More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 5 - January 15, 2022
the French and Indian War.
The French and Indian War would continue, but its focus moved elsewhere, to the northeastern colonies and to Canada. Eventually the French would be utterly routed, but not without great financial cost to the British.
a comment of Cicero’s, in an echo of Xenophon, that “of all sources of wealth, farming is the best, the most agreeable, the most profitable, the most noble.”
1759, he married a wealthy widow, Martha Custis.
won election as a delegate to Virginia’s House of Burgesses, the colony’s elected legislative body.
Which would prove more influential in American history, Washington’s practical education on the frontier or the study by Adams, Jefferson, and Madison of classical history, philosophy, and rhetoric? It is impossible to say. The answer is probably that both were essential.
Washington “always understood power and how to use it.”76 What could be more Roman than the prudent exercise of power?
Cicero put down the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome.
Adams idolized Cicero, the great Roman orator. As an old man, he would write that, “I have read him, for almost 70 years and seeme to have him almost by heart.”
Plutarch always balances his praise of great men by emphasizing one great shortcoming. In Cicero’s case, this was vanity.
“Catiline has plotted a dreadful and entire subversion of the Roman state by sedition and open war, but being convicted by Cicero, was forced to flee the city.”16 The fact that Catiline was a charismatic populist, calling for land reform and cancellation of debts, received less attention.
Cicero famously began his first speech against Catiline with striking urgency: “How far wilt thou, O Catiline! abuse our patience?”
Catiline’s plan to incite a slave revolt, set fire to the city, and massacre an untold number of political opponents.
slave uprising was genuine, as the famous one led by Spartacus in southern Italy had ended only eight years earlier.
death cannot be disgraceful to a brave man, nor premature to one of consular rank, nor miserable to a wise man.”
This story of Catiline fascinated post-Renaissance Europe, whose artists explored it in drama, poetry, and opera.
Adams loved the speeches of Cicero,
Among all the founders, it was Adams who seems most to have consciously used Cicero as a model for his life.
prefer that which is honest before that which is popular.”
Cicero in the course of his legal career became a wealthy man,
One issue that concerned Enlightenment thinkers was who was the greater man, Cicero or Cato? Montesquieu thought Cato was.
If Adams was a Cicero, Washington was a Cato—a
it is the duty of the people to resist tyranny.
Here were the seeds of the Revolutionary sentiment that would become so potent in the colonies in the 1770s. Sovereignty flows from the people, who have the power to withdraw it, and the duty to do so if the delegated authority abuses it.
Christianity simply did not loom as large in colonial America as it would a century later, or indeed does now in much of the United States.
part of understanding the Enlightenment is seeing that to its thinkers, there was a “fundamental irrelevance of religious revelation to the great issues of public life.”
the foundations of the Industrial Revolution were put in place by Enlightenment thinkers exploring new technologies such as steam power.
the relationship between church, state, and the people became a subject of intense discussion.
ancient Greek views on government—that monarchy degenerates into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into anarchy.
The best models of oratory, he wrote, were “Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, & most assuredly not in Cicero.”
Jefferson’s years of being taught by Douglas and Small, two Scots, his views would come to reflect Scottish thinkers of the time.
“the basic influence . . . of Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers.”
emphasis on testing ideas against observation through one’s own senses.
Scotland’s influence on American history was profound and remains underappreciated.
Scots more or less inventing the fields of modern economics and geology, as well as eventually setting off the Industrial Revolution with the steam engine.
the Scottish church, long independent of the English one, underwent a Calvinist reformation from which the Presbyterian Church emerged.
strong emphasis on literacy, because it believed the people should be able to read their Bibles.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which began appearing in Edinburgh in 1768.
much more than English law, French jurisprudence had its roots in ancient Rome.
the rediscovery of the Codex of Emperor Justinian I, a hefty summary of Roman civil law which that ruler had ordered compiled in the sixth century ad.
Scottish legal thinking deferred less to precedent than the English did, and was more open to classical principles and judgments based on reason.
More than others, Scottish bankers seemed to grasp that time is money, both to producers and to buyers.
New ways of thinking about time were in fact an essential element of the Scottish Enlightenment,
Scottish scientist James Hutton, who played a crucial role in creating the field of geology.
conventional wisdom was that the Earth was just six thousand years old.
Hutton was the first “to perceive that the age of the Earth was so great as to be almost beyond human comprehension.”
outside of New England, the Scots were the educators of eighteenth-century America.”
The story of the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment and the transmission of its ideas to America is fundamental to the history of American thought.”
I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.
“He carried his love of antiquity rather too far; for he frequently subjected himself to the charge of pedantry.”
