Kentucky-Tennessee
We passed through the whole breadth of Kentucky, going
from Louisville to Nashville. We also passed through the greater part of Tennessee, going from Nashville to Memphis
on the banks of the Mississippi. These two States seemed to us very like on another in many respects.
The country is covered with hills and shallow valleys through
which a multitude of little streams flow; it is a land of natural, but uniform, beauty.
In both States the ground seemed still almost entirely covered
by forest. At distant intervals a line of fencing, some burnt trees, a field of corn, some animals, a cabin made of roughly
shaped tree trunks put on top of one another indicated some denizen's isolated home. One hardly sees any villages. The
cultivator's houses are scattered in the midst of the woods.
Nothing is more unusual than to see a brick house in
Kentucky; we did not see ten of them in Tennessee. Except for Nashville.
The peasant's cabin in Kentucky or Tennessee is generally
divided into two parts as shown in the margin. All round there are a certain number of huts that serve as stables.
The interior of these dwellings show up the master's laziness
even more than his poverty. There one finds a fairly clean bed, some chairs, a good gun, often some books and almost
always a newspaper, but the walls are so open to the day that the outside air comes in on every side.
One is scarcely better protected than one would be in a shelter
made of leafy branches. Nothing would be easier than to protect oneself against bad weather and stop the cracks, but
the master of the place is incapable of taking such trouble. In the North there is a look of cleanliness and thoughtfulness
in the ordering of the smallest houses; here everything seems sketched out, everything left to chance; one would say that
the inmate lived from day to day with the most carelessness of the future.
In the parts of Kentucky and Tennessee through which we
passed the men are big and strong; they have a national physiognomy, and an energetic look. By no means like the
inhabitants of Ohio, who are a confused mass, a mixture of all the American races, they on the contrary all come from
a common stock and belong to the great Virginian family. So, too, they have much more than any other Americans we
have yet met that instinctive love of country, a love mixed up with exaggeration and prejudices, and something entirely
different from the reasoned feeling and the refined egotism which bears the name of patriotism in almost all the States
of the Union.
Almost all the farmers we saw, even the poorest, had some
slaves.
These are clothed in rags, but generally seem strong and
healthy. (A few lines of manuscript are damaged here).
After passing a fence of roughly shaped wood, not without
the risk of being devoured by the owner's dogs, one reaches a cabin whose walls a fire can be seen crackling on the
hearth; one pushed open a door hung on leather thongs and having no lock; one enters a sort of savage hut which seems
the refuge of every misery; there one finds a poor family living with the leisure of the rich.
As you come in, the master of the house gets up, and receives
you with pressing hospitality, but he is careful not to go himself to get what you need; in his mind it would be degrading
to him to serve you. It is a slave who pokes the fire to warm the traveler; it is a slave who gets his clothes dried and
brings him the food he needs. The master watches and his gestures direct his servants' work; he does nothing himself.
If he opens his mouth, it is to call his dogs or to tell of some of their bold feats. There is no farmer in Kentucky or
Tennessee so poor but can represent a fine example of the country gentlemen of old Europe.
Nothing in Kentucky or Tennessee gives the impression of
such a finished society; in that respect these two States are essentially different from those newly peopled by the
Americans of the North, in which one finds the germs of the high civilization of New England. In Kentucky or
Tennessee one sees few churches and no schools. Society, like the individuals, seems to foresee nothing.
But yet they are by no means still rustic folk; there is none
of that simplicity bred of ignorance and prejudices and --- (one word missing) which distinguish agricultural peoples
in the least accessible places. These men nonetheless belong to one of the most civilized and rational peoples in the
world. Their manners have nothing of rustic naivete. The philosophic and argumentative spirit of the English is found
there as in all America.
There is an astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers
among these savage woods. We traveled with the mail. From time to time we stopped at what is called the post office;
almost always it was an isolated house in the depths of a wood. There we dropped a large parcel from which no doubt
each inhabitant of the neighborhood came to take his share. I do not think that in the most enlightened rural districts of
France there is intellectual movement either so rapid or on such a scale as this in this wilderness.
In Kentucky and Tennessee slavery has immense effects on
the character and habits of the masters: it halts the industry of the inhabitants, and prevents emigrants from outside from
contributing theirs. But it presents no threat to the future of the colonists.
The black population is so much smaller than the white, and
it always will be so more and more. That is due to natural causes which can be easily demonstrated.
In Kentucky and Tennessee no crop requiring a very great
number of slaves is cultivated; ... (manuscript is damaged here; the gist of it is that the land does not produce any very
valuable cash crop, and is divided up into quite small holdings) on each small holding lives a white family with a very
small number of slaves; one does not see, as in the South, hundred of slaves cultivating the land of one white man.
Moreover Kentucky and Tennessee were peopled by poor emigrants who could not have assembled a great number of
slaves on any one property even if the type of cultivation had made it easy to do so. In Kentucky and in Tennessee they
masters live all the year round on their land. They direct their slaves' work and the poorest work with them
themselves.
That then shows that it would be possible to do without
slavery. Public opinion in these two states seems entirely to support this view. But slavery is an evil whose roots go so
deep that it is almost impossible to get free from it after its fatal influence has been noticed as before it was appreciated.
It would be absurd to want to pass judgment on a whole
people after spending a week or ten days among them. So I can only trust to hearsay.
The inhabitants of Kentucky and Tennessee are well known
throughout the Union for their violent habits; if what were told in the country is true, they seem to deserve that
reputation; they say that quarrels often lead to bloodshed, and that elections seldom pass off without knife-blows given
and received.
Various reasons which are not impossible to define, must have
combined to give the inhabitants of Kentucky and Tennessee the character attributed to them.
The first is the climate; it has always been that passions have
been hotter in the South than in the North. The second is slavery, a common factor for all the inhabitants of the South
and one that modifies their national character in the same way. The habit of uninhabited command gives men a certain
feeling of superiority which makes them impatient of opposition and irritated at the sight of obstacles. Slavery makes
work a dishonor; it makes the whole white race a leisured class for whom money loses a part of its value and who seek
their pleasures elsewhere in the resources of society and the pleasures of pride, a sort of aristocracy which is not guided
at all by the sort of legal honesty of trading peoples, but which has its values of convention, its fine feelings and its point
of honor. The Americans of the South are brave, comparatively ignorant, hospitable, generous, easy to irritate, violent
in their resentments, without industry or the spirit of enterprise.
Take these same men to a new land, put them in a wild
country where they must fight daily against all the miseries of life, and you will make their passions still more irritable
and violent and further removed from society. The slightest tiresome contact with it will be painful to them; less
civilized, they will have learnt even less to master themselves.
That is the whole story of the inhabitants of Kentucky and
of Tennessee. They are men of the South, masters of slaves, but rendered half savage by solitude and hardened by the
miseries of life.
(Tocqueville, p. 280)
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