Richmond stands in an admirable situation on the slope of a hill whose
base is bathed by the James River. Its Capitol, with its brick columns
covered with plaster, with its cornice and architrave of painted
wood, produces an effect, at a distance, which even the Parthenon,
in the days of Pericles, could not have surpassed; for the sky of
Virginia, when it is not darkened by a storm, or veiled with snow, is
as beautiful as that of Attica. Richmond has its port nearer than the
Piræus was to Athens, while, at the same time it stands upon the falls
of James River. Richmond enchanted me from the first by its charming
situation and the cordiality of its inhabitants; and it pleases me by
its ambition, for it aspires to be a metropolis, and it is making the
due preparations to assume that character by the great works which it
is executing or aiding to execute, canals, railroads, water-works, huge
mills, workshops, for which the fall in the river affords an almost
unlimited motive power. Here I also found some countrymen, whose love
for their country had not been chilled by fifty years of absence and
eighty years of age, and who have preserved, amidst the simplicity of
American manners, that fine flower of courtesy, of which the germ is
daily disappearing amongst us. I went yesterday, for the second time,
to visit the cannon and mortars, given to America during her struggle
for independence, by Louis XVI. In the Capitol, by the side of the
statue of Washington, I found the bust of Lafayette. I heard the names
of Rochambeau and d'Estaing pronounced, as if they were old friends
who had left but yesterday. I seem to myself, at times to have been
miraculously transported, not into France, but on the frontiers.
My admiration of Richmond is not, however, blind; the founders of the
new city have plotted out streets one hundred feet wide, like the
highways in the style of Louis XIV.; but in our great roads, between
the quagmires on the right and left, there is at least a strip of
passable pavement or roadway. The streets of new Richmond have neither
pavement nor light. In the rainy season, they are dangerous bogs,
in which, I am told, that several cows, who are here allowed by the
municipal authorities to go at large, have met with the fate of the
master of Ravensworth in the Kelpie. Richmond has, also, something of
the aspect of Washington; with the exception of the business part of
the town, it is neither city nor country; the houses are scattered
about on an imaginary plan, and it is almost impossible to find any
lines to guide you, or to recognise the street K, F, or D, to which
you are referred; for the alphabet has furnished the names here, as the
arithmetic has done at Washington. The plot of Richmond has, however,
this advantage over that of Washington, that it is on a smaller scale
and will be more speedily filled up; whilst Washington with its
arrangements for a million inhabitants, will not, perhaps, have fifty
thousand, twenty years hence.
There is something in Richmond which offends me more than its
bottomless mudholes, and shocks me more than the rudeness of the
western Virginians,[DA] whom I met here during the session of the
legislature; it is slavery. Half of the population is black or mulatto;
physically, the negroes are well used in Virginia, partly from motives
of humanity, and partly, because they are so much live stock raised for
exportation to Louisiana; morally, they are treated as if they did not
belong to the human race. Free or slave, the black is here denied all
that can give him the dignity of man. The law forbids the instruction
of the slave or the free man of colour in the simplest rudiments of
learning, under the severest penalties; the slave has no family; he has
no civil rights; he holds no property. The white man knows that the
slave has opened his ear to the word which every thing here proclaims
aloud, liberty; he knows that in secret the negro broods over hopes and
schemes of vengeance, and that the exploits and martyrdom of Gabriel,
the leader of an old conspiracy, and of Turner, the hero of a more
recent insurrection, are still related in the negro cabins.[DB] The
precautionary measures which this knowledge has induced the whites to
adopt, are such as freeze the heart of a stranger with horror.
Richmond is noted for its tobacco and flour market. The Richmond flour
is prized at Rio Janeiro as much as at New York, at Lima as well
as at Havana. The largest flour-mill in the world is at Richmond,
running twenty pair of stones, containing a great variety of accessory
machinery, and capable of manufacturing 600 barrels of flour a day. The
reputation of the Richmond flour in foreign markets, like that of the
American flour in general, depends upon a system of inspection peculiar
to the country, which contravenes, indeed, the theory of absolute
commercial freedom, but is essential to the prosperity of American
commerce, and has never, that I have heard of, been a subject of
complaint. The flour is inspected previous to its being exported. The
weight of each barrel and the quality of of the flour are ascertained
by the inspector, and branded on the barrel-head. The superior
qualities only can be exported; the inspection is real and thorough,
and is performed at the expense of the holder. The Havana, Brazilian,
or Peruvian merchant is thus perfectly sure of the quality of the
merchandise he buys; both the buyer and the seller find their advantage
in it.
