Alexis de Tocqueville and his travelling companion Gustave de Beaumont arrived in America in May 1831, one year after the United States Congress passed the Indian Removal Act at the behest of President Andrew Jackson. This Act authorized Jackson to trade existing Indian territories for lands west of the Mississippi, and marked a formal American commitment to the expulsion of the Cherokees, Choctaws, and other Eastern Indian nations. Tocqueville and Beaumont observed the effects of this law first-hand, spoke with Anglo-Americans who had lived and worked in Indian communities, read Cherokee newspapers, and surveyed presidential statements and policy documents. Footnote 1 Yet considering the tremendous volume of scholarly work on Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s account of American Indians and its connection to Jacksonian political discourses remains comparatively underexplored. Footnote 2 This relative neglect contributes to an impression of the era’s politics that is inaccurate and, we think, normatively problematic.
When scholars of American Political Development (APD) attend to Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians, Democracy in America is often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. The conventional story holds that America “expanded quickly and ‘easily’ during the antebellum era to a natural resting place on the shores of the Pacific.” Footnote 3 Despite having a conventionally weak state, the United States benefited from a unique constellation of advantages—a strong society, large influxes of European migrants, and geographical isolation. Footnote 4 As Stephen J. Rockwell notes, this narrative of “easy” expansion has often been accompanied implicitly or explicitly by misperceptions of American Indians as few in number, politically monolithic, easily dealt with, and destined for inevitable extinction. Footnote 5 Tocqueville provides a clear expression of this narrative when he notes that fortune has favored “the inhabitants of the United States [by placing] them in the middle of a wilderness where they have, so to speak, no neighbors. A few thousand soldiers are sufficient for them.” Footnote 6 Tocqueville suggests at times that indigenous populations would not markedly slow this westward expansion because they are doomed to an inevitable extinction. Footnote 7 As we will show, this is the aspect of Tocqueville’s treatment of American Indians that tends to be emphasized by political theorists and historians of political thought. Given the force of this conventional story of American expansion, it is easy to see nothing else in Democracy where Indian nations are concerned.
Recent revisionist work in APD has challenged this exceptionalist narrative of American expansion, arguing that the military, Footnote 8 civilian administration (particularly the Indian Office and related agencies), Footnote 9 and federal land policies and property laws Footnote 10 were crucial in the ambitious and challenging effort to colonize the West and remove indigenous populations. In short, westward expansion was far from easy. It was a political project that required a military, bureaucratic, and legal apparatus for its success. This emerging literature in APD helps to make visible the intense political efforts and contestation that went into American Indian displacement. In so doing, these revisionist treatments also open space to recognize the political efforts of Indian nations to contest these policies, not only through military means but also through legal actions, lobbying efforts, political rhetoric, network construction, and defensive social transformation, among other strategies. Footnote 11 All of these efforts highlight the way in which early nineteenth-century America was shaped by an ambitious and contentious settler colonial project. The analysis of Tocqueville that we offer shows that while he provides ample fodder for a conventional story of westward expansion, he also offers important resources for these revisionist accounts. Reading Tocqueville against this contextual backdrop reveals elements of Democracy that are otherwise too easily ignored.
We will argue that the contestation reflected in Tocqueville’s text is most easily recognized when one examines the way Democracy deals with claims about Indian nomadism. Footnote 12 Like many of his Jacksonian American contemporaries, Tocqueville invokes “nomadism” not only as the “wandering” ways of Indians, but also as a set of natural and inescapable dispositions that prevent them from “settling,” civilizing, and adapting to the conditions of democratic modernity. Footnote 13 Claims about Indian nomadism were central to Jacksonian defenses of Indian removal, and many elements of Tocqueville’s text reflect these discourses. As we outline in the next section, Tocqueville frequently casts nomadism as an inherent Indian trait. These moments in the text are consistent with readings that emphasize his presumption of easy expansion and inevitable Indian extinction. However, in the following sections, we show that such readings are incomplete. Tocqueville’s text is also crucially attuned to forms of Indian nomadism that are the product of specific and intentional Anglo-American actions and policies, and thereby part of the American colonial and bureaucratic processes noted by APD scholars. We call these forms of nomadism retreat and removal. What we call retreat is produced by processes of containment, in which Anglo-Americans encircle and encroach upon Indian lands in anticipation of the imminent flight or extinction of their current inhabitants. What we call removal involves the active ejection of Indians from existing locations of residence.
Our goal is to show the traces of political contestation that run as tensions and ambiguities throughout Tocqueville’s account. Debates about Indian retreat and removal were not easy ones, nor was their outcome foreordained to their participants. The political struggles of the time were complicated, with multiple parties seeking to frame the axes of debate and the portrayal of Indian nations. The contending forces included not only Jacksonsonians and their opponents at the federal level, but also the states, and—crucially—Indian tribes and their missionary allies. The conflict between the state of Georgia and the Cherokee Nation, assisted by well-placed missionary networks, was especially acute. While Tocqueville does not acknowledge this contestation as strongly as he might, its marks nonetheless run throughout the text. A full reading of Democracy in America, with all its conceptual and normative ambiguities, requires that we give them attention.
