building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

The Wilderness, The Westland and the Significance of the Frontier
When Alexis de Tocqueville (1805‐1859) went to America in 1831 to carry out a
survey on the American penitentiary and judiciary regime, many of the initiatives
and experiments described in the preceding pages had not yet been completed. The
first part of the account of his journey was published a few years later in his book
De la démocratie en Amérique (1835). Tocqueville did not merely analyse the
complexity of America, he also attempted to face his task with a modest spirit of
comparison, by comparing the American institutions and context with similar
French situations.
Tocqueville saw a prevalently agrarian nation, in which the towns were scarcely
populated and large areas were being colonised, as the United States had greatly
expanded its territories, starting from the date of the Declaration of Independence.
His careful study of the democratic institutions, the social policies in place and the
culture of the period enabled him to put forward a few hypotheses regarding the
future of the newly founded Republic. It was immediately clear to Tocqueville that
the destiny of the American nation was to take “equality of conditions” to the lands
of the Far West, to territories where objects and ideas could circulate freely.
With great perspicacity Tocqueville observed the effects of the internal
improvements [Figures 74‐81] and correctly prophesied a large increase in the
population. He sensed the inhabitants’ commercial ambitions and summed up the
striking features of those years in but a few words: “The post, that great instrument
of intellectual intercourse, now reaches into the backwoods; and steamboats have
established daily means of communication between the different points of the
coast. An inland navigation of unexampled rapidity conveys commodities up and
down the rivers of the country” 263 . Tocqueville had summarised the first immaterial
and partly folklorist traits, which made up the landscape of the frontier.
If the agricultural landscapes and the industrial economy of the water and woods
period represented the effort to exploit the unexplored territories, the frontier was
263 TOCQUEVILLE, Alexis de, De la democrazie en Amerique, Paris, 1835‐1840 (English translation by
Henry Reeve, Democracy in America, New York, The Colonial Press, 1900, vol1, p. 411) (Italian
translation La Democrazia in America, edited by Giorgio Candeloro, Milano, Rizzoli, 2010, p. 380)
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