For two weeks, in my Humanities course at Thales College, we will be reading most of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, an unsurpassed analysis of the American system of government and the American character.  That character, as Tocqueville saw, had been molded in large part by the religion and the manners of the English Puritans who settled in New England, for they were the ones and not the leisured men of the south who would dominate the nation as her boundaries extended ever westward.

Aside from religion and manners, one might think that Tocqueville would credit the structure of the national government — most obviously manifest in the Constitution — with American success and growth in population, territory, military strength, and industry.  That would be, I think, to mistake the machine for those who run it and for the material it is supposed to act upon.  The Constitution worked, at least for a time, for Americans and their situation, and Tocqueville is careful to note that a structure fit for them would not be fit for other peoples in other places.  We Americans, with our often impractical pragmatism, have long attempted to apply American machinery to non-American material, as if you could build arches as well out of sand as out of stone, or make glass as well out of stone as out of sand. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: True Theory Can Save Us From the Left’s Pseudo-Theories)

Woodrow Wilson was in this regard our most impractical president, a democratic theorist with little of the spirit or the touch of the common man. In the name of democracy he carved up the old Austrian empire into ethnic nations and set the stage for the most destructive war ever to plague the earth.

We will be discussing the machinery of the Constitution and the mutual relations of those bodies of government that made up the United States, and I have advised my students to turn their minds to the passion for equality that, for good and ill, is the most powerful social force in a democratic republic.  But today we did not broach that subject.  Today we looked at something so obvious and so important that only a theorist with a doctorate in political science could miss it.  It was geography.

Tocqueville spends a lot of time describing for his European readers what the American land north of Mexico is like.  And here I found my students most immediately curious and eager to learn more.  I know that geography is ignored in our schools, having been folded along with history into the amorphous “social studies.” But geography takes you immediately into the stuff of life, what no theorist can understand in abstraction.

I asked the students what Tocqueville noted about the Appalachian Mountains.  What are they like?  What obstacle did they pose to westward settlement?  For the Appalachians are not like the Alps.  They are not like the Pyrenees, that in the Middle Ages posed a barrier between Muslim-checkered Spain and Christian France.  They are mostly old mountains with rounded tops, many easy passes, and, as Tocqueville notes, rich valleys running in their midst, especially the one we call the Great Valley, extending from southwestern Virginia all the way through Maryland and Pennsylvania to the Delaware River. And beyond the Appalachians, what do we have?

The students thought about it for a while.  “The big rivers,” they said.  “The Great Plains.”  Those too are among the things that Tocqueville discusses.  The Mississippi is navigable from its mouth for 2,000 miles into Minnesota.  Its most water-abundant tributary, the Ohio, is navigable along its entire length, from its mouth at the Mississippi all the way to the place Tocqueville calls by its old name, Duquesne (Pittsburgh).  Other tributaries of the Mississippi, such as the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Tennessee, and the Red, are navigable for long stretches; and then canals and railroads would connect one great water system with another (for example, the Baltimore and Ohio), so that logs cut in Minnesota could be sent practically anywhere, with expedition and with little or no overland hauling.

Meanwhile, that vast land between the Appalachians in the east and the Rockies in the west contains some of the richest farm soil in the world, far richer than the flinty granite-land of New Hampshire or the thin sands of Connecticut.  How did that soil get there?  I talked a little about the retreat of the glaciers when the Ice Age passed, and the silt they deposited in their wake, as they scooped out the Great Lakes, leveled the lands, and spilled their waters into what would become the world’s greatest and most convenient system of rivers.  Such soil, I said, extends from the Great Plains north and west to the mouth of the Mackenzie, and it is only the shortness of the growing season, not the characteristics of the soil, that prevents Canadians from growing wheat and barley all the way to the Arctic Ocean. (READ MORE: Freedom as License Is Slavery in Disguise)

So there was gold in them thar plains, the gold of great farmland.  Americans had the knowledge and the tools to turn it into a breadbasket for the nation and, later, for the world.  But the region was already inhabited by native tribes.  What then?

I asked my students what you needed, before steam and combustion engines, to undertake agriculture on a large scale.  They answered readily, “You need big strong animals to pull a plow.”  The next question was obvious.  “What big strong animal did the natives in this area of the world have that could do that?”

Here biology and geography and history come together.  “They didn’t have the horse,” my students said, not till Europeans introduced it, and then the Indians mainly used the horse for warfare.  What about oxen?  “They had the bison,” said one of my students, and in fact, as Tocqueville says, the lives of the Indians in the American plains were bound by the habits and the movements of the great herds that thundered over the land.  Couldn’t the bison have been used to drag a plow?  There they were rightly skeptical.  The bison is strong enough to do that — too strong, though, too big, and too ornery to be domesticated.  And then there was another factor missing.  How did men in the old world domesticate great herds of sheep?  What did they have that was not native to the lands between the Appalachians and the Rockies? “Dogs,” said the students, brightening, because we Americans all love man’s best friend.  “They didn’t have dogs.”

So you had the conflict of one people with all their tools, their means of communication, their settled self-government, their draught animals, their sophisticated weapons, and their dogs, with people who lived off the land but not from it, whose fortunes were tied to the herds of bison that retreated ahead of the European settlers, so that they must retreat with them, and, as the Psalmist says, their place would know them no more.

It is to Tocqueville’s immense credit that he takes no delight in this prospect, nor does he sentimentalize the Indian as the superior and noble savage.  He recognizes and honors the Indian’s courage, aristocratic reserve, and proud hospitality; and he recognizes and deplores his savagery, his ignorance, and his aloof refusal to learn anything from the peoples who are displacing him.  He notes the treachery of state governments that break treaties almost as soon as the national government makes them; he has compassion for the wretchedness to which the Indians are often reduced; and yet he does not suppose for a moment that there is a clear solution to the problem.  For the land is there, and to farm it can feed a thousand for every one person it fed before, and the settlers have the means and the will to do it, and what must be, shall be. (READ MORE: Ignorance to the Fourth Degree)

It will be interesting to hear what my students have to say about equality as we go forward, and the Constitution, and whether the federated form of American government that characterized Tocqueville’s time is still with us in reality, as it is in name.  But I think I will not set aside this interest in the land, the water, the stuff of life.  And I wish our schools would take the hint.