Notes:BC1.Ind.Point of Departure

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Preliminary notes:

Primary reference: Tocqueville pg 29+

  • Circumstances required that owners worked their own land.
    • "All the English colonies therefore had . . . a great family resemblance . . seemed destined to offer the development of freedom, not the aristocratic freedom of their mother country, but the bourgeois and democratic freedom of which the history of the world had still not offered a complete model.
  • but there were nuances between North and South
    • Virginia received the first English colony in 1607.
      • Europe was still preoccupied with the idea that gold and silver mines made the wealth of peoples: a fatal idea that has more impoverished the European nations that gave themselves to it, and destroyed more men in America, than have war and all bad laws together.
      • "It was gold seekers who were sent to Virginia, people without resources or without [good] conduct, whose restive and turbulent spirits troubled the infancy of the colony and rendered its progress uncertain. Afterwards, the industrialists and farmers arrived, a more moral and tranquil race.
      • "No noble thought, no immaterial scheme presided at the foundation of the new settlements.
      • "Hardly had the colony been created when they introduced slavery, that was the capital fact that was bound to exert an immense influence on the character, the laws, and the whole future of the South.
      • ",Slavery . . . dishonors work; it introduces idleness into society, and with it, ignorance and haughtiness, poverty and luxury. It enervates the forces of the intellect and puts human activity to sleep. The influence of slavery, combined with the English characters, explains the mores and social state of the South."
    • "In the North, altogether contrary nuances were woven into the same English background. . . .
      • "In the English colonies of the north, . . . the two or three principal ideas that today form the bases of the social theory of the United States were combined."
      • New England settlers belonged to well-to-do classes. But they were neither rich nor poor. They were educated and a few recognized for their talents.
      • The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family ; the emigrants of New England brought with them admirable elements of order and morality . . "
      • "But what distinguished them above all from all the others was the very goal of their undertaking. It was not necessity that forced them to abandon their country; . . . ; nor did they come to the New World in order to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; they tore themselves away from the sweetness of their native country to obey a purely intellectual need; in exposing themselves to the inevitable miseries of exile, they wanted to make an idea triumph."