Nomadism
Many scholars who interpret the “Three Races” chapter in Democracy in America have focused on the relationship between liberal democracy and racial subordination, frequently addressing the status of African Americans and Indians together. Rogers Smith, for example, argues that Tocqueville relegates “blacks and Native Americans to the status of ‘tangents,’” treating their subordination as a merely contingent feature of American democracy. Footnote 14 Smith argues that Tocqueville casts racism as a “mere prejudice,” thereby obscuring its “intellectual respectability” in Jacksonian America. More recently, Laura Janara and Margaret Kohn have each argued that Tocqueville’s text recognizes complex psychological connections between liberal democracy and ascriptive hierarchy. The flux and restlessness of democracy in America engenders individual anxieties and pressures for mass conformity that fuel racial surbordination. Footnote 15 Similarly, Jack Turner has suggested that Tocqueville recognized deep psychosocial connections between individualism and white supremacy. While the southerner defines his personal freedom and independence as non-slavery, the northerner inflates the mythology of white supremacy and defines his status as non-blackness. Footnote 16 Along somewhat different lines, Mark Reinhardt has argued that, for Tocqueville, democracy and pluralism require a shared identity and common cultural values. Tocqueville’s containment of the analysis of race within a single chapter of Democracy is symptomatic of this foundational connection between his conception of liberal democracy and the underlying consensus necessary to sustain it. Footnote 17
Importantly, this scholarship tends to devote comparatively more analytical attention to Democracy’s treatment of slavery and the condition of African Americans than it does to the work’s discussion of Indians. Footnote 18 In doing so, it can inadvertantly call attention away from the specifically territorial aspects of American expansionist efforts and indigenous strategies of resistance. Those scholars who have attended closely to Tocqueville’s discussion of Indian nations have, despite quite different scholarly agendas, tended to affirm a common interpretive narrative that reinforces presumptions about the ease and inevitability of American expansion. This narrative argues that, like many of his contemporaries, Tocqueville thought that Indians were “doomed” to extinction. Footnote 19 Unable to envision an alternative fate, he could lament but never quite condemn their destruction. Footnote 20 Such interpretations tend to stress three connected explanations for Indian extinction within Tocqueville’s account. First, like many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, Tocqueville thought that the progress of civilization and democratic modernity were inevitable. Those, like American Indians, whose ways of life were associated with an earlier stage of cultural or political development, are destined for expulsion and annihilation. Footnote 21 Second, Indians are “doomed” because their attachment to their own freedom makes them “the unalterable opponents of bourgeois civilization.” Footnote 22 They are, in this sense, similar to European aristocrats, who also seek to protect their ancient freedom and inherited privileges against the inevitable march of democratic modernity. Footnote 23
Third, Indians face a necessary extinction because they actively resist becoming civilized. They “could have chosen civilization but disdained to do so.” Footnote 24 In Harvey Mitchell’s formulation, Tocqueville’s Indians “refused to take that vital step away from their nomadism and, by refusing, accepted their own destruction.” Footnote 25 This third explanation is closely connected to the other two. The progress of civilization and democratic modernity demand settlement and the practice of agriculture. However, the Indian’s unshakable preference for a nomadic and wandering life are the product of his proud attachment to freedom. On this conventional reading, Tocqueville’s Indians are at best the hapless victims of the providential march of civilization and democratic modernity and at worst the resigned participants in their own demise. Either way, the portrait on offer seems troublingly apolitical, devoid of active agency, contestation, and resistance. It is hard to recognize within it either the bureaucratic and institutionalized form of American expansionism or the intense resistance of Indian nations that characterized the politics of removal.
Even some interpretations that give central attention to settler colonialism as a deeply institutionalized political project end up reinforcing similar narratives. William Connolly offers an account of American expansionism that harmonizes well with elements of the recent revisionist work in APD, while seeking to make broader arguments about democracy’s exclusions. Connolly’s interpretation forms a brief part of an extended argument in Ethos of Pluralization, which seeks to show the ways in which meaningful pluralism has been foreclosed in canonical works of political thought, including Democracy in America. On Connolly’s reading, Tocqueville both describes and advocates a form of bounded pluralism, in which “there is a mild pluralization of ethnic groups, religious congregations within Christianity, local customs, and forms of governance . . . But politics is free to dance lightly on the surface of life only because everything fundamental is fixed below it.” Footnote 26 The disagreements and differences of American democratic society must be underpinned by a common identity, shared customs and mores, and a commitment to a particular understanding of civilization. The boundaries of the American “people” are set in Tocqueville’s account, Connolly argues, by a particular kind of relationship between civilization and territory. On this account, civilization is tied to the mastery of nature through cultivation and agriculture and the exploitation of natural resources. Civilization and territory become “intercoded,” creating what Connolly calls “the civi-territorial complex.” Footnote 27
For Connolly, the limits of Tocqueville’s pluralism are most evident in his discussion of American Indians. Conceptualizing a nomad as a deterritorialized entity that exists outside the bounds of the “people,” Footnote 28 Connolly argues that while Tocqueville’s mild pluralism can accommodate the more modest forms of nomadism that are indispensable to the American democratic experiment—the movement of labor, capital, trade, etc.—“the more fundamental nomadism of the Indian must be purged” because it resists the intercoding of civilization and territory that lies at the heart of the new polity. Footnote 29 Connolly notes that Tocqueville, like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, treats Indians as “nomads [who] merely visited the land . . . isolated tribes [who] wandered on its surface under the forest wilderness, [who] occupied but did not possess the land upon which they wandered.” Footnote 30
Because of Tocqueville’s intercoding of civilization and territory, the literal nomadism of the Indian—his wandering tendencies—is also a form of resistance against incorportation within the American “people.” Footnote 31 The major innovation of American democracy—the institutional and practical instantiation of the doctrine of popular sovereignty—demands that Indians be “displaced from the land they previously wandered over . . . because the territorialization of civilization itself sets the parameters of popular sovereignty.” Footnote 32 Connolly argues that the bounds of the moral imagination are set by the civi-territorial complex, meaning that the injustice of the treatment of the Indian cannot be squarely acknowledged either by Tocqueville or by the American people. Thus, Connolly explains, “the Indian is . . . simultaneously the first Other of the civi-territorial complex, the first sign of violence inscribed in its boundaries, and the first marker of how violence is obscured or forgotten by the complex that requires it.” Footnote 33 The necessity attributed to the purging of nomadic elements is, for Connolly, the ultimate manifestation of the impoverishment of Tocqueville’s pluralism.
