First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”4 It is a question that still hangs in the air more than two centuries later.

But for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life. Back then, it actually was masculine. It meant putting the common good before one’s own interests. Virtue, writes the historian Joyce Appleby, was the “lynchpin” of public life—that is, the fastener that held together the structure.

The word “virtue” appears about six thousand times in the collected correspondence and other writings of the Revolutionary generation, compiled in the U.S. National Archives’ database, Founders Online (FO), totaling some 120,000 documents.11 That’s more often than “freedom.”

Their readings ranged over more than a thousand years of ancient history, all the way from the Iliad to Justinian’s Codex, but came back again and again to that crucial period of the decline of the Republic. That decades-long process of republican erosion provided their political context, their point of reference, and much of their civic language.

Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all came from what the historian Annette Gordon-Reed calls “a society built on and sustained by violence, actual and threatened.”

But his chroniclers, in pursuing this humanizing mission, in fact seek to undo Washington’s work of a lifetime, which was to discipline his turbulent emotions, build an image of lofty distance, and most of all, establish a reputation for valiant leadership, unselfish virtue, and unyielding honor—that is, someone with the makings of a great man. Washington would spend decades in erecting and polishing that statue of himself.

One scholar puts it well when he comments that Adams “always wrote for the public as if he had a toga on.”

Perhaps even more than Jefferson, Wythe saw the new world through a classical lens. Unusually, he had studied the ancient texts with his widowed mother, who somehow had managed to learn Latin and Greek. Little is known about her background, but she must have been an excellent teacher, for Wythe became known, Jefferson wrote, as “the best Greek and Latin scholar in the state.” Wythe, he added, “might truly be called the Cato of his country.”66

His masterpiece, The Spirit of Laws, appeared in 1748. Though politically controversial in France for its skepticism of monarchy, it was enormously successful and soon was translated into English and other languages. Sir Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century British philosopher, concluded that Montesquieu’s impact remains all around us, pervasive yet often unseen, in the form of modern liberal democracy.

The vote was unanimous. Washington was to become, in his physical presence, the embodiment of the national defense, quite literally. He was, at first, the sole member of the United States Army.

The language here also makes explicit Jefferson’s divergence from Locke, who in his “Second Treatise on Civil Government” had used the phrase, “life, liberty and estate” (that is, property). Jefferson here replaced that last word with “happiness”—and in the process encouraged a social revolution.

Professor Ellis summarizes Washington’s next step well: The strategic key was the Continental Army. If it remained intact as an effective fighting force, the American Revolution remained alive. The British army could occupy Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and it did. The British navy could blockade and bombard American seaports with impunity, and it did. The Continental Congress could be driven from one location to another like a covey of pigeons, and it was. But as long as Washington held the Continental Army together, the British could not win the war, which in turn meant that they would eventually lose it.

Benjamin Franklin grew exasperated with Adams, who was with him in France for peace talks with the British. In a letter to Robert Livingston, secretary of foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, Franklin summarized Adams memorably: “He means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”47 This pithy sentence may be the single most illuminating thing ever written about John Adams.

In these letters he laid out the basic elements of what would become known as the Virginia plan, which in turn would be the core of the eventual Constitution. In the following year he would perform a series of tasks that would earn what Gordon Wood calls “the now widely accepted view that Madison was the most astute, profound, and original political theorist among the founding fathers.”47

Madison’s account is not entirely reliable. The historian Mary Sarah Bilder demonstrated in an intricate 2015 study that Madison fiddled with his notes on the Constitution all his life, combining some speeches, revising others, and omitting some of his comments that would be politically embarrassing if revealed, such as his desire in 1787 to constrain the powers of the states.

The history of the Amphictyonic League, or Council, that Madison referenced is obscure stuff to us, but it was not in early America, so it has continued relevance today. One reason that in the United States of the twenty-first century the 580,000 people of Wyoming are represented by two senators, the same number as the 40 million citizens of California, is because of the example of this league, which was a series of confederations of cities formed early in Greek history. The league’s member states had equal voting rights without regard to size or power.

Hamilton, who never seemed to have enough enemies to satisfy himself,

In the following decades the party slowly would evaporate, absent from the ballot box, but still present for a while in the judiciary. In 1807, for example, Theophilus Parsons (Harvard, 1769), the Federalist chief justice of Massachusetts, ruled that not all citizens were equal before the law in the case at hand, a slander charge, because “rank and condition” affected the degree of injury caused by act.57 The judge seems not to have understood that America was rapidly becoming a nation where the notion of social rank no longer existed.