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

by Thomas E. Ricks

voters should be told that the fates of the American and French experiments were not linked, and that “whatever may be the fate of republicanism there, we are able to preserve it inviolate here.”

slaves in France’s colony of Haiti began their revolt, which ultimately proved successful, with the establishment of an independent republic led by black men. American slaveholders watched this unfold with fear. This was their worst nightmare.

Blount became the first federal official to be impeached and was expelled from the Senate.

the number of newspapers published in the United States more than doubled from 100 to more than 250.78 Adams was appalled by this noisy babel of new American voices.

Adams’ defenders, then and now, argue that the Sedition Law rested firmly on existing English common law, and so was not a great departure.

American newspapers “operated as if the law of seditious libel did not exist.”

The American two-party system, the nation’s enduring source of political stability, was forged in—and, fair to say, created by—the nation’s newspapers.

newspapers were already beginning to shape the first party system, a contest between Federalists and those who aligned themselves with a newly emerging opposition.

Political participation was increasing rapidly, often to the point of illegality, with voter turnout sometimes exceeding 100 percent of the eligible (white male adult taxpaying) population.

In the two years after the Sedition Law was enacted, twenty-five journalists were arrested and ten convicted.

Thomas Cooper, a Pennsylvania newspaper editor who in November 1799 published a handbill stating that President Adams was incompetent and had meddled with federal judges. For this he was found guilty of malicious libel, fined $400, and sentenced to six months in jail.

“Ragged Matt, the democrat,” as the Federalists liked to call him, was found guilty of sedition, sentenced to four months of imprisonment,

Enforcement of the law was selective and uneven, to the extreme.

“Every defendant was a Republican, every judge and practically all the jurors were Federalists,”

Washington was disgusted with the state of politics.

Tobias Lear (Harvard, 1783), reported to President Adams that Washington went out like a Roman: “His last scene corresponded with the whole tenor of his life.—Not a groan, nor a Complaint escaped him in extreme distress.—With perfect resignation, and in full possession of his reason, he closed his well spent life.”

Hamilton, a fellow Federalist, who was rumored to have ambitions to lead a military takeover of the government.

prominent Connecticut Federalist, used an oration on July 4, 1799, to attack the Jeffersonians: “The object of this party is to destroy ancient systems—ancient

the workingman expected to be heard, and would no longer reflexively defer to the wealthy and well-educated.

all boiled down to a struggle between “the few & the Many.”

how some Republicans were thinking at the time—and perhaps why, a few years later, they would displace the Federalists so rapidly and completely.

Noah Webster’s dictionary of the American language, which he compiled during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Webster’s work seems to represent a fallback position for moderate Federalists: If you cannot control the people, perhaps you can control their language, and thus how they think

Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions, a series of statements opposing the Alien and Sedition Acts and toying with secession.

Could the United States survive without Washington as its unifying symbol?

Founders Online,

slavery was treated as much as possible with a conspiracy of silence. It was the greatest failing of the founders, hardly explainable even today.

“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Hamilton despised Jefferson. But Hamilton hated Aaron Burr more, writing to a friend, “He is as unprincipled & dangerous a man

a complete Cataline in his practice & principles.”

“Burr was a Catiline, a Bankrupt, an unprincipled Scoundrell, a damn’d Rascall and a Devil,” Adams concluded.

Jefferson and Burr emerged from the election of 1800 tied in the vote of the Electoral College.

The House of Representatives voted some thirty-five times, with a tie each time.

the constitutional system devised in 1787, which itself had replaced the Articles of Confederation of 1781,

the authors of the Constitution had adhered to “the teachings of classical republican thought [which] . . . equated parties with factions and considered them unmitigated evils.”12

The truest test of a new democracy is not whether a new leader is elected, but whether that new leader holds a second election and eventually turns over power.

the federal party,

Jefferson’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1801, is a statement of an opposition party taking over.

Jefferson made clear that he and his party had won, and that the Federalists had lost.

“the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to viol...

“every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”

Jefferson was indeed focused on the freedom of the press,

Jefferson pardoned Callender, the muckraking Scottish journalist who had been jailed under the Sedition Act.16 But Callender wanted much more, something like a nice, well-paid government job. He hoped to be rewarded for his efforts and imprisonment by being named postmaster of Richmond, Virginia. When the president did not do that, Callender turned on Jefferson, darkly warning that “he was in possession of things which he could & would make use of in a certain case.”17 When Jefferson shunned him, Callender published those “things,” which were the rumors—confirmed by DNA tests centuries later—that Jefferson kept an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, as his mistress, and had fathered children with her.

Two years later, in July 1803, Callender’s corpse would be found floating in shallow water in the James River.

John Adams did not attend Jefferson’s inaugural. He felt humiliated by losing the election, being the first president so rejected. “I was turned out of Office, degraded and disgraced by my Country,”

Adams’ next step was typical of his brilliant but sour personality. He began to write a memoir to settle old scores.

He watched the Jefferson administration with horror, but reassured himself that at least the president lacked the strength of nerve to seek dictatorship. “Jefferson is not a Roman,” he said jovially in a letter to Benjamin Rush. He seemed to understand, correctly, that the man in the White House was more Greek than Roman, and was in fact a follower of what he disparaged as “the poisonous pestilential & most fatal doctrine of Epicurus.”

he retreated into rereading a biography of Cicero. There he found eerie parallels between the decline of the Roman Republic and the condition of the United States. “I Seem to read . . . the History of our own Country for forty years past. Change the Names and every Anecdote will be applicable to Us.”

Adams had an image of himself as “The Last Roman.”

Jefferson took office angered by the rash of last-minute appointments Adams had made just before leaving the federal government.

America was rapidly becoming a nation where the notion of social rank no longer existed.