American Institutions and Their Influence by Alexis de Tocqueville (top novels to read .TXT) 📖

authority, it will consider the other states as subject provinces, and will cause its own supremacy to be respected under the borrowed name of the sovereignty of the Union. Great things may then be done in the name of the federal government, but in reality that government will have ceased to exist.[Footnote:

Thus the province of Holland in the republic of the Low Countries, and the emperor in the Germanic Confederation, have sometimes put themselves in the place of the Union, and have employed the federal authority to their own advantage.

] In both these cases, the power which acts in the name of the confederation becomes stronger, the more it abandons the natural state and the acknowledged principles of confederations.

In America the existing Union is advantageous to all the states, but it is not indispensable to any one of them. Several of them might break the federal tie without compromising the welfare of the others, although their own prosperity would be lessened. As the existence and the happiness of none of the states are wholly dependent on the present constitution, they would none of them be disposed to make great personal sacrifices to maintain it. On the other hand, there is no state which seems, hitherto, to have its ambition much interested in the maintenance of the existing Union. They certainly do not all exercise the same influence in the federal councils, but no one of them can hope to domineer over the rest, or to treat them as its inferiors or as its subjects.

It appears to me unquestionable, that if any portion of the Union seriously desired to separate itself from the other states, they would not be able, nor indeed would they attempt, to prevent it; and that the present Union will only last as long as the states which compose it choose to continue members of the confederation.

If this point be admitted, the question becomes less difficult; and our object is not to inquire whether the states of the existing Union are capable of separating, but whether they will choose to remain united.

[The remarks respecting the inability of the federal government to retain within the Union any state that may choose “to withdraw its name from the contract,” ought not to pass through an American edition of this work, without the expression of a dissent by the editor from the opinion of the author. The laws of the United States must remain in force in a revolted state, until repealed by congress; the customs and postages must be collected; the courts of the United States must sit, and must decide the causes submitted to them; as has been very happily explained by the author, the courts act upon individuals. If their judgments are resisted, the executive arm must interpose, and if the state authorities aid in the resistance, the military power of the whole Union must be invoked to overcome it. So long as the laws affecting the citizens of such a state remain, and so long as there remain any officers of a general government to enforce them, these results must follow not only theoretically but actually. The author probably formed the opinions which are the subject of these remarks, at the commencement of the controversy with South Carolina respecting the tariff. And when they were written and published, he had not learned the result of that controversy, in which the supremacy of the Union and its laws was triumphant. There was doubtless great reluctance in adopting the necessary measures to collect the customs, and to bring every legal question that could possibly arise out of the controversy, before the judiciary of the United States, but they were finally adopted, and were not the less successful for being the result of deliberation and of necessity. Out of that controversy have arisen some advantages of a permanent character, produced by the legislation which it required. There were defects in the laws regulating the manner of bringing from the state courts into those of the United States, a cause involving the constitutionality of acts of congress or of the states, through which the federal authority might be evaded. Those defects were remedied by the legislation referred to; and it is now more emphatically and universally true, than when the author wrote, that the acts of the general government operate through the judiciary, upon individual citizens, and not upon the states.—_American Editor._]

Among the various reasons which tend to render the existing Union useful to the Americans, two principal causes are peculiarly evident to the observer. Although the Americans are, as it were, alone upon their continent, their commerce makes them the neighbors of all the nations with which they trade.

Notwithstanding their apparent isolation, the Americans require a certain degree of strength, which they cannot retain otherwise than by remaining united to each other. If the states were to split, they would not only diminish the strength which they are now able to display toward foreign nations, but they would soon create foreign powers upon their own territory. A system of inland custom-houses would then be established; the valleys would be divided by imaginary boundary lines; the courses of the rivers would be confined by territorial distinctions and a multitude of hindrances would prevent the Americans from exploring the whole of that vast continent which Providence has allotted to them for a dominion. At present they have no invasion to fear, and consequently no standing armies to maintain, no taxes to levy.

If the Union were dissolved, all these burdensome measures might ere long be required. The Americans are then very powerfully interested in the maintenance of their Union. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to discover any sort of material interest which might at present tempt a portion of the Union to separate from the other states.

