Reviewed according to Nick Salvatore Comell University When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 his travels brought him between the walls of the populous cities of the Northeast.

Reviewed according to Nick Salvatore Comell University

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 his travels brought him between the walls of the populous cities of the Northeast, into the lately settled states of the ancient Northwest Territory, and then down the Mississippi Valley, where he saw at first hand the central paradox of the American experience - slavery and freedom existing side-by-side. Tocqueville's overall analysis of American life and cultivation in the Jacksonian era is well-known, as is his famous understanding of American democracy as firinged by broad-based acquisitive individualism. In Tocqueville's reading, "self-interest, strictly understood" in the context of familial, religious, and civic voluntary associations, checked this individualism and created a democratic agriculture he considered a major contribution to Western political life.

Tocqueville also recognized that American society contained the sperms of its own potential destruction. He worried that a "manufacturing aristocracy" would undermine the "free mores" of the citizenry, and he feared the possible tyranny of the majority in democratic life. Each of these tensions. Tocqueville notion found its resolution in the voluntary associations of the citizenry. on the contrary the third threat to American democracy lacked an obvious antidote. smooth were slavery abolished, Tocqueville perceived a danger to democratic civilization because "the prejudice which make a stand againsts the Negro" increased "in proportion as they are emancipated, and inequality is sanctioned by way of the manners while it is effaced from the laws of the country"

But this fervid observer possessed blind spots himself, and none was more pronounced than his misunderstanding of African Americans. Neither African nor American - in his view, without family, religion, or language - blacks, Tocqueville believed, lacked the foundations of civilization. uniform if emancipated, he wrote, the freedman or woman would sink "to like a depth of wretchedness that while servitude brutalizes, liberty razes him." Although Tocqueville passed from Natchez, Mississippi, when traveling between Memphis and fresh Orleans, he clearly did not qualified that town's most prominent barber, William Johnson

Born forward a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1809 to a mulatto slave mother and a white father (presumably his possessor after whom the son was named), the slave William Johnson won emancipation eleven years later forward the strength of his master's petition to the Mississippi legislature. Apprenticed as a barber to his brother-in-law (both his sister, Adelia Johnson and his mother, Amy Johnson had been emancipated by way of the white William Johnson), the young freedman learned his trade and established a store in Port Gibson, Mississippi, in the late 1820 Back in the Natchez area by dint of 1830, Johnson opened a barber store and bath house, began to accumulate land, and took a three-month trip to Philadelphia and just discovered York. In April 1835 Johnson married a independent mulatto woman, Ann Battles, of Natchez. Six month later he began a diary that ultimately grew to fourteen contortions and ended only with his assassination in a land dispute in 1851

In an left over way, had the Frenchman been able to shed his admit racial blinders, Tocqueville would have recognized Johnson as an example of his quintessential American. The free play of Johnson's activities and the commercial interests that lay closest to his heart reverberateed qualities Tocqueville discerned throughout his travels. Johnson was a barber with sum of two units shops; the owner of a bathing establishment; a landowner, a farmer, and a hunter; a factor and money lender to Natchez's business and agricultural community; a gambler, a marksman, and a horseman; and a logger who sought to employ every iota of his holdings to profit. His diary is weighted with the sheer tome of his thumbnail commercial observations: "Business has been Tolerable beneficial To Day" (28 Nov. 1840); "Business true dull, Nothing new that I know of" (7 Aug. 1844) The diary groans below the repetitive entries enumerating the loans made, the interest charged, and the names of repayment. Johnson took distinct pleasure in recording his profits, especially when he sold land in quick turn-arounds. What Tocqueville would have recognized, of course, was Johnson's acquisitiveness. Johnson penn the chiefly telling sentence in the entire diary in October 1841: "This has been a inert week with me for I Could not bring together any money from Any One"

But William Johnson was not simply a Tocquevillian everyman. An emancipated slave, a liberated person of color living in a slave state unruffled then drawing tighter its regulations of non-whites, independent or slave, Johnson was also himself a slave owner In his first account of taxes paid, in 1836 Johnson acknowledged owning four slaves assessed at $1655; at his death in 1851 he have a title toed fifteen slaves worth more than $6000 Like any slave possessor white or black, Johnson kept a earnest eye on the local slave market. He commonly attended auctions, and he exhibited the focused, narrowed vision of a businessman bent in succession profit: "I Bot Moses from a man at the name of William Good" he wrote in June 1836; "at Least I Bot him at auction beneath the Hammer for four Hundr Dollars cash - I Bot also 2 Boxe of wine at 287 1/2 for Box and 5 small Boxe of shaving soap, 43 cent for Box ...."