Race and ethnicity in America

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 101-102

  Glazer, Nathan ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 22844453540     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2000.0011     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 54-55.
2. Originally published as Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938).
3. The present-day reader may recall, wryly, that the Pequots have subsequently resuscitated themselves. They now own the enormously successful Foxwood gambling casino in Connecticut and have built a very expensive museum to recall their history.
4. Tocqueville and Beaumont were to continue their interest in the problem of slavery after they returned to France, taking a leading role in the effort to end slavery in the French colonies. At that time, slavery was limited to Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Rèunion, and existed on a much more modest scale than in the United States. In 1839, Tocqueville presented a major report to the Chamber of Deputies on the abolition of slavery. There was no question where he stood on the issue. As Seymour Drescher writes: "The continuation of slavery was not even allowed to be an 'academic' question. On one occasion in 1839, Tocqueville intervened to prevent Charles Dunoyer from suggesting the relative utility of slavery as an institution for discussion in the French Academy. Dunoyer raised the question of whether 'at the moment' forced labor was not preferable to liberty for the Negroes of the French colonies. . . . Tocqueville protests against such a proposition to be entered on the Academy's program. No historical or economic rationale was to be suggested that would diminish the fundamental moral clarity of the question of slavery" (Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968], 165).
5. The war over slavery in America finally came in 1861. Tocqueville had died in 1859, but Drescher tells us that "the Union became a joint cause of Tocqueville's widow and the Beaumont family."