Archives for September 2020

Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014.

The Declaration of Independence tells its readers who is doing the declaring: “We… the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled,” acting “by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies.” In practice, this meant that political independence of those united states from the British Empire was asserted by citizens, mostly white and male, acting however on behalf of the women, children, and indeed the slaves who lived in their households. Notoriously, it was the case that the equal unalienable rights that formed the moral basis of the newly-claimed sovereignty of that people were not reflected in the civil-social institutions and laws the people had enacted. Therefore, Professor Allen argues, “we cannot have freedom” in full “without equality.” Just as a people, in asserting its sovereignty, “assume[s] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” that same natural equality ought to prevail among individuals living within the same civil society. The civil conditions by which such equality will be secured won’t be the same as the conditions prevailing under the law of nations, inasmuch as no one American, and no group of Americans, enjoys the same degree of sovereignty over himself that an independent people enjoys. Americans live under one regime; the United States lives under no regime, and indeed asserts exactly that in the face of the British monarch.

Both political liberty and civic equality engage not only the natural rights of human beings but their natural capacities or powers, preeminently the distinctively human capacity of speech. The Declaration of Independence amounts to ‘nothing but words.’ The words needed backing by physical force. But the words justified the use of that force. More, they animated the founding of the regime that would replace the British regime, after Americans won the independence they had asserted. Language and force: “The achievement of political equality,” which must be earned, and is seldom simply bestowed, “requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.”

This is where the ‘our-ness’ of “our Declaration” comes in. Americans declared their independence on the basis of their equal natural rights a long time ago. Since then, many Americans have denied the existence of those rights. Such defenders of slavery as John C. Calhoun charged that every sentence of the Declaration’s opening paragraphs were falsehoods, based upon a wrong understanding of human nature. To this day, conservatives who prefer not to conserve the Declaration look to tradition, not the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, as the source of moral and political right. On the ‘Left,’ a panoply of thinkers has denied the principles of the Founders as retrograde, perhaps useful for the time but now superseded by historical progress. Marxists regard natural rights as excrescences of the ruling bourgeois class, but the much more numerous (and moderate) ‘Progressives’ of various stripes also regard such rights as obsolete relics of a time gone by.

It is a leading merit of Allen’s study to vindicate the Declaration from its critics but especially from its critics on the ‘Left.’ She wants all Americans to reclaim the Declaration for themselves. To do so, she must convince advocates of economic, social, and political equality that the Declaration speaks for them, too, and that they can and should speak up for it. What “individual citizens” need in order to defend their natural equality is a degree of political equality that enables them to gain “sufficient control over their lives to protect themselves from domination”—to be able to secure their natural rights from those who would violate them. Since no one individual can do this on his own, citizens will need to talk with one another, reaffirm and sometimes reform their political institutions and laws, looking to the Declaration for the unchanging standards against which all such practical efforts should be judged.

How to make the Declaration “ours,” so many years after its original ‘owners’ wrote and enacted it? Read it slowly, Allen recommends. Only after understanding it can one know what its authors, with their command of language, wanted to talk their fellow-citizens into. She sees that the beginning of that understanding, the beginning of wisdom respecting the Declaration, is to see that it is a syllogism, a “logical argument” that you will be rightly talked into, once you’ve seen the rational necessity, and consequent moral necessity, of that argument. She identifies the logictextbook the Signers likely had studied, Isaac Watts’s Logic; or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth with a Variety of rules to Guard against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, which went through twenty editions beginning in 1724.

Logical arguments reach out to the interlocutors of those who make such arguments. Since the Declaration was declared by a few on behalf of many, not by one voice issuing a decree, because it was “written by a group” even though Thomas Jefferson was its principal draftsman, the argument itself was refined in dialogue, as if one of the Socratic inquiries we can now read had not been written by Plato or Xenophon, but had really occurred among acting politicians. Allen calls the Declaration the product of “the collective mind” of the Founders and indeed of Americans, which is how Jefferson himself described it in his old age. Meanwhile, the mind of the British, represented in the mind of their sovereign, George III, had firmly closed itself against rational argument. By late summer of 1775 it was clear that “there would be no reconciliation, no effort to solve differences through negotiation rather than military compulsion.” Force, not reason, would prevail; hence the celebrated phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” To minds that are closed, even self-evident truths seem sophistical. Such closed minds incline to impose their opinions with force rather than arguing for them with words, but habits of unreason readily lead to unintended consequences. One means by which the Crown intended to force Americans to obey was to offer freedom to slaves and indentured servants in Virginia, if they “joined the British military” to put down the rebels. “This proclamation instantaneously radicalized Virginia’s slaveholding elite,” proving that the fight for natural equality can benefit from surprising allies. 

This suggests that the British regime was not only close-minded ‘in theory’—refusing to acknowledge equality of natural rights—but rationally deficient ‘in practice,’ imprudent. Not so, the Americans. Far from throwing themselves into a war for independence without considering the consequences if they won, they deliberated on the political means by which they could secure their rights after independence was achieved. John Adams outlined a model for the forms of government the united states might take. This included separation of powers, representation or republicanism, and bicameral legislatures. “Adams’s purpose in providing such a concrete script [was] to allay anticipated fears about the difficulty of setting up new governments in conditions” of what he called “sudden emergency.” “Pulling down tyrannies,” he wrote, requires “erecting Such new Fabricks” as may be “best calculated to promote [the] Happiness” of each former colony, and of their union as a whole. As early as 1776 Adams drafted a preamble that each colony could attach to their new constitutions. 