Connolly’s interpretation powerfully calls our attention to the parts of Tocqueville’s text that suggest an easy and inevitable process of Indian extinction. The reading connects these parts of the text to Tocqueville’s invocations of inherent forms of indigenous nomadism that persistently resist political incorporation into the American demos. Interpretations of this kind draw on ample textual evidence, and can help to make clear the kinds of work that such descriptions do in the text. Tocqueville notes that at the time of its “discovery” and colonization, America was “still only a wilderness,” occupied but not possessed by the Indians who resided there. Footnote 34 Their failure to engage in agriculture meant that America was, “properly speaking, a vacant continent, a deserted land, that awaited inhabitants.” Footnote 35 In his discussion of the dependence of Indians on hunting, Tocqueville draws a distinction between migrations—which occur between fixed points—and the much more unpredictable nomadism of hunters. Pastoral tribes, he explains, “change places, but they always follow a regular order in their migrations and constantly retrace their steps.” In contrast, “the dwelling-place of hunters varies like that of the very animals they pursue.” Footnote 36 Tocqueville argues that this more fundamental nomadism is the reason why civilization is difficult to establish among hunting peoples. For “to succeed in civilizing a people, it is necessary above all to get them to settle down and they can only do so by cultivating the soil.” Footnote 37
Tocqueville often writes in terms that imply the necessity of extinction or expulsion when he stresses the Indian’s unshakable love of freedom. “The savage,” he claims, “has never bent his will to that of his fellows; no one has taught him to distinguish a voluntary obedience from a shameful subjection.” Indeed, he is “unware of even the name of law.” For the Indian, “to be free is to escape nearly all bonds of society . . . Civilization has little hold over such such a man.” Footnote 38 Such a man has a “childish indifference to the morrow” and the “spontaneous instincts of his savage nature.” He stands “at the extreme limits of liberty.” Footnote 39 The Indian nomad is too attached to his own capacity to come and go as he pleases to ever be an American; “he is attached to barbarism as a distinctive sign of his race.” Footnote 40 The fate of Indian nations is thus inescapable: “Their implacable prejudices, their untamed passions, their vices, and perhaps even more their wild virtues delivered them to an inevitable destruction.” Footnote 41 Indeed, the Indian is fundamentally unadaptable and “keeps his opinions and even the smallest detail of his habits with an inflexibility that is without example in history. During the more than two hundred years that the wandering tribes of North America have had daily connections with the white race, they have borrowed so to speak neither an idea nor a custom” Footnote 42 In the face of this unshakable attachment to tradition and custom, the extinction of the Indian can perhaps be mourned in a certain sense. But it can hardly be regretted if a modern democratic civilization is going to be born in the “still empty cradle of a great nation.” Providence has given the Indians “only a short usufruct” of the riches of America. “In a way,” Tocqueville notes, “these people were there only waiting.” Footnote 43
Interpretations that highlight these passages provide powerful lenses for reading Tocqueville’s text. Readings like Connolly’s may ultimately be correct about the political and rhetorical effects of Tocqueville’s portrayal. Yet interpretations that stress narratives of inherent Indian nomadism and providential extinction call our attention away from other aspects of Democracy in America that are more alive to political contestation, and that show moments of clear moral anger. They offer only a partial reading of Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians and, by extension, an incomplete account of the politics of removal. These readings, we will argue, are thus descriptively incomplete. But such interpretations can also be normatively problematic in their impacts. Readings that focus on the role of inherent nomadism in Tocqueville’s account often seem to adopt that basic description of American Indian mobility in their own understanding of Jacksonian America. Connolly’s account seems to operate in this way, for example: the foundational violence that he describes as central to American expansionism is tightly linked to the Indian’s continual resistance to being settled in one place. Given the discursive centrality of Tocqueville to many contemporary debates, it is all too easy for an interpretation of his text to become an interpretation of his time, in ways that occlude the acute political tensions surrounding Indian removal.
The political tensions of the time are, moreover, more strongly reflected in Tocqueville’s text than readings of this kind suggest. While Tocqueville is often concerned with an inherent kind of Indian nomadism that makes political integration almost unimaginable, his text describes other forms of Indian movement as well, which he acknowledges in ways that complicate his account’s coherence and normative position. We will argue that Tocqueville often shows an uncomfortable awareness of induced forms of nomadism as well. He describes both a “nomadism” of retreat and, less distinctly stated but perhaps more importantly, one of removal.
