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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Founders Online, the National Archives’ wonderful digital compilation of the papers of the leaders of the early United States.

“First Peoples” rather than “Indian” or “Native American.” In researching this issue, I was struck by a statement by a group of musicians that “We do not call ourselves ‘Native American,’ because our blood and people were here long before this land was called the Americas. We are older than America can ever be and do not know the borders.”

1786–87—Shays’ Rebellion challenges the postwar distribution of power in Massachusetts

1794—The Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania poses another major challenge to the postwar distribution of American power and wealth

George Washington’s ability to observe and learn seems to me underappreciated. James Madison’s contributions, especially his designing gridlock into the American system, also seem to me to be undervalued. John Adams, by contrast, began to strike me as having an inflated reputation in recent years, with insufficient attention paid to his unhelpful commentary during the War for Independence and also his disastrous presidency. Likewise, though raised by my parents to revere Thomas Jefferson, I increasingly found myself disturbed by his habitual avoidance of reality.

If there is one thing a reader should take away from this book, it is that there is little certain about our nation except that it remains an experiment that requires our serious and sustained attention to thrive.

first part of the book will look at their early lives and educations. The second section will show how they used what they learned in their political deliberations as they sought independence and designed a new nation. The final chapters explore how the neoclassical culture that shaped them was altered by the powerful forces that emerged in the 1790s and the early nineteenth century, mainly the democratization of American politics and culture, but also the coming of the Industrial Revolution.

begin with George Washington, who managed to become the exemplar of the classical Roman values that meant so much to elite colonial society.

John Adams, who cast himself as a modern Cicero, a significant association because the parable of Cicero’s triumph over the Catilinarian conspiracy in 63 bc was the essential poli...

Thomas Jefferson, the only one in this quartet who favored the Greeks over the Romans, and look at how Jefferson’s Greek-inflected classicism steered him away from Federalism and also provided the p...

James Madison, whose classicism was leavened by a greater cosmopolitanism and an understanding of the limits to which one could rely on what the Romans called vi...

Washington, despite his lack of a classical education, came at different times to embody three of the great Roman role models—Cato, Fabius, and Cincinnatus—while avoiding the temptation of becoming an American version of Julius Caesar.

those young Scots transmitted to America the intellectual skepticism and dynamism of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was firmly rooted in classicism, and came even as the English universities of the time were mired in the intellectual doldrums and in fact sat out the Enlightenment. Likewise, Scottish legal thinking was far more rooted in Roman philosophy than was English law, which was more oriented toward local precedent and tradition.

Madison chose to travel weeks to attend the most politically radical college in the country, one with a new, explicitly “continental” approach to recruiting its students—and one that was led by a politicized Scottish minister.

Understanding the influence of classicism also helps us understand why, for example, George Washington placed such faith in “virtue,” why John Adams held such a fear of “faction,” and why Thomas Jefferson was so determined to give the official buildings of Washington, DC, a feel of ancient Rome.

Most notable is that the starting point for the United States is the fundamental contradiction of a slaveholder’s declaring that the basic fact of public life is that all people are created equal.

Washington absorbed classicism mainly secondhand, from the elite culture of his day.

Adams focused on the laws and rhetoric of Rome, especially on the speeches of Cicero, the self-made orator of the first century bc who became a personal model for him

Jefferson delved deeper into classical philosophy than the others did, especially Epicureanism, the philosophy of pursuing happiness and avoiding pain, which (as we shall see) pervades the most significant sections of his Declaration of Independence.

Madison was the most academic in his approach,

Adams a brilliant, honest, self-absorbed crank;

Madison, in order to prepare for the drafting of the American Constitution, would spend years engaged in a methodical study of ancient political systems, especially the histories of Greek republics. He was aided greatly by the trunkloads of books shipped to him from Paris by Jefferson. It was partly because of him that the writing of the Constitution became the high-water mark of classical republicanism in America—but also because of him that the pursuit of virtue, the very core of the old viewpoint, was abandoned.

Our soldier might even be able to quote from the play—maybe that striking line about choosing between liberty or death, or perhaps the passage in which a character regrets that he has only one life to give for his country.

We're all just quoting media. No original thought in our heads

island.