Commerce can no more dispense with confidence in the market than with
credit in the counting-house.
Tobacco is subjected to the same system of inspection, and in general,
all the coast States, all those from which produce is exported to
foreign parts, have established this system, and applied it to almost
all articles in which frauds can be committed. Thus in New York
wheat-flour and Indian corn-meal, beef, pork, salt fish, potash, whale
oil, lumber, staves, flax-seed, leather, tobacco, hops, spirits, are
all inspected. In regard to flour, the law is more rigourous than in
respect to other articles. The inspector brands with the word _light_
those barrels which are not of the legal weight, and the exportation of
which is also prohibited, and with the word _bad_ those which are of
poor quality. As for Indian corn, it is required that the grain shall
have been kiln-dried before grinding. Flour from other States cannot
be sold in the city of New York, even for local consumption, unless it
has been inspected the same as if for exportation. Every inspector has
the right to search vessels in which he suspects that there is flour
that has not been inspected, and to seize what has been so shipped,
or what it has been attempted to ship. There are beside various other
provisions and penalties to prevent fraud.
If the necessity of these inspections were not sufficiently proved by
their good effects and by long experience, it would be by the abuses
that prevail in those articles of commerce which are not subjected to
the system. Complaints have already been made in Liverpool, that bales
of cotton are often made up of an inferior article concealed beneath
an outer layer of good quality. From a report addressed to the Chamber
of American Commerce in this metropolis of the cotton trade, by the
principal cotton-brokers, it appears that this has not been confined to
two or three bales, amidst large quantities, but that whole lots of one
or two hundred bales have been found thus deficient.
What! it will be said, is there not, then, freedom of commerce in this
classic land of liberty? No! the foreign commerce is not free in the
United States, because the American people is not willing to expose
the industry and commerce of a whole country to be ruined by the
first rogue that comes along. The people of this country is eminently
a working people; every one is at liberty to work, to choose his
profession, and to change it twenty times; every one has the right
to go and come on his business, at pleasure, and to transport his
person and his industry from the centre to the circumference, and from
the circumference to the centre. If the country does not enjoy the
political advantages of administrative unity, neither is it hampered in
the most petty details of industry by excessive centralisation. No man
is obliged to go six hundred miles to solicit the license and personal
signature of a minister, overloaded with business, and harassed by
parliamentary solicitudes. But American liberty is not a mystical,
undefined liberty; it is a practical liberty, in harmony with the
peculiar genius of the people and its peculiar destiny; it is a liberty
of action and motion, of which the American avails himself to spread
himself over the vast territory that Providence has given him, and to
subdue it to his uses. The liberty of locomotion is almost absolute
with the exception of some restraints imposed by the observance of the
Sabbath. The liberty, or rather independence, in matters of industry
is also ample; but if it is abused by some individuals, the general
tendency is to restrain them by law or by dictatorial measures, or by
the influence of public opinion, sometimes expressed in the shape of
mobs.
The restraints on internal trade are few; there are, however, some
restrictions upon hawkers and pedlers who impose on the credulity
of the country people. If no effective bankrupt-law has yet been
enacted, severe penalties are provided against false pretences. If
stock-jobbing has not been prohibited, it is not from want of will on
the part of the legislators, for they are fully alive to the evils
of unproductive speculation, which diverts from industry the needful
capital; but because they do not see how it is to be effectually
prevented. Besides, it is not easy to commit frauds in the United
States, in the home trade; for here every body knows every body else,
and every one is on the watch against others; and it is not difficult
to ascend to the sources of a fraud. In respect to articles designed
for the foreign trade, detection is not so easy. There is also here a
sort of patriotism, which is by no means at war with the real interests
of the parties, and which operates with the fear of public opinion, in
keeping up a certain degree of honesty in domestic transactions, and
a tone of morality, which, if not wholly above reproach, is certainly
far superior to what prevails amongst us; whilst, to many persons, all
is fair in dealings with foreigners, whom they look upon as a kind of
barbarians.
Previous to 1789, we had numerous restrictions not only on foreign
commerce, but on domestic industry, in France. These were all blown
away by the Revolution; and certainly the destruction of most of them,
which had become antiquated and inapplicable to the existing state of
things, was a great gain; but we have run into the contrary extreme,
and abolished not only the burdensome restraints, but the most salutary
checks, and among them the inspection of exported articles. Yet on
the whole we have gained in respect to domestic industry, by sweeping
away those often cumbersome regulations; but in regard to our foreign
trade, the evil has certainly overborne the good, as the decline of our
maritime commerce fully proves.