Attention to Tocqueville’s context helps to illuminate the coercive character of both kinds of induced movement, and helps to situate him more squarely within the Jacksonian political debates of his time. The discursive opponents in these debates fought over whether Indians—the Cherokees in particular—were or were not naturally nomadic. Tocqueville’s text navigates unsteadily between the different positions circulating during his time in America. However, this wavering can help us to see more clearly the degree to which claims about Indian nomadism were intended, in that moment, to achieve political goals. Tocqueville does not resist the most troubling Jacksonian portrayals as strongly as we might now wish. But the resistance Democracy does offer deserves our recognition if we are to attend to the full force of the “Three Races” chapter.
Containment and Retreat
Tocqueville’s decision to confine his treatment of American Indians to a single chapter has made it easy to overlook the multiple strands that exist within his brief account. Footnote 44 This decision is plausibly interpreted as evidence of a textual containment strategy—an attempt to segregate questions of race from questions of democratic equality. Footnote 45 This containment is easiest to see if one conceives of Tocqueville’s text as a space in which and across which arguments are constructed and America is imagined. Conceived in this way, the topic of American Indian nations—spread throughout America—seems naturally to arise in multiple places. Indian individuals and political organizations have the potential to arise throughout Tocqueville’s text and to alter his arguments about equality of social condition, individualism, and pluralism, and thereby to resist and challenge his descriptions of American democracy. Footnote 46 And yet they never do so explicitly. In positioning “The Three Races” chapter in relation to his larger work, Tocqueville notes that the topic of race touches on but does “not enter into” his primary subject. Race concerns America, rather than democracy. Footnote 47 This declaration serves to segregate the issue of race from Tocqueville’s broader project. Footnote 48 As Mark Reinhardt argues, there are persistent and conspicuous “gaps in Tocqueville’s cartography, the missing people and relationships . . . a nation without class and without fundamental antagonisms.” Footnote 49 Reinhardt summarizes thus:
this act of textual segregation is what enables Tocqueville’s evasion of constitutive tensions in American political life . . . [F]ear and violence are discussed in ‘The Three Races’ chapter, but their formative role in the shaping of American democracy is not explored in any rigor in Democracy. Through this masking of democracy’s underside, the text works to obscure the political costs of Tocqueville’s policy of containment. Footnote 50
This containment closes off productive lines of thought that might allow one to question the conceptions of democratic equality at the heart of Tocqueville’s account. The fate of Indian tribes (and African Americans) remains outside of the primary American story.
Recognizing the effects of this textual containment on the character of Democracy as a whole is important. However, a focus on containment alone makes it easy to suppose that a single account exists within the “Three Races” chapter itself. While Tocqueville does segregate his discussion of Indian tribes from the rest of the text, his discussion within the chapter itself is by no means seamless or easily consistent. Tocqueville’s chapter is beset by contesting arguments about and portrayals of American Indians. Although it contains the narrative of inherent nomadism and providential extinction already outlined, it also describes two additional forms of Indian movement, which show evidence of deeper moral discomfort. These are the “nomadism” of retreat and removal. Footnote 51 A full interpretation of the chapter should read it not only for its textual segregation and providential discourse but also for its tensions, disagreements with itself, and competing accounts of Indian nomadism—which reflect, albeit imperfectly, the contestations of its time.
We can begin to get a sense of these tensions when we look at Tocqueville’s discussion of Indian containment as a political strategy. The textual move to confine the Indian to a single chapter is reflective of the politics of Tocqueville’s time, in which Indian tribes were often framed as fundamentally beyond the reach of civilization, and therefore as the appropriate objects of continual territorial compression. Even if the long-term fate of Indian tribes is to be disappearance, Tocqueville often describes the contemporary Anglo-American response to the nomadism of the Indian as an effort of containment. The Cherokees and the Creeks, for instance, found themselves virtually “encircled by Europeans who, landing on the shores of the Ocean, going down the Ohio and coming back up the Mississippi, surrounded them all at once.” The Indian nations of the south were thus gradually “squeezed little by little into limits that were too narrow, as hunters first make an enclosure around a thicket before entering simultaneously into the interior.” Footnote 52 Indian nations in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois faced similar encroachments. Worn down by decades of war and contact with Anglo-Americans, they proved unable to prevent their own dispossession and were confined to ever-shrinking portions of land. The result of these processes was clear—“to envelop [the Indians] from all sides and to squeeze them in more and more.” Footnote 53 As we will see, Tocqueville links these processes to recurrent patterns of Indian retreat, and to policies of removal.
Historically, processes of spatial containment were frequently coupled with exhortations to Indians to engage in agriculture. Ignoring existing practices of subsistence agriculture among many Indian nations, Thomas Jefferson, among others, made the transition from a supposedly inherent, forest-dwelling nomadism to a settled agricultural life the primary goal of a policy of civilization. Encouraging the transition to agriculture had the corresponding benefit of freeing up land for Anglo-Americans and containing Indian groups on smaller parcels of territory. As Jefferson argued to Benjamin Hawkins in 1803, the promotion of agriculture “will enable [Indians] to live on much smaller portions of land . . . While they are learning to do better on less land, our increasing numbers will be calling for more land.” Footnote 54 James Monroe echoed this logic in 1817: “The hunter state can exist only in the vast uncultivated desert. It yields to the more dense and compact form and greater force of civilized population; and, of right, it ought to yield, for the earth was given to mankind to support the greater number of which it is capable.” Footnote 55 Indian resistance to these agricultural visions was often interpreted as both a struggle against civilization and an inability to compete with more advanced Anglo-American farmers, in ways that Tocqueville addresses in the text when discussing retreat. Yet, as we will consider, Indians did not always resist—and when they did not, this posed profound questions about their political status, which Tocqueville acknowledges when discussing removal.