As for the Declaration itself, Congress edited Jefferson’s draft, reducing it “by about 25 percent.” In deference to the powerful plantation slaveholders whose support they needed, they omitted Jefferson’s vehement denunciation of slavery, while retaining the fundamental argument that puts slavery on trial for its life. They also removed a flowery passage describing the colonists as unrequited lovers of the British, although they more chastely continued to call the British their “brethren.” The added phrases acknowledging God—the “Supreme Judge of the World,” a world ruled by “divine Providence”—much to doubting Thomas Jefferson’s discomfiture. Even the calligraphers got into the act, capitalizing “GOD,” “CREATOR,” and “DIVINE PROVIDENCE” in the final document. “The monumental achievement of Thomas Jefferson is, ultimately, to have produced a first draft—and a general argumentative structure—that, through its philosophical integrity and unquestionable brilliance, could surive such intense committee work and bear this much demand for agreement. But the authorship of the document belongs to all those who participated in the conversations leading up to the decision to declare independence and to all those who wrangled over the consensual statement of justification.” And so “when we sit down to read the Declaration, it is their argument that we read, not Jefferson’s alone.” “The art of democratic writing,” the product of the art of democratic thinking—democratic in the sense of argued over, then consented to—is something that “we must learn to appreciate” if our public discourse is not to degenerate into a verbal war of all against all, vehement assertion against vehement assertion, in which no reason need apply. What is now the Declaration’s most controversial omission, “the language criticizing slavery,” demonstrates that “when groups of people write texts together, some choices are always made on the basis of votes, not truth. There will be compromises.” Without such compromises, the war for independence will never be won, and if somehow won, cannot secure the rights it was fought to secure, or frame the governments needed to perpetuate their security.

The Declaration is “an ordinary memo,” Allen writes, a document announcing a change and giving reasons for it. In so saying, she intends to make the Declaration seem ‘approachable’ to contemporary readers, but of course the Declaration isn’t a memo. It is what it says it is: a formal and indeed legal document appealing to the law of nations, similar to a declaration of war. In her attempt to ‘democratize’ the Declaration, she even goes so far as to claim that “we are all equal in having the capacity to judge relations among facts, principles, and courses of action,” equal in “being political creatures.” On the contrary, we are not equal in the capacity to judge (except in the sense that any sane person has such a capacity, even if not to the same degree); we are by nature political creatures, although again not all to the same degree, and some scarcely at all, content with being told what to do).

Allen returns to firmer ground in observing that the Declaration proceeds in four steps: “declaring reasons, presenting facts to witnesses”—the “candid world,” unbiased—then “declaring independence, and making pledges.” As a “unanimous” Declaration of the American Congress, it gives voice to many representatives but with one soul—as she cogently remarks, unus or ‘one’ and anima or ‘soul.’ Soul implies not only mind but life; “this comes through in the link between the words anima and ‘animal.'” Through their representatives, through the nucleus of their future republican regime, Americans have formed a group “committ[ing] its energies fully to a common goal.” Another way to say this is to recall that the Declaration says that governments derive their “just powers” from “the consent of the governed.” “This country was born in talk,” and not just any kind of talk but rational talk, a syllogism; consent means rational assent, not mere ‘going along.’ Consent is needed because human beings are equally human, that is, born with the capacity to reason, if not to the same degree and obviously not with the same willingness to exercise that capacity on a regular basis.

In its rational character, “the Declaration is nothing less than a very short introduction to political philosophy,” raising questions of what it is to live well along with the practical question of whether we are in fact living well. And it begins to answer these questions by raising the question of what it means to be “created equal.” Allen rightly denies that in invoking equality the Signers mean ‘sameness.’ She identifies five “facets” of their idea of equality: a condition in which no party dominates another; “equal access to the tools of government”; “egalitarian approaches to the development of collective intelligence,” by which she means moral and civic education; “egalitarian practices of reciprocity” or the ruling-and-being ruled relations Aristotle identifies as the characteristic of a sound marriage; and finally “shar[ed] ownership of public life and in co-creating our common world”—that is, the intention to exercise the tools of government to which every citizen has access. All of these facets of civic equality derive from the natural equality human beings have, equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The link between human nature and civil society is moral necessity—in this case, the necessity of dissolving the political bands that have connected Americans to the English. That moral necessity in turn derives from the logical contradiction between the equality of Americans and Englishmen by nature and the British regime’s refusal to secure the natural rights which both peoples equally share. Moral necessity impels them to turn to national “self-government” in lieu of the failed imperial government, to equal status as a sovereign people, not yet equal to the great British Empire in power (as Allen puts it) but “equal as a power,” as a sovereign people among a world of other equally sovereign peoples.

Allen pauses to remark that the phrase, “separate and equal station among the Powers of the earth,” which the Signers declare, was later distorted and misused by the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. In that ruling, the Court declared racial segregation constitutional if accommodations on railroad lines, restaurants, and so on were “separate but equal.” “Whereas the colonists sought an external separation, the segregationists—a cross-class alliance of white-power advocates—sought separation internally.” Of course, such separation never really mean equality but rather the opposite: racial domination, “to keep many people subjected and dependent.” Given this correct analysis, it is not quite right to say that “the Declaration provided tools for liberating some and dominating others”; it is more accurate to say that later Americans used the materials of which the Declaration’s “tools”—its words—could be reshaped and repurposed for evil.