Is this effectively meme culture?

meant putting the common good before one’s own interests.

One good cultural marker is the Harvard Universal Classics, a collection of essential works of world literature,

for the Revolutionary generation, Rome stood well in front of Athens, with the Greek world pushed to the background, seen sometimes as a bit obscure and impractical.

One of their major themes was the necessity of being skeptical of the exercise of state power. Their articles became central to the political debate in mid-century America, says Bailyn, who found in his study of the pamphlets of the time that they were “the most frequently cited authority on matters of principle and theory.”

whether the new nation could subsist on “public virtue,” relying on the self-restraint of those in power to act for the common good and not their personal interest,

party politics, which the classical writers taught them to regard as unnatural and abhorrent. Their misunderstanding of partisanship, or “faction,” as they tended to call it, nearly wrecked the new republic in the 1790s.

most troubling, was their acceptance of human bondage, which would prove disastrous to the nation they designed. Often seeing it a natural part of the social order, they wrote it into the fundamental law of the nation,

because he was not bookish and instead learned by observation and experience,

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

Today, that approach to life may seem profoundly conservative. But in the eighteenth century, it carried a whiff of egalitarianism.

John Adams had it right. Washington was not a philosopher, but he was a sturdy practical thinker. By that, Adams seems to have meant that Washington was capable of observing and learning.

New presidents often make the mistake, for example, of paying too much attention to formulating policy and not enough to implementing

Know yourself, and know those you are fighting. This is a more complex proposition than it may seem, as it requires introspection, strategic thinking, and reliable intelligence. Study the terrain and make it your friend. As circumstances change, be ready to change views and abandon assumptions. Listen to dissenters and know how to weigh alternatives.

he had seen that he himself could recover from stinging personal defeat—and also, perhaps, that the key goal of a general is sometimes not to win but merely to keep his army alive. His conclusion as a commander, he wrote in 1757, was that “Discipline is the soul of an army.”

college-educated comrades learned what was needed to found and design a new kind of nation; Washington, in a different but equally daunting school, learned what was necessary to liberate it and lead it toward stability.

More than any other founder, concludes Gordon Wood, Washington “always understood power and how to use it.”76 What could be more Roman than the prudent exercise of power?

John Adams Aims to Become an American Cicero

would come very close to achieving that vaulting ambition, which is surprising, because he was in many ways the odd man out among the first four presidents.

long before the adolescent Adams crossed the Charles River to Harvard, he was full of thoughts about how to better resist British authority. It helped that he was both bright and naturally irascible. He had been questioning authority for years. More than most men, he was born to do so.

Plutarch always balances his praise of great men by emphasizing one great shortcoming. In Cicero’s case, this was vanity. “He was always excessively pleased with his own praise, and continued to the very last to be passionately fond of glory; which often interfered with the prosecution of his wisest resolutions.”14 Adams would also exhibit this flaw.

Catiline was a charismatic populist, calling for land reform and cancellation of debts,

Fear of a slave uprising was genuine, as the famous one led by Spartacus in southern Italy had ended only eight years earlier.

Cicero’s faults and failings were also those of Adams, to a surprising and even alarming degree.

If Adams was a Cicero, Washington was a Cato—a comparison that would frustrate Adams later in life. For the Revolutionary generation, silent virtue almost always would be valued more than loud eloquence.

By having the self-confidence to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to human situations, they developed several new scholarly fields. In his magisterial study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay states that Montesquieu invented sociology in The Spirit of Laws, that Edward Gibbon founded the modern writing of history with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and that Adam Smith did the same for economics with The Wealth of Nations.57 (Xenophon’s Oeconomicus might from its title appear to claim to be a foundational document, but it really is about how to manage a household, which is what the word means in Greek.)58 Gay does not mention it, but Hume’s essay on “The Populousness of Ancient Nations” also was an early venture into creating the field of demography. Another Scot, James Hutton, came up with an astonishing new way to think about time, and so invented modern geology, a subject to which we will return. It is noteworthy that several of these innovative scholarly ventures—the ones by Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume—were rooted in the studies of the history of Rome.

this Mayhew is remembered today as the man who devised the brilliant colonial rallying cry “No taxation without representation.”