Short book on Tocqueville’s sojourn in the U.S.

The perfect introduction to Tocqueville’s “discovery” of America:  the 2010 book by Harvard professor Leo Damrosch.

What a journey the Frenchman made with his buddy Beaumont by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach: up to Montreal and Quebec City, far northwest to Green Bay, down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and back up through Milledgeville (Flannery O'Connor's future stomping ground for her and her peacocks was the 19th-century capital of Georgia until the aftermath of the Civil War) and beyond the Carolinas to the Northeastern corridor.

An excerpt:

"What impressed Tocqueville most of all as he studied The Federalist Papers was how abstract ideas could be given life in practical institutions.  By opposing a relatively elitist Senate to a relatively democratic House, for example, ‘the framers adopted a middle way that reconciled two systems that were theoretically irreconcilable.’  The federal government was empowered to enforce its laws even if the states tried to oppose them, unlike earlier weak confederations in Switzerland or Holland, which meant that ‘the Constitution rests in fact on an entirely new theory, which has to be recognized as a great discovery in the political science of our times.’  And the provision of amending the Constitution itself, showed once again that ‘theory has been put into practice.’ "