As Creator, God endows all human beings with certain unalienable rights. The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God also entitle a people to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, if (given their circumstances) moral necessity commands them to assert that station. As a law of nature and of nature’s God, moral necessity is as necessary as the law of gravity, although not quite in the same way. It is indeed felt in “the natural instinct to survive,” as Allen says, but a mere instinct implies no right; to claim that it does would be to run afoul of David Hume’s famous distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Rather, “the source of rights” is the nature of human beings ‘in full.’ Whether created by God or not, a good human being must fulfill its nature as such, just as a good horse or a good cornstalk is one that fulfills its nature. There are, of course, those who do not want human beings to fulfill their nature but rather to bend their fellows to serve those who dominate them, to turn those so dominated into beings less than what they are by nature. They want most human beings to be bad examples of human nature. In so desiring, they make themselves into bad examples of human nature, inasmuch as it is ‘self-evident,’ a matter of definition, that any being which is less than what it is by nature is a bad human being, and to desire the bad for others must therefore be a bad desire.

As Allen puts it, “Successful self-government is a success for nature, because it expands the flourishing of one set of natural creatures, human beings. Because all human beings desire to survive and flourish, they all struggle to interpret the events of their social worlds in order to ascertain whether things are going well or ill for them and their communities and to ascertain whether they need to change course.” Each person has “the potential to be a reasonable judge” (emphasis added)—a “moral sense,” as Jefferson would say, following the doctrine of the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. To realize this potential, each citizen must “grasp the importance of self-knowledge” and strive to achieve it. This is the Socratic lesson at the heart of the Declaration.

If so, then the human capacity of judgment entails the use of government to secure natural rights, inasmuch as one people might be considerably less willing to secure those rights for another people, as the British regime has demonstrated. The capacity so to use government requires a capacity readily to acknowledge certain truths about human beings. Hence the language, “self-evident.” Allen lists the truths the Signers consider to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that those rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that governments have been instituted among men, based on the consent of the governed to secure those rights; that when governments fail to secure those rights, the people have the right to change their government and instituted a new government, “laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” This is more than a list of truths, Allen observes; it is a syllogism. It is a syllogism that George III preferred not to acknowledge. Even Jefferson himself did not fully act on it, inasmuch as he failed to emancipate all of his slaves. But failure to acknowledge, or in acknowledging but failing to act upon, a logical argument does not invalidate the argument. No ad hominem argument refutes a syllogism unless the syllogism is about the nature or the behavior of a person. The major premises of the Declaration syllogism concern human beings as a species, not any one person. As Allen restates it, the syllogism is: (1) All people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; (2) Properly constituted government is necessary to their securing these rights; (3) all people have a right to whatever is necessary to secure what they have a right to; (4) all people have a right to a properly constituted government. This provides a standard by which persons and their action may be judged; it assumes nothing about the person or persons making the argument. Mao Zedong could say as much (although he did not); to counter-argue that Mao was a mass-murdering tyrant would be to say something true but irrelevant to the question of whether the argument is sound.

If equal unalienable rights are endowed by our Creator, who or what created human beings? This also raises Hume’s ‘is-ought’ question. “Why is it… that we possess our powers of mind, body, and spirit, which enable us to live, be free, and pursue happiness by means of politics, as a matter of right?” The Declaration leaves room for its readers to define the term ‘Creator’; Jefferson and Franklin evidently defined it differently than did that eminent Presbyterian co-signer, John Witherspoon. The fact that we must judge good and bad, the fact that no one can be ‘non-judgmental’ in any strong sense of the term, self-evidently or logically requires some ultimate source of right, whether that source is nature, or God, or some combination of the two. This puts the axe to Humean conventionalism, the claim that the real source of right can be custom or prevailing opinion, inasmuch as existing customs and opinions may be demonstrated to be bad for the human beings who practice and hold them. It does not put the axe to the later philosophic doctrine of historicism, which defines ‘God’ as Hegel does, as an ‘Absolute Spirit’ that unfolds dialectically through the course of human events. It does provide the beginning of an answer to historicism, but that is another matter.

So much for the theory of the Declaration. The Signers were not philosophers following their argument in all its implications but politicians with a practical intent. There is theoretical reasoning; there is also practical or prudential reasoning, equally obedient to the principle of non-contradiction. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” What Allen calls the Signers’ “spirit of prudence” points them to “the third facet of equality,” the “need to build a collective intelligence” through moral and civic education, an intelligence that enables a people to analyze “how the present connects to the future”—that is, how to counteract the tyrannical designs of a George III with plans for effective self-government. 

The Declaration’s invocation of prudence leads immediately to the minor premises of the syllogism, the list of charges against the monarch and the English Parliament. One highly useful step in educating oneself in political prudence is to learn how to recognize tyrannical designs. Given our ignorance of others’ thoughts, we can only identify a tyrannical design by a set of actions that fits a pattern. When the Declaration describes “the history of the present King of Great Britain” as “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” it means just such a pattern, a story or narrative of events. The prudence of the Signers comes out, as Allen remarks, not only in their recognition of this telltale pattern but in the timing of their counter-actions. They didn’t wait until the would-be tyrant had got his rule cinched in—a rule that contradicted both the natural rights of all human beings and the constitutional rights of Englishmen. 

