Tocqueville's mood, in short, was one of growing pessimism and doubt and this was only to increase in the years before his death in 1859. In truth there had been aspects of American society that had troubled Tocqueville deeply from the outset. One of these was the fate of Native Americans. A second was the existence of slavery. That this was so is made abundantly clear in the beautifully illustrated volume edited by Olivier Zunz, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America. Here, in addition to translations of letters by Tocqueville and Beaumont from America, are to be found extracts from their report on the penitentiary system, selections from Tocqueville's notebooks, two essays narrating excursions into the wilderness, letters relating to the writing and publication of Democracy in America, as well as other related material. 

When Tocqueville arrived in America he was determined to reach "a place that the torrent of European civilization had not yet reached". This he did by pushing as far westwards as he could. Inspired by the romance of the forest, never was his writing more lyrical. Yet Tocqueville also saw that the American wilderness was retreating rapidly. He saw too that the principal victim was the Indian. If his cousin Chateaubriand had seen the noble savage, Tocqueville saw only a drunken and ugly people, doomed to ruin and extinction as they were dispossessed of their land.

Although Tocqueville accepted that he had at best a sketchy acquaintance and knowledge of the South, he was fully aware of the barbarity inflicted upon the black population, and could see how slavery penetrated into the souls of the masters, forming "a veritable aristocracy" contemptuous of both money and labour. Slavery, he believed, neither could nor should endure. It defied economic reason. It marked a reversal of the order of nature. From a Christian perspective it was unjust and immoral. But, as a deleted passage from the original manuscript reveals, slavery also told us something profound about American society. "Of all the moderns," we read in the Nolla edition, "the Americans are those who have pushed furthest equality and inequality amongst men. They have united universal suffrage with servitude."

America then was a society where one race was born to perish, one to serve, and one to rule. Tocqueville never returned to America but he remained fascinated by the country, on one occasion describing himself as "half Yankee". As the Zunz volume shows, in the heated constitutional debates that wracked the French Second Republic he did not hesitate to praise the American example. Yet Tocqueville came increasingly to believe that America would disappoint its admirers. While in America he had been struck by the constant migration westwards of its population. In the feverish activity he witnessed in such cities as Cincinnati he saw the emergence of "a new society connected to Europe only by language". Everyone had come there only to make money. Now he saw that America was increasingly characterised by an immoderate appetite for wealth. He saw ever more lawlessness and an unruly democracy. Above all, he was horrified by attempts to extend the "horrible plague" of slavery west of the Mississippi, fearing for the future of the Union. America, he wrote to one of his correspondents in 1856, "has given little satisfaction to the friends of liberty for some time".