A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I believe this government cannot endure
permanently half-slave and half-free.
-- Abraham Lincoln, 1858
By the mid-19th century, the United States began to attract a
steady stream of foreign visitors. As one historian has noted:
"What had
been a somewhat obscure, occasionally romanticized backwater of
colonial exploitation became, virtually overnight, a phenomenon
to be investigated, a political and moral experiment to be
judged."
No visitor to the United States left a more enduring record of
his travels and observations than the French writer and political
theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in
America, first
published in 1835, remains one of the most trenchant and
insightful analyses
of American social and political practices. Tocqueville was far
too shrewd an observer to be uncritical about the United States,
but
his verdict was fundamentally positive. "The government of
democracy brings the notion of political rights to the level of
the
humblest citizens," he wrote, "just as the dissemination of
wealth brings
the notion of property within the reach of all the members of the
community." Nonetheless, Tocqueville was only one of the first of
a long line of thinkers to worry whether such rough equality
could survive in the face of a growing factory system that
threatened
to create divisions between industrial workers and a new business
elite.
Other travelers marveled at the growth and vitality of the
country, where they could see "everywhere the most unequivocal
proofs of prosperity and rapid progress in agriculture, commerce
and great public works." But such optimistic views of the
American
experiment were by no means universal. One skeptic was English
novelist
Charles Dickens, who first visited the United States in 1841-42.
"This is
not the Republic I came to see," he wrote in a letter. "This is
not
the Republic of my imagination.... The more I think of its youth
and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand
respects, it appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has
made a boast -- excepting its education of the people, and its
care for poor
children -- it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it
upon."
Dickens was not alone. America in the 19th century, as throughout
its history, generated expectations and passions that often did
not
agree with a reality that was both more mundane and more complex.
Already, its size and diversity defied easy generalization and
invited contradiction: America was both a freedom-loving and
slave-holding society, a nation of expansive and primitive
frontiers as well as cities of growing commerce and
industrialization.