The list of eighteen grievances itself has a pattern, moving from bad to worse to worst. “King George has begun to make war on the colonists,” and in a way that violates the rules of just war as set down in the law of nations. “He is an aggressor,” violating the laws of jus bellum, and his means of war, which the Signers compare to the tactics among the Indian nations and tribes that are savage, violate the laws of jus in bello. Oddly, Allen cites the “multitude of New Offices” the king has imposed on the colonies, but she misses its significance. An example of these offices, as she points out, was the American Board of Customs Commissioners, “whose members were to live in the colonies and regulate everything that had to do with trade and tax.” These and other such measures were part of his attempt, in collaboration with Parliament, to consolidate British rule before, during and especially after the war is over (a war he obviously expected to win). A multitude of new offices bespeaks the institutional structure of the centralized modern state; George III and Parliament intended to extend the central state’s tentacles into the American colonies. Anticipating Tocqueville and many others, the Signers see such statism as the prime instrument of tyranny in the modern world. Limiting immigration is another such tactic. As Allen remarks, the Americans disliked this because it stunted their economic growth (“societies under the thumb of tyrants do not grow prosperous”); it is also true that tyrants don’t want large populations of restless colonists who might reach the ‘critical mass’ that would make their revolution successful.

As a syllogism, the Declaration teaches those who follow it. “The Declaration teaches people how to do the very thing that it argues that everyone has the capacity to do, namely, make political judgments.” Political judgments, recall, are judgments made in common, reflecting the reciprocal ruling-and-being-ruled fellow citizens exercise. In this sense the Declaration leads its readers “to a very deep understanding of human equality.” “When we read the Declaration, we watch political judgment in action,” as the Signers first lay down the standards of right human conduct, then measure the conduct of the British regime against those standards, find it contradictory to it, and announce a timely action in response to it. Allen suggests that the Declaration “tests its own hypothesis” with respect to the capacity of Americans at least, and maybe all people as well. “If all people can read or listen to it and understand how political judgment works in the Declaration beyond the Declaration itself—which is to say, regardless of whether they have gone to school, or how much history they have learned—then the Declaration is right about human equality.” If so, so. This may be carrying the principles of natural right rather too far into optimism about their likelihood of practice. But Allen is undoubtedly right to think that those who carry those principles to the people can and did find a wider audience of persons who did indeed understand those principles, and did indeed have the capacity to apply them in practice, than tyrants, oligarchs, and demagogues have typically thought possible or desirable. And this capacity can be strengthened by educators.

She also sees clearly that the portrait of a tyrant provides a sort of photographic negative of what good government looks like. Good governments take actions exactly the opposite of those undertaken by the British. Good governments will respect the rule of law, the orderly transaction of legislative business, and the actions of an independent judiciary; it will govern by popular consent, not by bureaucracy and armies; it will not wage unjust war against its own citizens or foment violent factional strife among them but instead strive to keep a civil peace. 

This being so, “what are we to make of the fact that the signers, who formally declared a commitment to equality, also protected slavery and ruthlessly sought to deracinate, if not exterminate, Native Americans?” To this, Allen replies that many of the Founders did indeed work to end slavery, putting it on the road to extinction in many of the states. It isn’t as easy to do things like that as it may seem, from a distance of two centuries. “In order to germinate and come alive in the world, ideas have to function as rules for action.” They must move from the head to the heart, from thought to habit. That requires step-by-step planning and consistent implementation of the progression of steps—setting out the future course of events, then taking each step along that course. “By the time the colonists affirmed the Declaration of Independence, they had already for over a century been scripting for themselves the set of actions that could bring the ideal of equality to life among themselves.” They had “built specific new habits for interacting with each other at the same time that they were developing general ideas about political equality,” but had not done so with respect to “interacting with slaves or Native Americans.” To be sure, some did: Quakers and their ‘secularist’ ally, Benjamin Franklin worked for the education of free black children in Pennsylvania; the Washington administration sought to change the regimes of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ in the deep South. But such projects proved too limited and desultory; in the case of Washington’s policy, the people of Georgia moved to push the Indians out, anyway, and succeeded. “Ideas don’t change actions on their own. Our desires matter too. This, finally, is why a shadow of tragedy trails our Declaration,” a trail of tears that became a river, and then a flood less than a century later. The troubled waters have yet to recede, entirely, to this day—another reason to read the Declaration of Independence, slowly.