When we cast our eyes upon the map of the United States, we perceive the chain of the Allegany mountains, running from the northeast to the southwest, and crossing nearly one thousand miles of country; and we are led to imagine that the design of Providence was to raise, between the valley of the Mississippi and the coasts of the Atlantic ocean, one of those natural barriers which break the mutual intercourse of men, and form the necessary limits of different states. But the average height of the Alleganies does not exceed 2,500 feet; their greatest elevation is not above 4,000 feet; their rounded summits, and the spacious valleys which they conceal within their passes, are of easy access from several sides. Beside which, the principal rivers that fall into the Atlantic ocean, the Hudson, the Susquehannah, and the Potomac, take their rise beyond the Alleganies, in an open district, which borders upon the valley of the Mississippi. These streams quit this tract of country,[Footnote:

See Darby’s View of the United States, pp. 64, 79.

] make their way through the barrier which would seem to turn them westward, and as they wind through the mountains, they open an easy and natural passage to man.

No natural barrier exists in the regions which are now inhabited by the Anglo-Americans; the Alleganies are so far from serving as a boundary to separate nations, that they do not even serve as a frontier to the states. New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, comprise them within their borders and extend as much to the west as to the east of the line.

The territory now occupied by the twenty-four states of the Union, and the three great districts which have not yet acquired the rank of states, although they already contain inhabitants, covers a surface of 1,002,600 square miles,[Footnote: See Darby’s View of the United States, p. 435. [In Carey & Lea’s Geography of America, the United States are said to form an area of 2,076,400 square miles.—_Translator’s Note._]

[The discrepance between Darby’s estimate of the area of the United States given by the author, and that stated by the translator, is not easily accounted for. In Bradford’s comprehensive Atlas, a work generally of great accuracy, it is said that “as claimed by this country, the territory of the United States extends from 25� to 54� north latitude, and from 65� 49′ to 125� west longitude, over an area of about 2,200,000 square miles.”—_American Editor._]

] which is about equal to five times the extent of France.

Within these limits the qualities of the soil, the temperature, and the produce of the country, are extremely various. The vast extent of territory occupied by the Anglo-American republics has given rise to doubts as to the maintenance of the Union. Here a distinction must be made; contrary interests sometimes arise in the different provinces of a vast empire, which often terminate in open dissensions; and the extent of the country is then most prejudicial to the power of the state. But if the inhabitants of these vast regions are not divided by contrary interests, the extent of the territory may be favorable to their prosperity; for the unity of the government promotes the interchange of the different productions of the soil, and increases their value by facilitating their consumption.

It is indeed easy to discover different interests in the different parts of the Union, but I am unacquainted with any which are hostile to each other. The southern states are almost exclusively agricultural; the northern states are more peculiarly commercial and manufacturing; the states of the west are at the same time agricultural and manufacturing. In the south the crops consist of tobacco, of rice, of cotton, and of sugar; in the north and the west, of wheat and maize; these are different sources of wealth; but union is the means by which these sources are opened to all, and rendered equally advantageous to the several districts.

The north, which ships the produce of the Anglo-Americans to all parts of the world, and brings back the produce of the globe to the Union, is evidently interested in maintaining the confederation in its present condition, in order that the number of American producers and consumers may remain as large as possible. The north is the most natural agent of communication between the south and the west of the Union on the one hand, and the rest of the world upon the other; the north is therefore interested in the union and prosperity of the south and the west, in order that they may continue to furnish raw materials for its manufactures, and cargoes for its shipping.

The south and the west, on their side, are still more directly interested in the preservation of the Union, and the prosperity of the north. The produce of the south is for the most part exported beyond seas; the south and the west consequently stand in need of the commercial resources of the north. They are likewise interested in the maintenance of a powerful fleet by the Union, to protect them efficaciously. The south and the west have no vessels, but they cannot refuse a willing subsidy to defray the expenses of the navy; for if the fleets of Europe were to blockade the ports of the south and the delta of the Mississippi, what would become of the rice of the Carolinas, the tobacco of Virginia, and the sugar and cotton which grow in the valley of the Mississippi? Every portion of the federal budget does therefore contribute to the maintenance of material interests which are common to all the confederate states.

Independently of this commercial utility, the south and the west of the Union derive great political advantages from their connexion with the north. The south contains an enormous slave population; a population which is already alarming, and still more formidable for the future. The states of the west lie in the remoter part of a single valley; and all the rivers which intersect their territory rise in the Rocky mountains or in the Alleganies, and fall into the Mississippi,