TRACK FIFTEEN: Lincoln and de Tocqueville

In his middle-50s, Chapman crossed paths with some particularly interesting younger individuals--- about a quarter-century younger – who like him enjoyed being on the rivers, and like him they were keen observers of mankind. Unlike Chapman, they became writers, and their words are read and even revered, almost two centuries after crossing paths with Johnny Appleseed. Chapman for his part seemed to have no interest in leaving written records of his life and work.

Chapman met young Abraham Lincoln when Lincoln’s claim to fame, if he had any, was his set of abilities as a rail-splitter, a wrestler, and a storyteller. Lincoln had just then talked himself into a job as the co-captain of a flat-bottom boat taking produce from Indiana down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a 1200-mile trip. He had made that excursion already once before. Chapman spoke with him somewhere along the Ohio River portion of this second trip. It was 1830, and Chapman was making another one of his excursions with his water-borne contraption of two canoes, lashed side-by-side, with Chapman in one and bushels of apple seeds in the other. It was an unusual sight, and it caught young Abe’s attention.

Lincoln told Chapman about his first trip to New Orleans, and some things he had never seen before. He saw groups of slaves in transit along the Mississippi; slaves working in the fields of the sugar cane plantations in Louisiana; and in New Orleans, the slave auction market. Lincoln came from a part of Indiana where his town of a couple thousand inhabitants had 10 or 15 slaves there, less than 1% of the population. In New Orleans, he said he learned that fully one third of the population were enslaved. He said “Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature. And if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

Two years later, they crossed paths again. It was during the Black Hawk War, around 1832. Lincoln had volunteered for military service for a month or two at a time. and he ended up in a spy unit traveling all over the territory looking for Black Hawk, even way up in Wisconsin. Lincoln hadn’t experienced any combat, and told Chapman that the bloodiest battles he was involved in were those with the mosquitos. He spent leisure time with Native American allies and came to respect the cultures of the Potawatami and Sauk and other Natives: cultures mysterious to him but nonetheless deserving, as human. To him, and to Chapman, it was obvious that America was a society of three races. When he ran for state legislature later that year, Lincoln liked to raise a question in the conversations at general stores and other political gathering places, inviting discussion on, as he put it, “Who has the most right to complain, the Indian or the Negro?”

Chapman also ran into a pair of very interesting young French gentleman traveling along the river—just as young as Lincoln, in their middle twenties. They were Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. Traveling around a great swath of North America, they were taking notes on democracy, because their audience back in France was interested in figuring out how to make democracy work. John ran into them while stopping briefly in Marietta, Ohio, to see his parents and siblings, as he often did on his journeys back and forth to the cider mills in Pennsylvania.

Tocqueville told Chapman that he was going to write that the conditions of the enslaved and the Indians were threats to the republic. But went on to say that despite this lack of enlightenment, America seemed more capable than many countries at repairing its faults. America, he felt, was a system which aimed at finding a harmony of interests and therefore could be a model for other democracies. Tocqueville published his book, Democracy in America, just at the time of Andrew Jackson’s most vicious period of Indian Removal, and about 20 years before the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War.

Tocqueville did not see what was coming, but he had a good enough eye to perceive what was going on at the time he crossed paths with Chapman. Tocqueville said with a combination of despair and anger that the enslaved and the Indians “both suffer the effects of tyranny, though their miseries are different.” He reported what was widely discussed in America at the time: viewed from the banks of the Ohio River, the side with no slaves was far richer and more populous than the side where slavery was in force. Tocqueville said when you cross the Ohio River, you sail between liberty and servitude.

He was also aware that the Indian tribes were being slowly but steadily evicted, and wondered that American society had become so expert at talking a noble language while committing ignoble deeds. Indeed, he knew that Washington and Jefferson and others had written in the Northwest Ordinance that Indian rights were to be preserved. In letters at the time, they referred to Natives as the “First Americans,” and they pointed to aspects of Indian culture—food-ways, housing, and even systems of justice --- as worthy of consideration as examples of how to thrive on this Continent to which the whites had so recently arrived.

Here’s a song that Chapman might have sung, about the Common Good.