Allen turns to the Americans’ attempts to persuade the king. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms,” only “to be answered by repeated injury” by him, a man therefore “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” The capitalization of “We” was added by the printer but was not removed by the Signers when they reviewed his work. Allen makes much of this, saying that “it’s as if the Declaration is telling a story about how ‘We, the people’ was born.” Given the Declaration’s clear indication that Americans were already a people before their separation from the political bands that connected them to the English, it is more as if they are saying that We, the people have come to political maturity, that we are ready for self-government and indeed insist on it. We are reasonable, in theory and in practice; the British regime is not. We have developed “habits of reciprocity,” as Allen nicely puts it. The king, habituated to rule with no back-talk, has not. The colonists understand “the kind of equality that needs to be in play in relations between people in order for freedom to obtain,” relations that are political in Aristotle’s sense. The connection between genuinely political relations and reason is that both presuppose dialogue and dialectic, reciprocity, not one-way commands. There will come a time, after such deliberation, when commands are issued; otherwise, there is no rule, no government. Allen identifies the two times the phrase “We hold” occurs in the Declaration. First, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”; we, as a people who have engaged in political conference, in rational dialogue, have made our decision and we will stick to it. Second, we hold our “British brethren,” along with “the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends”; again, we have decided, together. Against any extra-logical, ad hominem questions about “the rectitude of our intentions,” they simply refer the matter to the Supreme Judge of the World, who alone can discern rectitude or the lack of it. They are willing to be judged by their fellow men in the same way they have judged their fellow men, by their actions directed at building “a political order that puts [the] recognition of human equality front and center.” And so they have been judged, although judgments have varied, ever since. 

“All adults should read the Declaration closely; all students should have read the Declaration from start to finish before they leave high school.” To do so “would prepare us all for citizenship” by “learn[ing] the democratic arts.” 

Charles Dickens: American Notes. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, Publisher, n.d. Volume 27 of The Works of Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens visited America twice, first in 1842, at the age of thirty, already well established as a novelist, and then in 1868, now world-renowned. The 1842 visit occurred only a couple of years after Tocqueville had published the second volume of his magisterial Democracy in America. Dickens wisely made no attempt to compete with it. Rather than offer a sweeping analysis of American civil society and politics framed by “a new political science for a world altogether new,” Dickens relied on his own considerable strengths as a novelist. He tells the story of his journey; he describes places and persons and customs, praising and blaming but seldom theorizing. In his earliest book, Sketches by Boz, he collected journalistic vignettes of his fellow Englishmen, making a portrait of the national character emerge from the particulars; the Notes does this for America. His book does not attempt to replace the Democracy, but it does supplement it. He gives you a sense of what America and Americans were like, on the ground and on the waters of America, how it felt to move around the country. Accompanied by his wife, he pays much more attention to the inconveniences of travel than Tocqueville does. If his impressions often center on conditions in prisons, schools, insane asylums, and factories, it is only because he never ceases to be Charles Dickens, the son of a man whose father spent time in debtors’ prison, the author of Oliver Twist, which he’d brought out only three years earlier.

Tocqueville remarks on the touchiness of Americans in those days regarding foreigners’ opinions of their country, and Dickens felt that too, both during his visit and after his book was published. He reserves his sharpest criticisms for slavery and American journalism—fair targets, both.  His animadversions on American manners (he is particularly exercised by the then-prevalent habit of chewing tobacco) are hard to gainsay. In the preface to the second edition, he protests, “Prejudiced I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favor of the United States…. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one.” Just so.

From England, he boarded a mail ship for Halifax in January, when the northern Atlantic offers no mercy to travelers. “The laboring of the ship in the troubled sea” during a night storm “I shall never forget”; “it is impossible for the most vivid imagination to conceive.” But not for a great novelist to describe: “To say that [the ship] is flung down on her side in the waves, with her masts dipping into them, and that, springing up again, she rolls over on the other side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a hundred great guns, and hurls her back—that she stops, and staggers, and shivers, as though stunned, and then, with a violent throbbing at her heart, darts onward like a monster goaded into madness, to be beaten down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped on by the angry sea—that thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and wind are all in fierce contention for the mastery—that every plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water in the great ocean its howling voice—is nothing. To say that all is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree, is nothing. Words cannot express it. Thoughts cannot convey it. Only a dream can call it up again in all its fury, rage, and passion.”

Halifax was still a comfortingly English place, with Canada’s own smaller-scale parliament observing its new-year opening, complete with the royal governor’s speech. “The military band outside the building struck up ‘God Save the Queen’ with great vigor before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted, the ins rubbed their hands; the outs shook their heads; the Government party said there never was such a good speech; the opposition declared there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and members of the House of Assembly withdrew for the bar to say a good deal among themselves, and do a little; and, in short, everything went on, and promised to go on, just as it does at home upon the like occasions.” 

Dickens’s first American stop, Boston, impressed him from the start, as its Custom House men comported themselves with “the utmost courtesy,” in contrast with “the servile rapacity” of French officials and the “surly, boorish incivility” of their English counterparts, “discreditable to the nations that keep such ill-conditioned curs snarling about its gates.” As for Boston itself, “the city is a beautiful one,” its residents exhibiting “intellectual refinement and superiority” thanks to nearby Harvard College, whose professors “would shed a grace upon, and do honor to, any society in the world.” “Whatever the defects of American universities may be, they disseminate no prejudices; rear no bigots; dig up the buried ashes of no old superstitions; never interpose between the people and their improvement; exclude no man because of his religious opinions; above all, in their whole course of study and instruction, recognize a world, and a broad one too, lying beyond the college walls”—the world that Dickens, with no university degree, so tirelessly brought to his readers’ attention. Thanks largely to Harvard, in Boston “the almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant, amid a whole Pantheon of better gods.” 

