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In 1851, Thomas Hart Benton wrote to Martin Van Buren in shock. He had just read Democracy in America, was outraged at Tocqueville's picture of American democracy, and intended to correct the Frenchman's "errors." The British journalist Henry Reeve had translated the two volumes of Democracy in America immediately after their publication in French (1835 and 1840), and by the time Benton read it, the book had been widely acclaimed on both continents. Providing an alternative account of the Jacksonian years, Benton believed, was an urgent task for the Democratic party, for Tocqueville was already "the authority on American democracy in Europe, and with the federalists here, and will be with our posterity if they know nothing but what the federalists write." Tocqueville had portrayed Andrew Jackson as "a man of violent character and middling capacity," and a slave of the majority who behaved toward Congress as "a favorite that sometimes bullies his master." Furthermore, he had condemned Jackson's politics for undermining the institution of the presidency and weakening the Union. In order to counter such analysis, Benton dedicated a chapter of Thirty Years' View, his memoirs of his career in Congress, to a detailed refutation of Democracy in America.1
Not that Benton accused Tocqueville of bad faith; he rather regarded the traveler as a "victim of the company which he kept while among us; and his book must pay the penalty of the impositions practiced upon him." What company? Benton answers: "Bankers, brokers, jobbers, contractors . . . speculators." At the opposite side of the political spectrum, the critics of Jacksonian Democracy were not happier with Tocqueville's book. Disappointment was their main reaction: Democracy in America contained nothing new to the American reader. It borrowed, as Joseph Story put it, from the Federalist and Story's Commentaries on the Constitution, and only repeated known truths about the working of American institutions.2
However, contrary to Benton's suspicion, Tocqueville's American friends were not speculators, but rather politicians and lawyers. Nor were they all fervent "Federalists": Tocqueville's appreciation of American democracy is more complex than Story believed. This article reconstructs the influence of Edward Livingston, an atypical Democrat, on Tocqueville's understanding of Jacksonian America. Through such reconstruction, I hope to shed light on Tocqueville's relation to American lawyers,...