by galleries. (The spokes plan had already been used in the Maison de Force in Ghent, but that
had no galleries.) This was typical of American-style utopianism and was so much admired that
Haviland was asked to design prisons all over the United States. He specialized in prisons
designed to accommodate huge new populations committing more crimes-and new crimes-and
young criminals. Typical of his work was the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Nearly all
`serious' visitors, such as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and W. M. Thackeray, who
intended to write books about their travels, visited one or more prisons (as well as workhouses,
homes for fallen women, and similar dismal but worthy places).
It was prisons which drew to America the most perceptive and influential of the European
observers, Alexis de Tocqueville. Of noble descent, born in a Normandy chateau, he was
nonetheless a liberal, in some ways a radical, whose object (he said) was to abate the claims of the aristocrats' andprepare them for an irresistible future'-which he saw to be emerging in
America. In 1831 the new French liberal' government of Louis-Philippe, which had been delightedly hailed by President Jackson as the first real sign that his kind of democracy was spreading to Europe, gave de Tocqueville an unpaid commission to investigate American penology and write a report, which he published in 1833. He subsequently published his Democracy in America, part one in 1835, two in 1840. It has remained in print ever since.- The theme of the work is thatThe gradual development of the principle of equality is a Providential
fact,' and he traces the implication in American institutions, both in theory and in practice.
Volume one is mainly about America, and is tremendously optimistic; volume two is also about
France, and tends to pessimism. But this work, and his copious letters, and his subsequent
memoirs provide wonderful glimpses of American society in the 1830s.
The sharp-eyed and reflective Frenchman went from Boston to New Orleans with brief forays
west of the Alleghenies, and did many of the usual things. He stayed in Boston's Fremont Hotel,
built two years before, marveling at the `private parlor' attached to each room, the slippers
supplied while boots were being polished, and the terrific bellboys-though he also noted
universal and disastrous bed-sharing in the interior. In Baltimore he dined with Charles Carroll-
evidently a public monument to be visited by all, if sufficiently distinguished-and rejoiced at the
way such aristocrats, unlike their European counterparts, accepted the new democracy graciously
and even managed to get themselves elected by universal suffrage. He had an appalling time in
the savage winter of 1831-2. In a letter to his mother he described how he had shared a
Mississippi steamship with a crowd of Choctaw warriors being forcibly moved west:
There was a general air of ruin and destruction in this sight, something which gave the
impression of a final farewell, with no going back; one couldn't witness it without a heavy
heart. The Indians were calm but gloomy and taciturn. One of them knew English. I asked
him why the Choctaws were leaving their country. `To be free,' he answered. I couldn't
get anything else out of him. Tomorrow we will set them down in the Arkansas
wilderness. I must confess it is an odd coincidence that we should have arrived in
Memphis to witness the expulsion, or perhaps the dissolution, of one of the last vestiges
of one of the oldest American nations.
Shortly afterwards he came across Sam Houston, riding a superb stallion,' a man he described asthe son in law of an Indian chief and an Indian chief himself.'
What makes de Tocqueville's account memorable is the way in which he grasped the moral
content of America. Coming from a country where the abuse of power by the clergy had made