He was especially impressed with Boston’s “public institutions and charities,” judging them “as nearly perfect as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity can make them.” In his description of a home for the blind, he steps aside to offer an unforgettable description written by the resident physician of the meeting of a deaf-mute child, Laura Bridgman, with her mother, from whom she had been separated for several years. At an insane asylum, a poorhouse, a reform school Dickens remarks the good effects of gentle treatment: “In all of them the unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition will admit of; are appealed to as members of the great human family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the strong heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) Hand.” It is as though John Locke’s recommendations for “the Young Gentleman” have been generalized to the care of the mentally ill, the poor, even the criminal. Has the rule of medical-scientific techniques done better, in the two centuries since?

A similar spirit informed the justice system. In this, democracy does well. “In every court ample and commodious provision is made for the accommodation of the citizens. This is the case all through America. In every Public Institution, the right of the people to attend, and to have an interest in the proceedings, is most fully and distinctly recognized,” and there is no “insolence of office of any kind.” It may be that America, “in her desire to shake off the absurdities and abuses” of the old wig-and-gown English system of law, may “have gone too far into the opposite extreme,” treating its judges too informally; one is reminded of Dickens’s younger contemporary, Walter Bagehot, who would write of the needed dignities of law courts. But Dickens also sees that such dignities, and even the law itself, are “powerless” against an “occasion of any great popular excitement”; “no men know [this] better than the judges of America.” It is better that the people learn legal procedures for themselves, by watching how court officials proceed. For maintaining order, popularly-supported law needs supplementation from the churches, and from the ladies who attend them so assiduously. This too can be overdone. “The peculiar province of the Pulpit in New England (always excepting the Unitarian ministry) would appear to be the denouncement of all innocent and rational amusements. The church, the chapel, and the lecture-room are the only means of excitement excepted; and to the church, the chapel, and the lecture-room the ladies resort in crowds.” The lecture-room was the pulpit of the “sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists.” Wondering what they might be, “I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible, would be certainly transcendental,” and that Transcendentalists follow “my friend Mr. Carlyle, or I should rather say,” they follow “a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Dickens is inclined to be generous with him, and with them. “This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold,” exhibiting “a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her ever-lasting wardrobe.” “If I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist,” and probably not a divine.

Dickens could hardly overlook New England industry—especially the railroads and factories. He availed himself of the one to visit the other, in nearby Lowell, Massachusetts. With “a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell,” the racially segregated train made its way somewhat more slowly than its English counterparts—a point on which Americans proved sensitive, one of them hastening to tell the Englishman that America is “a go-ahead country, too.” On the train, democracy prevails as it does in the courts. “Everybody talks to you or to anybody else who hits his fancy,” and “any lady may travel alone, from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere.” “Quiet people avoid the question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election in three years and a half, and party feeling runs very high; the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins.” This is Tocqueville’s democracy, but up close and personal.

At the factories in Lowell (which had been founded only 21 years earlier), Dickens was impressed not only by the newness of everything but the neatly-dressed mill girls: “I would always encourage this kind of pride, as a worthy element of self-respect, in any person I employed.” Many boarding-houses had pianos in the common room and many of the women subscribed to circulating libraries; the town had “churches and chapels of various persuasions, in which the young women may observe that form of worship in which they have been educated.” There was a literary periodical featuring articles by the women. To readers who might object that such things are “above their station,” Dickens replies, “I would beg to ask what their station is.” They worked twelve hours a day, so there was little question that they were doing what they were hired to do. “For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of today cheerfully done and the occupation tomorrow cheerfully looked to, any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable.” The stories published in the Lowell Offering “inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence,” exhibiting also “a strong feeling for the beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left at home”; most of the women were farm girls who would return home in a few years, having supported themselves and perhaps helping their families in the meantime. The stories featured “very scant allusion to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or fine life.”

There was also a harder, Yankee-trader side to New England, mingled with religiosity. Sharp dealing was not only practiced but admired. At Hartford, Connecticut, where “too much of the old Puritan spirit persisted” in the form of Blue Laws, religious influence “has not tended, that I know, to make the people less hard in their bargains, or more equal in their dealings.” At New Haven, then called the City of Elms, Dickens toured poorhouses, a madhouse, a jail, and Yale College. 

New York was no Boston. Less social uplift, more business, as the ferry boats worked the harbor: “The city’s hum and buzz, the clinking of capstans, the ringing of bells, the barking of dogs, the clattering of wheels, tingled in the listening ear. All of which life and stir, coming across the stirring water, caught new life and animation from its free companionship; and, sympathizing with its buoyant spirits, glistened as it seemed in sport upon its surface, and hemmed the vessel round, and plashed the water high about her sides, and, floating her gallantly into dock, flew off again to welcome other comers, and speed before them to the busy port.” In New York, the prisons and mental hospitals were darker and harsher places than in they were in Boston, a fact Dickens blames on the political machines, which staffed those institutions with party hacks. But the city also welcomed a foreigner with warmth. “I never thought that going back to England, returning to all who are dear to me, and to pursuits that have insensibly grown to be part of my nature, I could have felt so much sorrow as I endured when I parted at last… with the friends who had accompanied me from this city.” 

While he “greatly liked” Philadelphia—a “handsome city, but distractingly regular” (“I would have given the world for a crooked street”)—Dickens was shocked by the practice of solitary confinement in a nearby prison. “I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers,” a punishment “which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature.” This “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain [is] immeasurably worse than any torture of the body,” leaving the prisoners helplessly disoriented when finally released,” suffering, as one prison official said, “a complete derangement of the nervous system.” Solitary confinement “wears the mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough contact and busy action of the world”; “those who have undergone this punishment MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased.” It is what Tocqueville called American individualism or isolation, carried to the point of scientific-sane insanity.

