Tocqueville in Jacksonian Context: American Expansionism and Discourses of American Indian Nomadism inDemocracy in America

Abstract

Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians inDemocracy in Americais often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part because American Indians did not offer much resistance. Historians of political thought and scholars of American Political Development tend to affirm this narrative when they read Tocqueville’s text as suggesting merely that Indians are “doomed” to an inevitable extinction. Our interpretation here proceeds along different lines, with a greater focus on the ways in which contending Jacksonian-era discourses of Indian nomadism are represented in Tocqueville’s text. We argue thatDemocracyreflects complex and often competing descriptions of inherent Indian nomadism, retreat, and removal, with varying attributions of causal responsibility for disappearing Indian populations. This reading of Tocqueville highlights contentions about Indian removal that are often ignored or neglected in current scholarship, and can therefore help us to better appreciate both his text and his time.

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

“…. agents of the state systematically sought to uproot Indian nations and drive them westward” (McQueen and Hendrix 2017, 668–69). Tocqueville reports that the federal government executes this project in a “perfectly legal manner” and “exhibits the purest love of formalities and legalities” (375, 391).…”

“…We see these impressions reproduced directly in Tocqueville’s statements about the unique “strength,” “vigor,” and “energetic” self-driven activity that flows from a lack of bureaucracy—and in his worry that centralized public administration, were it someday to develop, “inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies” this “strength.” We know that reliance on elite American opinion is a feature of DA , regardless of its reliability, because we can see it in other areas as well—for instance, in Tocqueville’s toggling “between the different positions circulating during his time in America” regarding whether Indian communities are nomadic or not (McQueen and Hendrix 2017, 667).…”

“…Tocqueville is justly criticized for reproducing transparent settler self-justifications claiming to perform a mission civilisatrice (McQueen and Hendrix 2017, 665–66, 668). We also should ask who these “woodsmen” might be.…”

“…Plucky individual settlers could not possibly manage a project so colossal all by themselves—especially against significant organized resistance from the people whose land they were taking—and so they did not. Instead, this continentally scaled imperial project required enormous “bureaucratic capacity,” coordinated in many instances by a “central administrative apparatus” that began to develop for this purpose “in the earliest days of the nation” (Adler 2021, 15; John 1995, 25; McQueen and Hendrix 2017, 664; Rockwell 2010, 26). The United States may have been a “conventionally weak state” by twenty-first-century standards (Frymer 2014, 120), but it was by no means stateless at the federal level in the early nineteenth century.…”

“Rethinking Tocqueville: White democracy or American democracy?”

“… 1 See Balfour (2022), Benson (2017), Duong (2018), Janara (2004), Kohn (2002), McQueen and Hendrix (2017), Noll (2014), Olson (2004), Tillery (2009, 2018), Turner (2008), Welch (2003). …”