On the peace of 1814, when the sea was again opened to our vessels,
our foreign commerce fell into the hands of petty traffickers, whose
cupidity exhausted the vocabulary of fraud. During the first years
after the Restoration, the French name became discredited in all the
markets of the Old and the New World. The Levant trade, of which we
had the monopoly, passed into the hands of the English and Austrians.
The stuffs, with which we formerly supplied the East, being no longer
subject to inspection on exportation, fell short in measure and were
inferior in quality. Formerly packages of our goods changed hands
without distrust and without search; but it became necessary to submit
them to a rigourous examination, for their contents often turned out
to be quite different from the invoice. South America was the great
theatre of these frauds; water was actually sold for Burgundy, rolls
of wood for rolls of ribands. The Bordelese, who, not without reason,
charge the prohibitive system with the decline of their prosperity,
cannot be blind to the fact, that their own unscrupulous rapacity
contributed pretty largely to this result.
As customers could no longer be found to deal with us, these frauds
have necessarily been checked. Our foreign trade has gradually fallen
into the hands of a few great houses, and this concentration, which
has powerfully contributed to the prevalence of honorable dealings in
English commerce, has done something towards reviving ours. The small
dealers have been driven out of the field; and it is to this cause that
we have to attribute the good condition of our trade with the United
States. But let us not deceive ourselves; some sleights of hand are
still played off; Bordeaux is not yet wholly purged of the infection;
French commerce abroad is yet cankered by foul sores. It must be
confessed, that, if our public policy has been marked by a good faith
and a spirit of disinterestedness, that give us a right to denounce the
Punic faith of _perfidious Albion_, the English race can proudly oppose
the bold and honourable spirit of its commercial dealings to the
pusillanimity and unworthy shifts of our own. Let us confess our shame,
and submit to the necessary diet for the cure of so loathsome a leprosy.
The United States constitute a society which moves under the impulse
and by the guidance of instinct, rather than according to any
premeditated plan; it does not know itself. It rejects the tyranny of
a past, which is exclusively military in its character, and yet it is
deeply imbued with the sentiment of order. It has been nurtured in
the hatred of the old political systems of Europe; but a feeling of
the necessity of self-restraint runs through its veins. It is divided
between its instinctive perceptions of the future and its aversion to
the past; between its thirst after freedom, and its hunger for social
order; between its religious veneration of experience, and its horror
of the violence of past ages. Hence the apparent contradictions which
appear in its tastes and its tendencies; but the confusion is only
apparent.
In each State there are two authorities, distinct in their composition
and their attributes. The one corresponds to the government in the
European social system, to the old Cæsar. At its head is a magistrate
who bears the old name of Governor,[DC] with the pompous title of
commander-in-chief of the sea and land forces. This authority is
reduced to a shadow. In the new States of the West, which have come
into the world since the establishment of Independence, its attributes
have been gradually suppressed, or rather the citizens have reserved
the exercise of them to themselves. Thus the people itself appoint most
of the public officers. The management of funds is rarely confided
to the Governor, but is generally entrusted to a special board of
Commissioners. The Governor has not the control of the forces of the
State; strictly speaking, indeed, there are none; but in case of
necessity, the Sheriff has the right to summon the _posse comitatus_,
and to oblige all bystanders, armed or not, to render him assistance,
and to act as police officers. There is no regular police, there are
no passports; but nobody can stop at an inn without entering his name
and residence on the register. This register is open to the examination
of all in the bar-room, which is a necessary appendage of every public
place, and there it remains at all times to be turned over by all. The
bar-keeper fills, in fact, the post of commissioner of police, and the
crowd that assembles in the bar-room to read the newspapers, smoke,
drink whiskey, and talk politics, that is to say all travellers, would,
in case of necessity, be ready to act the part of constables. This is
real self-government; these are the obligations and responsibilities,
that every citizen takes upon himself when he disarms authority. The
power of the Governor, who was formerly the representative of royalty,
the brilliant reflexion of the omnipotence of the proud monarchs of
Europe, is crumbled to dust. Even the exterior of power has not been
kept up; he has no guards, no palace, no money. The Governors of
Indiana and Illinois have a salary of 1000 dollars a year, without a
house or any accessories. There is not a trader in Cincinnati, who
does not pay his head-clerk better; the clerks at Washington have 700
dollars a year.
