anticlericalism endemic, he was amazed to find a country where it was virtually unknown. He
saw, for the first time, Christianity presented not as a totalitarian society but as an unlimited
society, a competitive society, intimately wedded to the freedom and market system of the
secular world. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other,' he wrote,but in America I found that
they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.' He added:
Religion ... must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of the country for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.' In fact, he concluded, most Americans held religionto be indispensable to the maintenance of republican
institutions.' And de Tocqueville noted on an unpublished scrap of paper that, while religion
underpinned republican government, the fact that the government was minimal was a great
source of moral strength:
One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government (when a people is fortunate
enough to be able to do without it, which is rare) is the development of individual strength that
inevitably follows from it. Each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the
support of an outside force which, however vigilant one supposes it to be, can never answer all
social needs. Man, thus accustomed to seek his well-being only through his own efforts, raises
himself in his own opinion as he does in the opinion of others; his soul becomes larger and
stronger at the same time.
In de Tocqueville's view, it was education which made this spirit of independence possible.
The Rev. Louis Dwight said to him that the Americans were the best-educated people in the
world: [Here] everyone takes it for granted that education will be moral and religious. There would be a general outcry, a kind of popular uprising, against anyone who tried to introduce a contrary system, and everyone would say it would be better to have no education at all than an education of that sort. It is from the Bible that all our children learn to read.' As a result of a liberal system of education and free access to uncensored books and newspapers, there were fewer dark corners in the American mind than elsewhere. Reflecting on his conversations in Boston, he noted:Enlightenment, more than anything else, makes [a republic] possible. The
Americans are no more virtuous than other people, but they are infinitely more enlightened (I'm
speaking of the great mass) than any other people I know. The mass of people who understand
public affairs, who are acquainted with laws and precedents, who have a sense of the interests,
well understood, of the nation, and the faculty to understand them, is greater here than any other
place in the world.’
De Tocqueville, significantly, felt that the American syndrome-
morality/independence/enlightenment/industry/success-tended not to work where slavery
existed. He was shocked to find the French-speaking people of New Orleans infinitely more
wicked and dissolute than the pious French Canadians, and blamed the infection of slavery, anti-
freedom. Similarly, he contrasted industrious Ohio' withidle Kentucky': On both sides [of the Ohio River] the soil is equally fertile, the situation just as favorable.' But Kentucky, because of slavery, is inhabitedby a people without energy, without ardor, without a spirit of enterprise.'
He was led, he said, again and again to the same conclusion: leaving aside the slave states, `the
American people, taking them all in all, are not only the most enlightened in the world, but
(something I place well above that advantage), they arc the people whose practical, political
education is the most advanced.'