State Primacy: 1832 Eyes

I come back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (1835) again, for a third time, now that Volume I of II has been read end to end, even if not fully absorbed. The volume is so much a window into that political time, and so much a mirror into which to reflect on the present political time. You cannot get that by simply travelling laterally somewhere in present time. You must go back through eyes, critical eyes, from another land, France, that were on the scene at another moment in history.

Chronicler de Tocqueville is, it should be said, never economical of words, and he is sometimes wayward in his extrapolations of America to come, but, nevertheless, one must still trip through his insights with respect. He speaks of the President of that time, Andrew Jackson.

“General Jackson stoops to gain the favor of the majority; but when he feels that his popularity is secure, he overthrows all obstacles in the pursuit of the objects which the community approves or of those which it does not regard with jealousy. Supported by a power that his predecessors never had, he tramples on his personal enemies, whenever they cross his path, with a facility without example; he takes upon himself the responsibility of measures that no one before him would have ventured to attempt. He even treats the national representatives with a disdain approaching to insult; he puts his veto on the laws of Congress and frequently neglects even to reply to that powerful body. He is a favorite who sometimes treats his master roughly. The power of General Jackson perpetually increases, but that of the President declines; in his hands the Federal government is strong, but it will pass enfeebled into the hands of his successor.”

Those last lines deserve a pause to consider. De Tocqueville is looking past Jackson’s executive aggressiveness with a certainty that the States will assert the primacy that is their due in an era when the Federal government is still widely seen as a coalition of independent States, States whose leaders see value in coalition when needed, but States nevertheless who will assert their own primacy otherwise.

They, the States, in 1832, are still closely tied to the Constitution to which they entrusted themselves for purposes of unbinding the tenacles of a British King. But each feels a State primacy, too.

De Tocqueville is certain of that perceived State primacy, no matter what President Jackson does. “So far is the Federal government, as it grows old, from acquiring strength, and from threatening the sovereignty of the States, that I maintain it will be growing weaker, and that the sovereignty of the Union alone is in danger.”

This is such an interesting perspective, and maybe even terribly wrong. But, you must be in the moment of a period book written by a practiced observer such as Alexis de Tocqueville to get the full richness and import of the power tug-of-war that is visible to him. His story includes the above characterization of President Andrew Jackson’s Presidency, yes, but the chapter is entitled “Chances of Duration of the Union.”

That is de Tocqueville’s focal point here, and it came almost 30 years before the Civil War! Yet, he concludes: “The future conceals the final result of this tendency ….” Other events “may check, retard, or accelerate the changes I have described; I do not effect to be able to remove the veil which hides them.”