‘Je ne connais pas de pays où il règne, en général, moins d’indépendance d’esprit et de véritable liberté de discussion qu’en Amérique’
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1835 — 1981, I : 353).

‘Tyranny of the community, whether simply the participants’s peers or the large male fraternity of various social classes, governed southern society. Leaders, as duelists, orators, and politicians, had to bear that Tocquevillian fact in mind’
—Wyatt-Brown (1983 : 357).

‘When in the early 1820s President Monroe asked Jefferson about appointing Jackson to the U.S. mission to Russia, the ex-president replied, “Why, good God! he would breed you a quarrel before he had been there a month!”’
—Watson (1985 : 105).