In Europe, he continues, “the criminal is an unfortunate who fights to hide his head from the agents of power the population in some way assists in the struggle. During his visit, he “saw the inhabitants of a county where a great crime had been committed spontaneously form committees for the purpose of pursuing the guilty one and delivering him to the courts” (in Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop’s rendering). In “Democracy in America,” he describes an incident that might be read as a darker version of the lucky discovery in Florida. The participatory nature of American citizenship, in all its forms, impressed him deeply. He was constantly struck by the country’s intense religiosity he admired its provincial decentralization, marvelling at the busy way every small township managed its own affairs and happily organized committees and meetings on every subject but he also recognized, amid this admirable collectivism, the country’s deep strain of individualism. These are the same American peculiarities that Alexis de Tocqueville noticed when he journeyed here in 1831, at the age of twenty-five. A European observer would probably be struck by the unpeopled landscape and the alligators, the intense local and voluntary involvement (a congregation, a united small community), but also by the defiant individualism-the solitary seeker rigged up as if for nineteenth-century missionary work-and, of course, the slightly insane theological certainties. Setting aside the always troublesome exceptionalism of such “miracles” (their logic dictates that every missing girl not so fortunate was being either punished or neglected by the Lord), what was remarkable was how very American the happy story was, as if James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Cormac McCarthy had collaborated. The local police chief told reporters that if he had not believed before in miracles he certainly did now.

“God sent me and pointed me directly to her,” he said later. As he slogged through the marshes, quoting Scripture and calling out Nadia’s name, he wonderfully heard a response. Armed with a machete, a G.P.S.-equipped BlackBerry, trail mix, and a Bible, the devout father of five let the Lord guide him to Nadia. Well, not quite, because he had divine assistance. A local church congregation had mobilized teams of searchers, but the man who discovered her, James King, was on his own. Last month, Nadia Bloom, an eleven-year-old girl who had been missing for four days, was found, unhurt, in alligator-infested Florida swampland. Tocqueville is always tacking from anxiety to optimism and back again.

Alexis de tocqueville democracy