The two volumes of De la démocratie en Amérique provided a comprehensive description of the culture and analysis of the political institutions of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century that impressed even American contemporaries. “In America, it will be regarded not only as a classic philosophical treatise of the highest order, but as indispensable in the education of every statesman, and of every citizen who desires thoroughly to comprehend the institutions of his country,” wrote John C. Spencer in 1838 in the preface to the American translation of Tocqueville’s magnum opus (Spencer 1838, xii). Another great admirer of Tocqueville was the Prussian-born Francis Lieber, who held the first American chair of political science at Columbia College, now Columbia University, from 1860 until his death. Lieber had met Tocqueville on his trip to America and translated his work Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis, et de son application en France (1833) into English. In his lectures at Columbia College, he repeatedly suggested to his students that each of them should know Tocqueville’s works since no American had yet better described their country and its political culture (Lieber 1860, 29–30). Lieber thus laid the foundation for a line of reception through which Tocqueville’s magnum opus, along with the Federalist Papers, became one of the most important texts of US political self-interpretation (Auderset 2016, 205–223).