Of course, the framing of the Constitution was not the end, but rather the
beginning of the political process through which the American citizens organized
their body politic and created a system of checks and balances to offset the power of
the state with a decentralized system of associational intermediation. As the new
country began building its representative governance structure in the early
nineteenth century, a young Frenchman by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805–1859) had arrived there to study the newly created republic as she was
searching for stable foundations assuring her future. The traveler published what he
observed on his way through the Confederacies in the two volumes of Democracy in
America.