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January 5 - January 15, 2022
“The words of truth are simple, and justice needs no subtle interpretations, for it has a fitness in itself; but the words of injustice, being rotten in themselves, require clever treatment.”
Xenophon, especially the Memorabilia, his memoir of Socrates.
Jefferson greatly preferred Xenophon’s account of Socrates to Plato’s.
John Locke’s On Government and the works of Montesquieu.
“Pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily,” Epicurus states in a letter that Laertius quotes. But, he continues, “we are not speaking of the pleasures of a debauched man, . . . but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from confusion.”
Jefferson would remain devoted to Epicurean thought for the remainder of his life. He summarized that belief system thusly: Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice90
When one seeks to understand Jefferson, it is almost always helpful to look to Epicurus.
He would not bear arms in the War for Independence. He criticized slavery repeatedly in his life but never did much to end it.
the works of Montesquieu constituted a bridge between the Enlightenment and the classical world.
The Stamp Act, meant to assert British authority over the colonies and to raise revenue to pay for the French and Indian War,
“Mr, Madison a gloomy, stiff creature, they say is clever in Congress, but out of it has nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners—the most unsociable creature in Existence,”
in colonial Princeton. As one biographer phrases it, the college “smoked with rebellion.”
In March 1770, British soldiers shot and killed several people in the central part of Boston.
looking at American politics as the Scotsman Hutton had looked at the rocks of the Earth.
Patrick Henry, speaking out against the act, strode up to the very line of treason. It was his first full week as a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses, and he was delivering his maiden speech.
Henry was notorious in the Hanover area as an idler, more fond of hunting, fishing, and dancing than of work.
splendid display of mr Henry’s talents as a popular orator. They were great indeed; such as I have never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.”
With that speech, Jefferson said, “he was certainly the man who gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution,”
The British government responded to the American demands with a cascade of acts meant to intimidate them.
Dissident Americans decided to meet in what they would call the First Continental Congress.
pamphlet under the title A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
the essay is both tendentious and a mishmash.
One of Jefferson’s favorite ancient authors was Tacitus,
A Summary View became the first sustained piece of American political writing that subjected the King’s conduct to direct and pointed criticism.”
Congress agreed, “under the sacred ties of Virtue, Honour, and Love of our Country,” once again to boycott British goods.
the British Parliament weeks later declared the colony of Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion.
two elevations just to the north of Boston harbor. Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill
Parliament declared the American colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion” and vowed “to bring the traitors to justice.”
Thomas Paine, whose essay Common Sense had appeared six months before Jefferson drafted the Declaration
Jefferson emphatically wanted no establishment of religious authority or tests of belief.
Jefferson was writing for the American masses,
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the essence of Epicureanism.
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).
Governments are made by men, he states, and receive their powers from “the consent of the governed.”
that idea originated with the Scottish philosopher George Buchanan almost two hundred years earlier,
In his 32nd Dialogue, Lyttelton, himself a politician and friend of Alexander Pope, imagines an exchange in which Servius Tullius, the legendary sixth king of Rome, asks, “Is not Liberty an inherent, inalienable Right of Mankind?”
charges against the king, a list of some twenty sentences that constitutes about half the entire document.
Nineteen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration were of Scottish or Ulster Scot extraction.
American soldiers in New York responded to a public reading of the Declaration by pulling down the gilded statue of King George III that dominated the southern end of Broadway in Manhattan.
By some accounts, portions of the monarch’s statue were melted down and made into musket balls for the Revolutionary Army.
President Abraham Lincoln, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the battle that had ended there on July 4, 1863, began by invoking Jefferson’s words:
sought to model his public persona upon Cato—upright, honest, patriotic, self-sacrificing, and a bit remote.
commander who relinquished power and returned to his farm, an American Cincinnatus.
Fabius was better known to Washington and his peers than he is now. He was celebrated by Rome for defeating the shocking invasion of Hannibal by refusing to give battle. Hannibal of Carthage began from his base in Spain. In 218 bc he marched through today’s France and then crossed the Alps into northern Italy, where he scored two overwhelming victories against Roman armies.
Fabius was known even as a youth for his firm, low-key manner, but also for supposedly being slow in thought.
Shadowing Hannibal’s soldiers but not attacking, Plutarch writes, Fabius “gave them no rest, but kept them in continual alarm.”
Hannibal himself eventually went into exile from Carthage and died in around 180 in what is now Turkey, most likely committing suicide by poison to avoid being taken prisoner by a vengeful Rome.
All of the first four presidents possessed copies of Plutarch’s Lives, as did most educated people of the time.
What his contemporaries read in Plutarch about Quintus Fabius Maximus was that he “set Forth to oppose Hannibal, not with intention to fight him, but with the purpose of wearing out and wasting the vigour of his arms by lapse of time.”
he shifted to a war of posts. This interim step was, again, not a Fabian approach, but was rather a retreat into fortresses from which he would invite the enemy to bring the fight to him.