In the providentialist strands of Tocqueville’s text, it is the Indian’s inherent and insurmountable nomadism that prevents him from being included in the American demos. Yet Tocqueville also calls attention to a nomadism of retreat, which is induced by both the actions of individual Anglo-Americans seeking Indian lands and the policies of the Jacksonian state. This kind of movement has profound effects on the character of Indian tribes. It creates a more severe form of “barbarism” by which Indians become even more unrooted than before. Tocqueville explains the results of these displacements in stark terms: “Europeans, after scattering the Indian tribes far into the wilderness, condemned them to a wandering and restless life, full of inexpressible miseries.” Footnote 56 The wandering, unsettled ways of Indian tribes that are used to justify state projects of forced relocation and containment are in this instance described by Tocqueville as the product of these projects. Here, nomadism is an artifact, rather than a natural disposition.
At points, Tocqueville describes this form of displacement as the result of uncoordinated individual efforts, which represent a kind of naturalistic process of civilizational growth. “A few European families, occupying widely separated points,” he writes, “succeed in chasing forever the wild animals from all the intermediate space that stretches between them.” Indeed, he suggests that settlement may not even be necessary for these effects to occur: “the instant the continuous noises of European industry are heard in some place, the game begins to flee and withdraw toward the west, where its instinct teaches it that still limitless wildernesses will be found.” Citing his frequent source Secretary of War Lewis Cass, Tocqueville relays that “this effect of the approach of whites . . . often makes itself felt two hundred leagues from their frontier.” Footnote 57 Making the point clear for his European and American readers, he suggests that the disappearance of Indian game is like making “the fields of our farmers sterile.” Without the capacity to live in these conditions, Indians are reduced to starvation, seen “prowling about like famished wolves amid their deserted woods.” Footnote 58 The Indians once “lived alone in the wilderness from which they are exiled today,” but conditions are now much different for them. “Exiled” from the wilderness, they are often contained in smaller territories on which they cannot sustain themselves. “I met the last of the Iroquois,” Tocqueville ominously relates. “They were begging for alms.” Footnote 59
Tocqueville suggests that these conditions often leave no option but retreat for those who are able. Left with nothing “except misery and death,” the squeezed and enveloped Indians “finally make up their minds; they leave, and following at a distance the flight of the elk, the buffalo and the beaver, they leave to these wild animals the care of choosing a new homeland for them.” Footnote 60 Tocqueville’s text often works to mitigate the tension between claims about inherent Indian nomadism and these produced retreats. For example, he characterizes the nomadism of retreat as a return to the Indian’s “natural” ways: “misery had pushed these unfortunate Indians toward civilization, oppression [now] drives them . . . back toward barbarism. Many of them, leaving their half-cleared fields, resume the habit of savage life.” Footnote 61 In a similar vein, he notes that “[Indians] become enlightened only with the aid of Europeans, and the approach of Europeans depraves them and pushes them back toward barbarism” Footnote 62 Yet Tocqueville also makes clear that retreat is not simply a return to an original state, but something worse: “[B]y scattering their families, by obscuring their traditions, by interrupting the chain of memory, by changing all their habits . . . European tyranny has made them more disorderly and less civilized than they already were.” The more this process persists, Tocqueville notes, “the more barbaric” and “unhappy” the Indians become. Footnote 63 In these moments of displacement and retreat, Indians become paradoxically both more nomadic and more savage than they ever were previously.
Though Tocqueville’s text often works to naturalize these processes of containment as the inevitable result of “civilizational” growth, it also shows awareness that such a description is dangerously convenient for the encroaching society. It is not, “strictly speaking, the Europeans who chase the natives of America away, it is famine.” Yet, as Tocqueville ironically notes, this is merely a “happy distinction that had escaped the old casuists and that modern [scholars] have discovered.” He describes these “forced emigrations” as attended by “dreadful evils” that “you cannot imagine.” Footnote 64 In cataloging these evils, he also finds himself offering descriptions of Indian societies that are at odds with his easy statements about inherent nomadism. Indians are hesitant to move, he suggests, because “instinctive love of native land attaches them to the soil where they were born.” Once movement begins, other kinds of social ties and practices are fractured and destroyed. Indians are forced to go West to contend with the tribes already there, so that “behind them is hunger, ahead of them is war, everywhere there is misery. In order to escape so many enemies, they divide up. Each one of them tries to isolate himself in order to find furtively the means to sustain his existence” and “the social bond, long weakened, then breaks.” In these circumstances, there will soon “no longer be a people; families will scarcely remain; the common name is being lost, language forgotten, the traces of origin disappear. The nation has ceased to exist.” Footnote 65 Forced to flee, the settled social and territorial bonds of these “natural” nomads fracture and fall apart.
