In late 1829, Lorenzo de Zavala, an influential Mexican statesman, writer, and editor, fled Mexico and traveled to the United States as a political exile. In 1834 he published Viage a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América [ Journey to the United States of North America], one of the earliest known meditations on U.S. democracy. While ostensibly written about the United States, Viage is directed at his fellow Mexicans and is intended as a tool for learning about democratic ideals and their potential realization in Mexico. In this article, I examine Zavala’s ideas about degeneracy and barbarism as presented through his discussion of slavery and slave-like imitation in both the U.S. and Mexico. Throughout his narrative, Zavala points to different types of slavery as part of each country’s past and present that continue to impede the realization of republican ideals and national democratic projects. I argue that Zavala uses a comparative mode, highlighting the similarities between Mexican and U.S. degeneracy. He thus presents both countries as young republics embroiled in similar fights for “civilization” as part of a hemispheric community moving away from barbarism and towards a broadly American concept of “progress.”