Alexis and Beaumont witnessed 1st hand the Indian removal of the Cherokee nation and other nations by Pres. A. Jackson..................he said he had seen many things.................but that was the worst site he had seen in his life....................a sight of utter despair............i think he put it like that............others said the same thing.............a white man who was later in the US Civil War said that the forced march from the East to Oklahoma..........................was worse than even the fighting in the Civil war.............



In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead.^[1] They arrived in New York City in May of that year and spent nine months traveling the United States, studying the prisons, and collecting information on American society, including its religious, political, and economic character. The two also briefly visited Canada, spending a few days in the summer of 1831 in what was then Lower Canada (modern-day Quebec) and Upper Canada (modern-dayOntario).