What Tocqueville describes here is far from a simple naturalistic process. Instead, he shows a deep awareness of the methods by which individual actors and agents of the state systematically sought to uproot Indian nations and drive them westward. He notes that when Anglo-Americans begin to “approach the wilderness occupied by a savage nation, the government of the United States commonly sends to the latter a solemn embassy.” This embassy uses Indian starvation as a bargaining tool. Tocqueville imagines the words of the treaty commissioners: “What are you doing in the land of your fathers? Soon you will have to dig up their bones to live there.” Footnote 66 The Indians are promised abundant lands in the West, where they may live more fruitfully and peacefully. Lacking other options, they accept this choice: “Half persuaded, half forced, the Indians move away; they go to inhabit new wildernesses where whites will not leave them in peace for ten years.” Footnote 67 It is through this opportunistic mix of persuasion and coercion that “Americans acquire at a very low price entire provinces that the richest sovereigns of Europe could not afford.” Footnote 68 There is little that is unanticipated or providential about this process, as Tocqueville describes it here. Instead, he makes clear the degree to which American institutions have sought to naturalize such process: “The dispossession of the Indians often takes place today in a regular and, so to speak, entirely legal manner.” Footnote 69
Despite the anger and normative protest that these textual moments display, Tocqueville reminds the reader of the inherently unsettled nature of these fleeing nomads. At heart, he writes, “the habits of the wandering life are still not destroyed. Traditions have not lost their dominion; the taste for hunting has not been extinguished.” Footnote 70 The Indian is called back to nomadism by the empty spaces “where, for so long, he lived free . . . a few hours of walking can restore it to him.” Footnote 71 Yet these cannot be the actual spaces of the Indian’s earlier life, since those are now filled with Anglo-American settlers.
By working to re-naturalize movement of this kind, the text gives the appearance of consistency. Yet the agency at work here is not providence or an undifferentiated “civilization,” but the specific intentional actions of American settlers and their government. Unresolved tensions about the identity of and challenge posed by the character of Indian societies run just under the surface of Tocqueville’s discussion, alongside inconstant irony and moral condemnation. To what degree is Tocqueville’s Indian the product of forcible displacement rather than inherent nature? These tensions in the account grow when the text turns to the politics of outright Indian removal, where claims about nomadism become much more difficult to lodge.
Removal
It is striking that nowhere does Tocqueville’s text directly address Indian Removal as the official policy of the United States, advocated by President Andrew Jackson and duly passed by Congress in May 1830. Yet indirect references to this policy and accurate descriptions of its surrounding political controversies run throughout Democracy’s “Three Races” chapter. Footnote 72 Tocqueville himself was a personal witness to the removal of the Choctaws. His text shows a clear awareness of the highly public debates between the Cherokee Nation, Georgia, and the United States about the justification of Indian Removal. Democracy is also attuned to the recurrent invocations of “nomadism” that were central to these debates. Footnote 73 Read in this discursive context, the political stakes and underlying tensions of Tocqueville’s claims about Indian nomadism become especially clear, as do his questions about the notion of “civilization” itself. It is, moreover, in his indirect discussion of the politics of removal that Tocqueville’s language becomes most normatively charged. Footnote 74
Recognizing the politically attuned nature of some of Tocqueville’s claims about Indian nomadism can be difficult without contextual knowledge of the patterns of discourse circulating during his visit to America. Footnote 75 In 1829, Andrew Jackson’s initial message to Congress addressed the condition and future of Indian tribes in ways that will be familiar from Tocqueville’s discussion. Jackson both attributes an inherent nomadism to American Indians and admits that the state has often caused their retreat. His language is that of humanitarianism, and it is worth quoting at length:
The condition and ulterior destiny of the Indian tribes within the limits of some of our States have become objects of much interest and importance. It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life. This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits. Footnote 76
As this illustrates, Tocqueville’s acknowledgment of the connection between American displacements and Indian mobility was not an unusual one given the discursive context of the time. Rather, descriptions of this kind could be found at the highest levels of government, and circulated widely throughout newspapers and other kinds of publications.
However, Jackson’s speech goes on to raise an entirely different concern about the “civilization” of the Indian. Some Indians in the South, “having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama.” Footnote 77 In 1827, the Cherokee Nation drafted a new constitution, drawing on language from the preamble of the American constitution whilst retaining important elements of Cherokee self-understanding. The Cherokee constitution sought to formalize the nation’s governing structures, legal codes, boundaries, and national status. The following year, the Cherokee government began publishing the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper (in both English and Cherokee) with the purpose of defending Cherokee claims within the American public sphere. Georgia, alarmed by what it saw as an imperium in imperio, immediately passed laws that claimed to abolish the existence of the Cherokee nation entirely. Before Tocqueville left America, competition between Georgia and the Cherokees would lead to one Supreme Court decision, with a second to follow less than a month after his departure, as well as to a great deal of heated political debate about the legal status of Indian nations.
Tocqueville’s text shows an acute awareness of the Cherokee example and its potential challenges to claims about inherent nomadism. Because the Cherokees and other Southern tribes were not driven out of their territories as swiftly as others, Tocqueville notes, they have better adapted to white society. Standing “between civilization and death,” Tocqueville writes, these tribes “became farmers.” Footnote 78 The Cherokees, Tocqueville writes, “went further; they created a written language, established a fairly stable form of government; and, as everything moves with a hurried step in the New World, they had a newspaper before all had clothes.” Footnote 79
Tocqueville returned to France with copies of the Phoenix, which would have been filled with Cherokee political arguments. Footnote 80 On the basis of this and other evidence, he argues that the Cherokee achievements prove “that the Indians have the ability to become civilized.” However, the optimism of this claim is immediately tempered. The mere existence of such an Indian capacity for civilization “in no way proves that they can succeed” in achieving it. His ultimate conclusion is bleak. Long-established Indian customs, he suggests, are a virtually unavoidable obstacle to civilization. Footnote 81
Yet why exactly will the Cherokees and other Southern tribes be unable to achieve civilization? Here, Tocqueville wavers unsteadily between civilization as a form of sedentary, agricultural life and civilization as the sheer capacity to exercise violence. He notes that “with the aid of their resources and their enlightenment, the Europeans did not take long to appropriate most of the advantages that possession of the soil could provide to the natives; the Europeans settled among them, seized the land or bought it at a low price, and ruined the Indians by a competition that the latter could in no way sustain.” Footnote 82 Framed in this way, the problem is simply that the Cherokees and other Southern tribes will be unable to transition quickly enough to persist in the face of market competition.