On the way to Washington, Dickens stopped at Baltimore, where he saw slaves for the first time, servants at his table in a restaurant. “The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.” Later, he would be glad to revise his plan for traveling on to Charleston, South Carolina, not only in light of the great distance involved but in anticipation of “the pain of living in the constant contemplation of slavery.” He would see enough of it in Richmond, Virginia, where, “as in all other [places] where slavery sits brooding, there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system,” wherein “biped beasts of burden slink past” with “gloom and dejection upon them all.” He saw a mother and children recently purchased, separated from the husband and father. “The children cried the whole way, and the mother was misery’s picture. The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and, every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe.” With education of slaves outlawed, “the darkness—not of skin, but mind—which meets the stranger’s eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of all fairer characters traced by Nature’s hand; immeasurably outdo [ones] worst belief.” 

Dickens found the democratic republic’s capital city profoundly unimpressive, even repellant. “It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features,” along with “an occasional tornado of wind and dust.” “Such as it is it is likely to remain,” having “no trade or commerce of its own,” “little or no population beyond the President and his establishment,” members of Congress, and government drudges, along with the necessary hotel-keepers and tradesmen. With swamps on all sides, “It is very unhealthy.”

As for Congress, the gag rule against criticism of slavery was then in full effect, and “an aged, gray-haired man” (it may have been John Quincy Adams, but Dickens almost never mentions an American name) had been censured for “having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic which has for its accursed merchandise men and women, and their unborn children”—this, in a chamber where the “Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, which solemnly declares that All Men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with the Inalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” hangs on the wall, “gilded, framed, and glazed.” Looking over the men congregated on the floor of the House of Representatives, Dickens found the democracy contemptible. “Despicable trickery at elections; underhanded tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragons teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the  popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences; such things as these, and, in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and unblushing form stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.” Here none of “the intelligence and refinement,” the “true honest patriotic heart of America” found no representation in the people’s representatives. Instead, “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof”; “they who in other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the furthest from that degradation.”

Instead of venturing further south, Dickens headed west for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There he examined several of the “treaties made from time to time with the poor Indians,” signed by men who could not read the documents they had signed. “Nor could I help bestowing many sorrowful thoughts upon the simple warriors whose hands and hearts were set there in all truth and honesty; and who only learned in course of time from white men how to break their faith, and quibble out of forms and bonds.” “I wondered, too, how many times the credulous Big Turtle, or trusting Little Hatchet, had put his mark to treaties which were falsely read to him; and had singed away, he knew not what, until it went and cast him loose upon the new possessors of the land, a savage indeed.” Later, on a steamboat from Louisville to Saint Louis, he met Pitchlynn, the Choctaw chief, who did in fact speak and read English (he especially admired the poetry of Sir Walter Scott, that chronicler of clan battles). Pitchlynn expected that his race “would soon be seen upon the earth no more,” “for what could a few poor Indians do against such well-skilled men of business as the whites.” He shared Dickens’s opinion of Congress, saying “it wanted dignity in an Indian’s eyes.” With only twenty thousand Choctaws remaining, their number declining, “a few of his brother chiefs had been obliged to become civilized, and to make themselves acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance of existence”; “unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, they must be swept away before the strides of civilized society.” As for the English, he calmly and correctly remarked that they “used to be very fond of the Red Men when they wanted their help, but had not cared much for them since.” “He took his leave; as stately and complete a gentleman of nature’s making as ever I beheld; and moved among the people in the boat, another kind of being.” 

Steamboat travel brought out the worst of ordinary democratic moeurs. “In all modes of traveling, the American customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy; and I strongly incline to the belief that a considerable amount of illness is referable to this cause.” Meals were consumed in silence, with “no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in spitting; and that is done in silent fellowship round the stove, when the meal is over.” What is more, “the people are all alike,” with “no diversity of character,” traveling “on the same errands, say[ing] and do[ing] the same things in exactly the same manner, and follow[ing] in the same dull, cheerless round.” In the evening the passengers “amused themselves till the night was pretty far advanced, by alternately firing off pistols and singing hymns.” As for the Mississippi River, it was “an enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour; its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees”—a “foul stream” with low banks, “the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slim on everything, nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.” The commercial importance of the Mississippi, and its surroundings, down to the richness of the farmland mud he despises, rates no attention. He found St. Louis to be another American work in progress, albeit with better prospects for elegance and beauty than Washington, but no more salubrious in its hot climate and surrounding undrained swamps. Generally, Dickens was unimpressed with the American landscape when flat, democratic—prairie land disappoints him, that “vast expanse of level ground,” “oppressive in its barren monotony” —thrilled when aristocratic, a thing of “gleaming depths” and “heavenly promise,” as Niagara Falls.

In Carondelet—a village later incorporated into St. Louis—he met his one frontiersman, an innkeeper, “a dry, tough, hard-faced old fellow” who had served in the militia during the War of 1812 “and had seen all kinds of service—except a battle.” “He had all his life been restless and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change,” even then wishing he could “clean up his musket, and be off to Texas tomorrow morning.” “He was one of the very many descendants of Cain proper to this continent, who seemed destined from their birth to serve as pioneers in the great human army; who gladly go on from year to year extending its outposts, and leaving home after home behind them; and die at last, utterly regardless of their graves being left thousands of miles behind, by the wandering generation who succeed.” His wife had paid the cost, “having seen her children, one by one, die here of fever, in the full prime and beauty of their youth.” Dickens and his own wife had other plans, returning to England after a time in Canada. For them, “Home, and all that makes it dear; no tongue can tell, or pen of mine describe.”

