Society, Manners and Politics in the United States / Being a Series of Letters on North America

by Michel Chevalier

In the Northern States of the American Union, society is much less complex in its composition, than in France. Exclusive of the coloured caste, there are here only two classes; the middle class and the democracy. Of the two conflicting interests, one only has a public existence here; it is labour. The Middle Class consists of the manufacturers, merchants, lawyers, physicians. A small number of cultivators, and persons devoted to letters or the fine arts, is to be added to these.

The democracy is composed of the farmers and mechanics. In general, the cultivator is the owner of the soil; in the West, this rule is without exceptions. Great landholders do not exist, at least as a class, in the North and the Northwest. There is strictly speaking no class of mere labourers; for although there are day-labourers, and both in the cities and country many workmen without capital, yet these are in fact apprentices, for the most part foreigners, who become in turn proprietors and master-workmen, and not unfrequently rich manufacturers, wealthy speculators.

Between these two classes there is, however, no line of demarcation, for the attempts of some coteries to establish certain fashionable distinctions do not deserve notice, or at least are only of a negative value, as timid and often absurd protestations against the abuse of equality. The two classes have the same domestic habits, and lead the same life, and differ considerably only in respect of the sect to which they are attached, and the pews they occupy. The relations which exist at present between the wealthy bourgeoisie and the wrecks of the aristocracy in France, give an accurate notion of the relative condition of the two classes of American Society.

Political influence is, at present, entirely in the hands of the American democracy, as with us it is monopolised by the Middle Classes. The latter have no chance of getting possession of power in the United States, except temporarily, or by means of accidental divisions in the democratic ranks, when they may rally to their standard a portion of the farmers and mechanics, as happened in 1834, after General Jackson's attack on the Bank. So in France, it will be impossible for the aristocracy to raise, not its own banner (for it has none), but that of the legitimate line, unless the folly of the government should excite new troubles, and inspire the Middle Class, who now support it heartily, with fears for the public security.

In the Southern States, the existence of slavery produces quite a different state of society, from that of the North; half of the population there consists of mere labourers in the strictest sense, that is of slaves. Slavery necessarily requires great estates, which in fact, form aristocracy. Great estates still continue to be held in the South, notwithstanding the custom of equal partition has very much narrowed them.

Between these two extremes in the South, an intermediate class has sprung up, consisting, like our Middle Class, of the workingmen and the men of leisure, the new interest and the old interest. Commerce, manufactures, and the liberal professions, on one side; on the other, the landholders, corresponding to our moderate country landholders, living on their estates by the sweat of their slaves, having no taste for work, not prepared for it by education, and even taking little oversight of the daily business of the plantation; men who would be incapable of applying themselves to any occupation if slavery were abolished, just as our proprietors would be unable to get a living, if they were to be deprived of their estates.

It is plain that the equal partition of estates must have tended to increase the number of this class of men of leisure; it is numerous in the old Southern States, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and also in Louisiana; the check which these States at first experienced in their career, whilst the North was advancing without let, and the contemporaneous increase of this class, are two correlative facts, which account for each other. But we do not find this class in the new States of the South. The new generation there, as in the North, devoured with the passion of making money, has become as industrious as the Yankees. The cultivation of cotton offers it a wide field of activity; in Alabama and Mississippi, the cotton lands are sold at a very low price. The internal slave-trade furnishes hands in abundance, which are easily procured on credit when one has friends, but no patrimony. The sons of the old Southern States, instead of vegetating on a fragment of the paternal estate, with a handful of negroes, sell off their property at home, extend their means by aid of a loan, which they are sure of being able to repay promptly, and go to the Southwest, to establish a a cotton-plantation, a sort of agricultural manufactory, in which they are obliged to exercise more or less of the activity, and to feel more or less of the hopes and fears of a manufacturer.

Thus the class which works little or not at all, is disappearing in the United States. In the Western States, which are the true New World, it no longer exists at all, in the North or in the South; you meet with no one there who is not engaged in agriculture, commerce, manufactures, the liberal professions, or the clerical office. The United States, then, differ from us in having no aristocracy, no idle Middle Class, no class of mere labourers, at the least in the North. But a distinction should be made in regard to the absence of these three classes; for while it may be admitted that the two last are absolutely becoming extinct, it would be more correct to say that the first has not yet begun to exist.

Civilisation, in its passage from one continent to the other, has, then, got rid of two classes. This twofold disappearance is, however, only a single phenomenon, or, at most, two phases of a single fact, the industrial progress of mankind. It seems to me to be inevitable, that, in this matter, the Old World should follow the example of the New; it moves towards the same end under the influence of peculiar causes, and it is irresistibly driven onward by what is commonly called the force of events, that is, by the decree of providence.

There is a rule superior to all social conventions, codes of legislation, or systems of jurisprudence; it is, that when a class has ceased to take part in the workings of society, its doom is pronounced; it cannot preserve its privileges, unless the march of civilisation comes to a stand, and it is kept stationary, as it was in Rome from Augustus to Constantine; but when the column again sets forward, those who will not serve as soldiers, and are unfit to be officers, those who can do duty neither in the ranks nor in command, who can act neither in the tent nor the field, all these are abandoned as stragglers, and their names are struck from the roll. The law is inflexible and unsparing; no human power can rescue those whom it condemns from their doom; they only can save themselves, by taking part in the general movement.