During his nine months in the United States, in 1831 and 1832, the 26-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville encountered an almost cinematic cross-section of the country. He dined twice with the patrician former president and then congressman John Quincy Adams, once in Boston and once in Washington. He met with Adams’s nemesis, the populist oligarch Andrew Jackson, then in the White House, although he got little from Jackson besides chitchat and a glass of Madeira. He saw the Choctaw being driven west from their ancestral lands in the first episode of the Trail of Tears, witnessed the brutal caning of a Black man at a social gathering in Baltimore, and observed with a novelist’s eye the nursery school racial consciousness of a plantation owner’s already imperious young daughter, tended by an enslaved woman and a Native American.