Dickens concludes with essays on what he considers the worst American evils: slavery and the press. He identifies three classes of slavery apologists: “the more moderate and rational owners of human cattle who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society with which it is fraught”—latter-day Jeffersons; those who “doggedly deny the horrors of the system, in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject,” men who would “gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority,” defining freedom to mean oppression, savagery, mercilessness, and cruelty toward their fellow human beings—the future Nathan Bedford Forrests; and finally, those who define republicanism as having no man above them, but no man beneath them entitled to rise up to equal them, men who consider voluntary servitude disgraceful, deducing that servants ought therefore be slaves—the “miserable aristocracy of a false republic.” Dickens rebuts these several pretentions, remarking that “Slavery is not one whit more endurable because some hearts are found which can partially resist its hardening influences.” To those who (like Senator Stephen Douglas) deny the cruelty of slavery, saying that public opinion prevents it, he replies “public opinion in the slave States is slavery, is it not?” Public opinion in those states “has delivered the slaves over to the gentle mercies of their masters,” making the laws that deny the slaves the “legislative protection” Americans had demanded from England in the 1770s. “Public opinion has knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and shielded the murderer. Public opinion threats the abolitionist with death, if venture to the South; and drags him with a rope about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city in the East.” “Shall we whimper over legends of the tortures practiced on each other by the Pagan Indians, and smile upon the cruelties of Christian men?” He should rather return America to “the forest and the Indian village” than see slavery endure; he would rather see a civil war, turning the knives with which “Liberty in America hews and hacks her slaves” to the “better use” of “turn[ing] them on each other.” America shows that democracy or popular sovereignty can be as, or more, tyrannical than monarchy or oligarchy.

The public opinion that rules democracy owes much of its coarseness to the press. Although Americans are “frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate,” their virtues are sadly sapped and blighted in their growth among the mass”; “one great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust,” which it mistakes for “superior shrewdness and independence.” Distrust brings political instability with it, as voters put people into office only to turn them out a couple of years later. America’s “licentious press” intensifies suspicion for the sake of its own commercial profits.

“Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through the land with giant strides; but while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless.” Every year, “the tone of public feeling must sink lower down,” Congress “must become of less account before all decent men,” and “the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.” Far from supporting the free exchange of opinions, “this monster of depravity” represses them. “When any man in that Free Country has freedom of opinion, and presumes to think for himself, and speak for himself, without humble reference to a censorship which, for its rampant ignorance and base dishonesty, he utterly loathes and despises in his heart; when those who most acutely feel its infamy, and the reproach it casts upon the nation, and who most denounce it to each other, dare to set their heels upon, and crush it openly, in the sight of all men; then I will believe that its influence is lessening, and men are returning to their manly senses.” Tocqueville had written that in a democratic civil society, pressure on the minds and hearts of the people comes not ‘from above,’ as under aristocracy, but from ‘around’ each person, from what would later be called ‘peer pressure’ from a peerage whose names include everyone in the telephone directory. For Dickens, the press has made itself the tool that enables the democracy to leverage that pressure.

What Tocqueville says about women on the American frontier—that they are sad, worn-out, but resolute—Dickens finds in all Americans. “They certainly not a humorous people”—no Shakespearean clowns or Dickensian eccentrics will be found there— and their “temperament always impressed me as being of a dull and gloomy character.” “I was quite oppressed by the prevailing seriousness and melancholy air of business; which was so general and unvarying, that, at every new town I came to, I seemed to meet the very same people whom I had left behind me at the last,” people stuck in “a dull, sullen persistence in coarse usages,” a people who had “rejected the graces of life as undeserving of attention.” Dickens’s America is not only a democracy but a commercial democracy, a land of joyless questing for joy, and it is no wonder that Dickens returned to England with relief. “The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to remain forever unprotected” (Dickens viewed the pirating of his own writings by American publishers with understandable indignation). “We are a trading people, and don’t care for poetry,” Americans say, while caring enough for the prose of English writers to violate copyright in order to consume it at a cheaper rate. In America, “healthful amusements, cheerful means of recreation, and wholesome fancies must fade before the stern utilitarian joys of trade.”

In the second edition of his book Dickens included a speech to none other than a national gathering of American journalists. By 1868, with the civil war that eradicated slavery over and American newspapers improved, he could extend an olive branch, “express[ing] my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America,” and “bear[ing] my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity.” He acknowledged “the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side—changes moral, changes, physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere.” Publius or Tocqueville might contend that a republican regime had gradually refined and enlarged the public views, but Dickens characteristically offers no explanation and no speculation, leaving the matter at the level of observation. 

It might be added that today, some 180 years since Dickens arrived, the democratization wrought be the new journalistic media and the failure of American educators to understand, and therefore to teach, American republicanism have revived many of the malign practices Dickens condemned—paradoxically, often in the name of erasing the after-effects of the race-based slavery Dickens equally condemned.