Well, Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching and so many people are excited to see their family, friends, and feast on wonderful food. This year, as many others, we have so much to be thankful for. While looking back in the past, be sure to have something to look forward to. In the feelings of the heart there can be no dissimulation. Virtue should be the sovereign of the feelings, not their destroyer.

So put any differences aside and make the most out of the special day. Encouragement is the food of talent; without cheering, no one can say what an author’s faculty naturally is. I never see a modest man, but I am sure that he has a treasure in his mind which requires nothing but the key of encouragement to unlock it, to make him shine. There is a limit to the length of the inspection which a man can endure, under certain circumstances. Never say die.

However, there is a point beyond which endurance becomes ridiculous, if not culpable. In the 1830s and 1840s, a stream of Europeans came to the United States of America to see for themselves the development of American character and mass political participation in the age of Jackson. The age of Jackson has nothing to do with our beloved King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Instead, the age of Jackson refers to when Andrew Jackson, a man of wealth and land, was elected President of the United States, in 1828.

The age of Jackson too place from 1829 to 1849, when President Andrew Jackson led the national government through a series of reforms and radical changes. The nation’s territory more than doubled in size. Safely in control of the federal government, the Jeffersonians labored to set it on a new and more democratic course. Andrew Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828 represented the emergence of a new, unified system of democratic politics.

All these changes heralded the continued strengthening of a powerful democratic faith built around the values of equality, opportunity, and individual autonomy. Those values would continue to reverberate throughout the coming years. Also, the new foreign policies transformed the nation’s relations with Europe and the Americans. However, there was less of an effort to reconcile Native American rights with national growth.

With all of these changes being made, the American people had reason to face the future with both confidence and concern.  Notable visitors came to America from England, Scotland, France, Hungary, and the German states, as well as from Argentina and others newly independent nations in Latin America. One returning home, they wrote books about their travels, revealing their impressions of the character of the American people and institutions.

Obviously, these visitors did not agree about the qualities they observed in Americans or whether the American style of democratic politics was a good or bad thing. Some saw the American people and their elected representatives as unsophisticated, uncultured and undisciplined, less interested in the substance of a politician’s speech, as Charles Dickens observed in 1842, than in how long did he speak?

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian, who came to the United States of America, in 1831, at the young age of 25. Alexis de Tocqueville is best known for his book, Democracy in America, which is a two-volume study of the American people and their political institutions. Now, this is another reason, as a nation, we need to be careful about how we treat others because the book is frequently quoted by journalists and politicians.

To truly understand history, we need to also look at historic documents, letters and pictures. The historian who would wish his lessons to sink deep into the heart, thereby essaying to render mankind virtuous and more happy, must not content himself with simply detailing a series of events—he must ascertain causes, and follow progressively their effects; he must draw dedications from the incidents as they arise, and ever revert to the actuating principle. Historical research can be an amazing adventure once you have experienced how fascinating it can be. The great end of history is to show how much human nature can endure or preform and I would like to share a wonderful letter, written in 1835, from Alexis de Tocqueville, on his impression of America.

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty, which reigns in that country, as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.

I do not say that there is frequent use of tyranny in American, at the present day; but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country, more than in its laws.

I know of no country in which there is still so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America….In American, the majority arises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion: within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them….He is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to open to it.

Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before publishing his opinions, he imagined that he held them in common with others; but no sooner has he declared them, than he is loudly censured by his opponents, whilst those who think like him, without having the courage to speak out, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

Fetters and headmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn. Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression: the democratic republicans of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind, as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man, the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it, and rose proudly superior.

Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics: there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says, “You shall think as I do, or you shall die,” (this is where vote or die comes from). However, now he says, “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people.”

Therefore, you can see how opinions about Americans changes, and they were viewed as people who have evolved. We do not want to go back to a society of tyrants and unsophisticated savages. History, a far more daring storyteller than romance, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money because Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” –Alexis de Tocqeville