Essay 40: The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 7)
Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner
The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 288 (Start at “How the Enlightenment”) – 292 (Stop at “That the Laws”) of this edition of Democracy in America.
De Tocqueville on American Education and Self-Government
In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln addressed a young men’s lyceum debating society in Springfield, Illinois, on the topic of “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” Lincoln stated that mob rule and demagoguery were great threats to American self-government. He asserted that the way to preserve American political institutions was to restore reason and reverence for the laws as a “political religion” over the shifting and dangerous passions of human nature.
Publishing his masterpiece, Democracy in America, at the same time Lincoln spoke, De Tocqueville offered his own reflections on “the influence exerted by the enlightenment and the habits of the Americans on the maintenance of their political institutions.” In both cases—education and political habits—were formed primarily through experience rather than theory. The American people, he observed, were eminently a very practical people.
De Tocqueville thought that American education did not produce great literature or scientific inventions. Instead, Americans adapted the technology, “marvelously to the needs of the country.” They also sought education to learn “the doctrines and the proofs of [their] religion.” Finally, they gained familiarity with “the principal features of the constitution that governs” their country.
The main measure of American education might be found, in De Tocqueville’s view, in the thousand newspapers he says crisscrosses the republic. Americans demonstrated a commitment to the “utility of Enlightenment” rather than a desire to reproduce the Encyclopedie project of the French Enlightenment to classify all the world’s knowledge, for example.
Americans bring this practical education and knowledge even in the vast stretches of the western frontier. De Tocqueville stated that the American plunges “into the wilderness of the New World with his Bible, a hatchet, and newspapers.” Thus, they bring their version of enlightenment with them as they civilize what they considered a wilderness.
But, more than that, education cultivates the habits and mores of a self-governing people. De Tocqueville writes, “the instruction of the people serves powerfully to maintain a democratic republic.” Those virtues of citizenship, however, are acquired not through reading great political tracts but by the constant practice of self-governance.
De Tocqueville is astounded that Americans have an extremely strong sense of their rights. The American knows “what his rights are and what means he will use to exercise them.” The same could hardly have been said of peasants farming in Italy or serfs in imperial Russia.
Americans also acquire an understanding of the laws from reading newspapers and participating in the work of self-government. With a written Constitution and published laws, Americans were in a unique position of knowing the laws they lived under. De Tocqueville writes, “He has made himself familiar with the mechanisms of the laws.”
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Americans engaged in self-governance. Universal male suffrage meant that all white men could vote, which was truly exceptional in the first half of the nineteenth century. They voted in free elections, served on juries, held political office, served in local government jobs in their communities, and attended democratic town meetings.
“It is from participating in legislation that the American learns to know the laws, from governing that he instructs himself in the forms of government. The great work of society is accomplished daily before his eyes and so to speak in his hands.”
De Tocqueville noted that Americans carried “the habits of public life into private life.” That was perhaps one of the keys to the health of American democracy. They had democratic habits and virtues that animated a robust civil society of self-governing citizens who could manage their own affairs without the intrusive hand of government. And, self-government was rooted upon education forming the character of the American people.
Today, Americans generally have a strong instinctual sense of their constitutional rights. While they may not always get the exact particulars correct, they cherish the right to speak their minds because they have free speech under the First Amendment. They also have a strong reaction against a police officer searching the trunks of their cars without probable cause or entering their homes without a warrant. They would want to speak with a lawyer if arrested and held at a police station. In this way at least, the American spirit of liberty and self-government is alive and well.
De Tocqueville noted this phenomenon almost two centuries ago in Democracy in America. He wrote an American “will teach you what his rights are and what means he will use to exercise them.”
Tony Williams is Senior Teaching Fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute; a Constituting America Fellow; author of Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance that Forged America, and Hamilton: An American Biography.
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Hello! I’m Janine Turner, founder of Constituting America! I am challenged, and perhaps we all should be as an American society, by these words of our guest scholar Tony Williams on De Tocqueville.
“Americans also acquire an understanding of the laws from reading newspapers and participating in the work of self-government. With a written Constitution and published laws, Americans were in a unique position of knowing the laws they lived under…. ‘He has made himself familiar with the mechanisms of the laws.’ “
My first thought is that this is a form of American exceptionalism. We, as Americans, were the first to actually write and print a constitution! Our founders believed it was vital to respect Americans by giving them the opportunity and ability to read the constitution. They knew it was important to not just hear it verbally but to print it and make it available in order to encourage citizens to participate in it and acknowledge that it was what Hamilton said it was, “the genius of the people.”
(this may be compared to the Protestant movement of reading the bible personally rather than just hearing it and the invention of the printing press)
The laws were available so that all Americans could know why they were in place and become an educated populace. The populace wanted and was eager to be a republic based on principle and laws. The challenge today is to make sure all Americans and rising generations understand this blessing. But, in order to understand it, they must read and study our “supreme law of the land.” As John Adams said, “liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” What are your thoughts? 🙏