Skip to main content

de Tocqueville on Slavery

By



"The danger of a conflict between the white and the black inhabitants of the Southern states of the Union (a danger which, however remote it may be, is inevitable) perpetually haunts the imagination of the Americans, like a painful dream. The inhabitants of the North make it a common topic of conversation, although directly they have nothing to fear from it; but they vainly endeavor to devise some means of obviating the misfortunes which they foresee. In the Southern states the subject is not discussed: the planter does not allude to the future in conversing with strangers; he does not communicate his apprehensions to his friends; he seeks to conceal them from himself. But there is something more alarming in the tacit forebodings of the South than in the clamorous fears of the North."

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch18.htm

Comments

  1. James FergusonMay 22, 2009 at 10:45 AM

    Great painting of Tocque. The more I read about the Brogan bio the more I'm tempted to buy it. Tocque came across as too much of a royalist in Democracy of America. He was pretty harsh on "The Age of Jackson," but he made many prescient remarks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. avrdsMay 22, 2009 at 4:41 PM

    Gintaras, I was trying to find the quote that Goodwin uses in her book but couldn't find it. But just scanning through that chapter on race was very interesting. I think Chartres is on to something about reading this at some point. I don't think I own a copy of the book, but it's easy enough to read online I suppose. The biography also sounds interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. avrdsMay 22, 2009 at 4:43 PM

    Speaking of biography, received an email from Amazon.com this a.m. with a book they highly recommend for me -- Nixonland, which I actually have on order already (not from them).

    Robert, have you read this one?

    ReplyDelete
  4. James FergusonMay 22, 2009 at 4:49 PM

    I got Nixonland in the mail the other day, and it looks good. Our great "law and order" president which Pynchon skewers in Vineland.

    ReplyDelete
  5. avrdsMay 22, 2009 at 4:57 PM

    Funny how that works, isn't it?

    I think I read that the author is at work on the third in his trilogy about the rise of conservatism in America. Watching California threatening to sink into the Pacific, I'm beginning to wonder if the nation will ever recover from the so-called Reagan revolution. The hard thing to accept is that voters brought it all on themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  6. avrdsMay 22, 2009 at 5:00 PM

    By the way, the "recent comments" section is working fine for me now. It's really helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  7. RickMay 22, 2009 at 11:15 PM

    I see nothing in the recent comments section. Maybe it has something to do with my Internet settings.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more