This fall of power is to be explained by other considerations than
those drawn from the principle of self-government. The ancient power
was Cæsar, was military in its character. American society has denied
Cæsar. In Europe, it has been necessary that Cæsar should be strong
for the security of national independence; for in Europe we are always
on the eve of war. The United States, on the contrary, are organised
on the principle, that war between the States is an impossibility, and
that a foreign war is scarcely probable. The Americans, therefore, can
dispense with Cæsar, but we are obliged to cleave to him. Yet it is not
to be inferred that they can and will long dispense with authority, or
that they are even now free from its control. There is, in America,
religious authority, which never closes its eyes; there is the
authority of opinion, which is severe to rigour; there is the authority
of the legislatures, which sometimes savours of the omnipotence of
parliament; there is the dictatorial authority of mobs.
Still more; by the side of the power of Cæsar, in political affairs,
another regular authority is beginning to show itself, which embraces
within its domain the modern institutions and new establishments of
public utility, such as the public routes, banks, and elementary
schools, that, in the United States, have acquired an unparallelled
magnitude. Thus there are Canal Commissioners, Bank Commissioners,
School Commissioners. Their power is great and real. The Canal
Commissioners establish administrative regulations, which they change
at will, without previous notice. They fix and change the rate of
tolls; they are surrounded by a large body of agents, entirely
dependent upon them and removeable at pleasure; they are charged with
the management of large sums of money; the sums that passed through the
hands of the Pennsylvania Commissioners amounted to nearly 23,000,000
dollars. They are certainly subjected to a less minute and rigourous
control, than is extended to the most trifling affairs of our Board of
Public Works or our Engineer Department. If they had had our financial
regulations, our system of responsibility, our court of accounts, they
would, certainly, have spent ten years more in executing the works
entrusted to them, and they would have executed them no better and
no cheaper. The Bank Commissioners in the State of New York, by the
provisions of the Safety Fund Act, are clothed, by right, if not in
fact, with a sort of dictatorship; they have, in certain cases, power
of life and death over the banks.
It is in the new States, especially, that one should see the
Commissioners exercise their powers. Last summer the Ohio Canal
Commissioners, perceiving or thinking that they perceived, a conspiracy
among the persons engaged in the transportation of goods on the
New York canals to raise the rates of freight, immediately adopted
a resolution to this effect; whereas certain persons have shown a
disposition to make exorbitant charges, the rates of toll on all
articles that may have paid on the New York canal, above a certain
rate of freight, shall be double. This was establishing a _maximum_,
not only on their own territory, but on that of a neighbouring State.
A director-general of our public routes, who should take such a
liberty, would be forthwith denounced as violating the principles of
commercial freedom. In the United States, every body agrees that the
Ohio Commissioners were right; that the profits of the transportation
companies would be somewhat less, but the public would be the gainer,
and the former accordingly submitted.
In the United States, then, the general weal is the supreme law; and it
immediately raises its head and vindicates its rights, when it feels
the encroachments of private interest. The system of government in this
country is, therefore, not so much a system of absolute liberty and
free will, as a system of equality, or rather it takes the character
of a strong rule by the majority. In looking at some of the provisions
in the charters of incorporated companies, one is tempted to ask how
associations could be formed on such conditions, and how they have
been able to procure capital. In Massachusetts, the share-holders are
individually responsible for the debts of the company. In Pennsylvania,
it is expressly provided, that, if at any time the privileges granted
to the corporation shall prove to be contrary to the public good, the
legislature may revoke them. This is the germ of despotism; but in
the United States, Cæsar is disarmed; the old feudal line has neither
fangs nor claws. Industry is prompt to take alarm at the exercise of
despotism by Cæsar; but it is only in extreme cases, that it will feel
any distrust of a society which lives and flourishes by labour, and all
whose ends and aims, public and private, are self-aggrandisement by
means of productive labour.
To understand fully the meaning of the word liberty, as it is used in
this country, it is necessary to go to the sources of the American
population; that is to say, to the origin of the distinction between
the Yankee and the Virginian race. They have arrived at their notions
of liberty by different avenues, the one by the gate of religion, and
the other by that of politics, and have, therefore, understood it very
differently.