Yet Tocqueville is also clear about the effects of military power on Indians living among “the most greedy people of the globe.” Footnote 83 The Cherokees, “isolated in their own country,” now form only “a small colony of inconvenient foreigners in the middle of a numerous and dominating people” Footnote 84 —a people which is unwilling to tolerate their continued presence, claiming instead the legal right to force them to remove. Tocqueville accurately describes the conflict between the Cherokees and the state of Georgia. While the Cherokees and Creeks continued to occupy their ancestral land, “the Americans often negotiated with them as foreign nations,” but “the states within which [the Indians] find themselves did not want to recognize them as independent peoples.” Footnote 85 Tocqueville rightly notes that the Cherokees and other Southern tribes appealed to the American government for relief from the states, but received none. In place of protection, the federal government offered them removal. Footnote 86 On this account, “the states, by their tyranny, force the savages to flee; the Union, by its promises and with the aid of its resources, makes the flight easy.” Footnote 87 The problem here is not the capacity to meet any obvious civilizational criteria, but an absence of power: the Cherokees simply do not have any way to resist Georgia’s act of aggression.
States like Georgia were eager to remove the Cherokee and other tribes, not because of the resistance of Indians to efforts at civilization and containment, but precisely because of the success of these efforts. Tocqueville explains that Anglo-Americans in the South look with envy upon “the lands the natives possess; they feel that the latter have not yet completely lost the traditions of savage life, and before civilization has firmly attached them to the soil, they want to reduce them to despair and force them to move away.” Footnote 88 The need to remove the Indian “before civilization has firmly attached them to the soil” speaks not to anxiety that policies of civilization and sedentarization are failing, but that they are too effective—the Indians are becoming so visibly attached to the soil that efforts at displacement will no longer be able to draw on the cover of claims about inherent nomadism.
Both supporters and opponents of Indian removal were acutely aware of the difficulties posed by the visibility of Cherokee bonds to the soil. In 1825, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun noted that “great difficulty arises from the progress of the Cherokees in civilization. They are now, within the limits of Georgia, about fifteen thousand, and increasing in equal proportion with the whites; all cultivators, with a representative government, judicial courts, Lancaster schools, and permanent property.” Footnote 89 After the Cherokee government was formalized, this problem was especially acute. Lewis Cass, a deep opponent of Cherokee claims who would oversee the removal of the Cherokees and others as Secretary of War, expressed similar worries:
The establishment of [the Cherokee] government, claiming to be independent … by which means they may become permanently established in their present possessions, necessarily presents . . . a serious question for consideration. It is evident, that if this pretension be not resisted now, resistance hereafter will be in vain. It is one of these questions, eminently practical, which a few years’ acquaintance would settle. What might now be the assertion of a just and proper jurisdiction by civilized communities, might then be an unjust claim to be enforced only by war and conquest. Footnote 90
Such language is revealing. As long as Indians could be described as nomads whose displacement would simply return them to their natural condition, it suggests, few claims of “injustice” could plausibly be pressed. Once they became civilizationally recognizable to those around them, on the other hand, then displacement could only happen by unjust war and conquest.
The Cherokees and their supporters were well aware of the discursive power of claims to agricultural and legal entrenchment. In the two legal cases they were able to bring before the United States Supreme Court, the Cherokees and their advocates argued for their legal status within the law of nations, and the binding nature of their relationships with the United States. Footnote 91 They and their supporters were clear about the discursive uses to which claims of nomadism were put by opponents. In 1829, as one example among many, missionary Jeremiah Evarts published a series of heavily reprinted newspaper essays under the name of “William Penn” in which he outlined the Cherokee’s legal arguments against Georgia and claims for a sovereign status more generally. He captures the political function of arguments about nomadism well, ventriloquizing the complaints of the people of Georgia to the Cherokees:
[You] had no business to betake yourselves to an agricultural life. It is a downright imposition on us. This is the very thing that we complain of. The more you work on land, the more unwilling you are to leave it. Just so it is with your schools; they only serve to attach you more strongly to your country. It is all designed to keep us, the people of a sovereign and independent State, from the enjoyment of our just rights. We must refer you to the law of nations again, which declares that populous countries, whose inhabitants live by agriculture, have a right to take the lands of hunters and apply them to better use. Footnote 92
Claims of Indian nomadism were thus central to the contestation over Indian removal, and widely debated in a variety of forums. Given their salience during Tocqueville’s visit to America and the content of many of the sources that he cites Footnote 93 —including an extended selection from a Cherokee memorial to Congress—it would have been impossible for him to be ignorant of these debates. Footnote 94
Tocqueville is clear about the brutalities that the Cherokees and other Indians faced in the prospect of removal, and the degree to which the policy would produce the very kind of “wandering and restless life” that was said to justify their expulsion in the first place. Footnote 95 He is also clear about the difficult bind which the Indians faced, in choosing between retreat or eventual removal: “From whatever side you envisage the destiny of the natives of North America, you see only irremediable evils. If they remain savage, they are pushed ahead and kept on the move; if they want to become civilized, contact with men more civilized than they delivers them to oppression and misery.” Footnote 96 This “oppression and misery” nonetheless takes the peculiar form of respect for the appearance of humanitarianism and legality. “If by chance an Indian nation is no longer able to live in its territory,” Tocqueville explains, “the Americans take it fraternally by the hand and lead it themselves to die outside the country of its fathers.” Footnote 97 This humanitarian removal reflects “the purest love of forms and of legality.” Tocqueville closes his discussion of the Indian in a famously ironic way, noting that Anglo-Americans have displaced the Indians “with a marvelous ease, calmly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. You cannot destroy men while better respecting the laws of humanity.” Footnote 98
