![]() He was, at that time, riding to Congress to advocate for Native Americans. It was Sam Houston, future president of the Republic of Texas, who had recently slipped out of his marriage and the governorship of Tennessee to return to his earlier life among the Cherokee, who called him “the Raven.” Houston lectured the young Frenchmen on the continent’s indigenous tribes, whom he professed to respect deeply. On the Western frontier, not long after observing the Choctaw dispossession, the two were approached by a rider on a splendid stallion. Tocqueville’s travels with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, memorialized in the two volumes of Democracy in America, can seem touched by a kind of fate. ![]() 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. 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 dined twice with the patrician former president and then congressman John Quincy Adams, once in Boston and once in Washington. During his nine months in the United States, in 18, the 26-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville encountered an almost cinematic cross-section of the country. ![]()
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