When the Yankee came to settle himself in the New World, it was not for
the purpose of founding an empire, but to establish a church. He fled
from a land, which had shaken off the yoke of the papal Babylon, only
to fall under that of the Babylon of episcopacy. He left behind him
Satan, his pomp, and his works; he shook from the soles of his feet the
dust of the inhospitable land of the Stuarts and the Anglican bishops;
he sought a refuge in which he might practise his own mode of worship
and obey what he believed to be the law of God. The Pilgrims, landed
on Plymouth rock, established a liberty according to their own notion;
it was a liberty for their own use exclusively, within whose embrace
they felt perfectly at ease themselves, without caring if others
were stifled by it. It might have been expected, that, proscribed
themselves, they would at least have admitted religious toleration; but
they did not grant it the narrowest corner, and even now it is far from
having elbow room among them. Originally, the right of citizenship was
extended only to Puritans like themselves; the state and the church
were confounded; it was not until 1832 that they were definitely and
completely separated in Massachusetts. The Jew and the Quaker were
forbidden to touch the soil under the severest penalties, and in case
of return, under pain of death. At present, if the law tolerates the
Roman Catholic, public opinion does not, as the burning of the Ursuline
convent in 1834, and the scandalous scenes exhibited at the trials
of the incendiaries, testify. Still less mercy is shown to unbelief;
witness the trial of Abner Kneeland for blasphemy, on account of his
pantheistic writings.[DD]
The Yankee type exhibits little variety; all Yankees seem to be cast
in the same mould; it was, therefore, very easy for them to organise
a system of liberty for themselves, that is, to construct a frame,
within which they should have the necessary freedom of motion. On their
arrival they accordingly formed the plan of one, not merely tracing its
general outlines and form, but dividing it into numerous compartments
controlling all the details of life, with as much minuteness as
the Mosaic law did that of the Hebrews. Thus organised, it became
impossible for any man not cut to the same pattern, to establish
himself among them. Although most of those laws which thus reduced life
to rules,[DE] have been abrogated, especially since the Revolution,
still their spirit survives. The habits which gave them birth, and to
which, by a natural reaction, they gave strength, still exist, and to
this day it is observable, that no foreigner settles in New England.
As for us, who resemble each other in nothing, except in differing from
every body else, for us, to whom variety is as necessary as the air, to
whom a life of rules would be a subject of horrour, the Yankee system
would be torture. Their liberty is not the liberty to outrage all that
is sacred on earth, to set religion at defiance, to laugh morals to
scorn, to undermine the foundations of social order, to mock at all
traditions and all received opinions; it is neither the liberty of
being a monarchist in a republican country, nor that of sacrificing the
honour of the poor man's wife or daughter to one's base passions; it
is not even the liberty to enjoy one's wealth by a public display, for
public opinion has its sumptuary laws, to which all must conform under
pain of moral outlawry; nor even that of living in private different
from the rest of the world. The liberty of the Yankee is essentially
limited and special like the nature of the race. We should consider it
as framed after the model of the liberty of Figaro; but the Yankee is
satisfied with it, because it leaves him all the latitude he desires,
and because of all the lessons of the Bible, that of the forbidden
fruit, which we have not been able to fix in our brain, has made the
deepest impression on his.
As the Yankee does not suffer under these restraints, as he is, or what
amounts to the same thing, thinks himself, free, a preventive authority
is unnecessary for him. This is the reason why there is no appearance
of authority in New England, and that an armed force, a police, are
even more unknown there than in the rest of the Union. The absence
of a visible authority imposes on us, and we think that the American
in general, and the Yankee in particular, is more free than we are.
I am persuaded, however, that if we measure liberty by the number of
actions that are permitted or tolerated in public and private life, the
advantage is on our side, not only in comparison with New England, but
also with the white population of the South.
The Virginian is more disposed to understand liberty in our manner.
His disposition has a greater resemblance to ours; his faculties are
much less special, more general than those of the Yankee; his mind is
more ardent, his tastes more varied. But it is the Yankee that now
rules the Union; it is his liberty which has given its principal
features to the model of American liberty. Yet to extend its empire,
it has been obliged to borrow some of the characteristic traits
of Virginian liberty; or, I might say, of French liberty, for the
high-priest of American democracy was a Virginian, who had imbibed in
Paris the doctrines of the philosophy of the 18th century. American
liberty, as it now is, may be considered the result of a mixture, in
unequal proportions, of the theories of Jefferson with the New England
usages. From these dissimilar tendencies has resulted a series of
contradictory measures, which have become strangely complicated with
each other, and which might puzzle and deceive a careless observer. It
is in consequence of these opposite influences in the bosom of American
society, that such conflicting judgments have been passed upon it;
it is because the Yankee type is at present the stronger, whilst the
Virginian was superior in the period of the revolution, that the ideas
which the sight of America now suggests, are so different from those
which she inspired at the epoch of Independence.