Tocqueville’s final note before concluding his discussion of the Indian is in some ways the clearest portion of the text for conceptualizing the meaning of “civilization” as it threatens the Cherokees. Citing the report by John Bell of Tennessee that accompanied the introduction of the Indian Removal Act in Congress, Tocqueville relates ironically how within the text it is “established . . . by very logical reasons” that “the Indians had no right” to their lands, whether by “soil, or sovereignty” Footnote 99 He goes on:
You are astonished by the facility and ease with which, from the first words, the author gets rid of arguments founded on natural right and reason, that he calls abstract and theoretical principles. The more I consider it, the more I think that the only difference that exists between the civilized man and the one who is not, in relation to justice, is this: the one contests the justice of the rights that the other is content to violate. Footnote 100
If “civilization” cannot mean superior justice, nor agricultural and legal claims to place and sovereignty—since Tocqueville seems to acknowledge the plausibilty of Cherokee grounds to them—it is hard to see what meaning is left to the term, beyond the capacity to destroy. The ungrounded and unpredictable force that cannot be contained, as implied here, is not the Indian. It is the American, who has a kind of uncontrollable tendency to move at will across all other established patterns of social life.
Deploying Tocqueville
Our goal in this essay is not to rescue Tocqueville from normative objections (which we share) that his argument should have gone farther in protesting against Indian removal. Others of his time—including some of those he encountered personally—certainly went further. Footnote 101 Tocqueville’s account is problematic in a number of ways, and its coupling of textual segregation with claims about providential extinction weakens both the force and visibility of his moral objections. Tocqueville recurrently presents displacement and extinction as inevitable, deploying, as Connolly rightly notes, “a slippery language of regret without moral indictment.” Footnote 102 Nonetheless, his account is more complex and internally divided, both in its portrayal of Indians and its normative positions, than is often recognized. The conclusion to his discussion of the fate of American Indians retains its ironic biting force: “You cannot destroy men while better respecting the laws of humanity.” Footnote 103 Sharp edges of normative protest, ambiguities about nomadism and civilization, and instabilities in claims about racial character run throughout the chapter. Footnote 104 An awareness of the discursive context of Tocqueville’s American visit helps to make these competing strands of argument newly visible.
Tocqueville’s text tacks unsteadily between a position of providential, fore-ordained Indian extinction that left little place for normative protest, and a more normatively charged sense that Indian expulsion was the product of specific choices made by particular agents—choices that often deserved moral anger and scorn. This unsteadiness reflects the diverging patterns of discourse in his Jacksonian context. Tocqueville spoke to, corresponded with, and read the work of political actors involved in debates over Indian removal from a variety of contending positions, and these contentions have left their mark on the chapter as a whole, often standing in unresolved tension with one another. If we read Tocqueville’s text with these seams of uncertainty and disagreement in mind, we are likely to envision more vividly the patterns of contestation in which it was composed. Central to this contestation was a language of nomadism that was intended not only as descriptive, but justificatory for projects of American Indian displacement. This language was circulated from the highest levels of government as an explanation for the legitimacy and naturalness of American territorial expansion.
In his inaugural address to Congress, President Andrew Jackson regretfully described the very conditions of extinction that he himself was working to create:
Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. Footnote 105
Tocqueville’s account, though strikingly inconstant in its portrayals and normative evaluations, does not always accept language of this sort. It is important for our own readings of Democracy in America to acknowledge the tensions that run throughout Tocqueville’s account, so that we keep clearly in view the political goals that claims about Indian nomadism and inevitable extinction were intended to serve. Doing so will also prevent us from losing sight of the intense political efforts that Indian tribes and their allies made to contest these claims and the project of expansionism and displacement of which they were a part.
In normative terms, it is especially important to us that commentators on Tocqueville do not, themselves, slip unwittingly into a language of inherent Indian nomadism and easy American expansionism. It is equally important for scholars of APD and political science more broadly to avoid this slippage. To do so allows the advocates of Removal to dominate our current understandings of the period, and therefore contributes to a mistaken understanding of the early American state. As revisionist APD scholars have sought to make clear, American territorial expansion was a complex and contentious political project, in which institutions were mobilized to create the “empty” spaces that white American citizens would then fill. Footnote 106 Discourses of nomadism and inevitable Indian extinction were essential to this project and were contested by tribes and their allies. The United States did not, as conventional APD accounts have often suggested, expand easily and naturally to its current territorial and political shape. Its expansion was often the result of systematic and contested choices made by political actors. There is a rich potential for future work by APD scholars in further documenting the specific policies, discourses, and spaces of disagreement during this period of American westward expansion. While Tocqueville gives us less help in this task than we might like, there are nonethless many resources in his text for more historically sensitive accounts of Indian Removal.
