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March 15 - March 20, 2022
Scottish philosophers long had maintained that it is natural and right for there to be limits on the power of monarchs.
Multiple similar passages suggest that Adams, lacking the guidance of an older friend, was trying to mentor himself.
An observation by the novelist Anthony Trollope also applies to Adams: “Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his weakness. . . . He was very great while he spoke of his country, which he did so often; but he was almost as little when he spoke of himself—which he did as often.”84
This preference for the Greeks may have inoculated Jefferson against the stiff, Roman-like Federalism of Adams and Washington.
Scotland’s influence on American history was profound and remains underappreciated. The story of this development is fascinating. In
The Scottish divergence from English thinking had its roots in changes that began two hundred years earlier, when the Scottish church, long independent of the English one, underwent a Calvinist reformation from which the Presbyterian Church emerged. This new church placed a strong emphasis on literacy, because it believed the people should be able to read their Bibles. In 1661, it became church policy that every Scottish town should have a schoolmaster educated in Latin, while rural parishes should have a minister capable of giving basic instruction to country youth.18
Uniquely, Scotland’s Enlightenment was university-based, giving its academic institutions a dynamism that English universities in particular lacked.20 J.E.G. De Montmorency, a historian of education, states that English universities were bypassed altogether by the Enlightenment as they experienced “a century of educational sleep” in the 1700s.
One result of this multinationalism was that the Scottish approach to law was heavily influenced by the French. In fact, writes Arthur Herman, “many Scottish lawyers in the seventeenth century still went to France to complete their law training rather than to England.” That’s significant in the context of classicism because much more than English law, French jurisprudence had its roots in ancient Rome.
As a consequence, Scottish legal thinking deferred less to precedent than the English did, and was more open to classical principles and judgments based on reason.
The control of time had moved from the church tower to inside the house, and in doing so had become more precise.
Likewise, more Americans enrolled at the University of Glasgow during the colonial period than went to either Oxford or Cambridge.55
As a historian of early American education put it, “It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, outside of New England, the Scots were the educators of eighteenth-century America.”
one historian puts it, “the Scottish Enlightenment, above all other versions of that western world intellectual phenomenon, took on a heightened significance in the fashioning of the early republic. 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.”62
Jefferson copied into his book Bolingbroke’s irreligious observation that while Christ did not offer a complete system of ethics, the ancient world did:
Plato’s Socrates, writes the classical scholar Jeffrey Henderson, is “unworldly, aloof, and hyper-intellectual,” while Xenophon’s is “down-to-earth, handy, and practical as well as philosophical and comfortable in any society.”
March 1767.
The fact they're able to pinpoint the month and year is impressive
“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.”88
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
As he once wrote in a parting letter to a lover, the beautiful Italian-English artist Maria Cosway: “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.” That is a recipe for Epicureanism, but it also provides a pathway for emotional withdrawal. Indeed, that letter continued, “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.”96
This approach might also have enabled him to justify his failure to examine his own contradictions, if by doing so he would suffer pain or confusion. It might have been too discomfiting for him to recognize that as a man, he was forward thinking but not forward acting.
Montesquieu concluded that large nations could not be republics, flatly stating that “it is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist.”8 This observation would become a major issue when Americans two decades later turned to drafting a Constitution.
Jefferson did not detail his objections, but he likely was irked by Montesquieu’s conclusion that a major cause of Rome’s decline was Epicurean thought.
One American college caught Madison’s eye. It had led the way in engaging with the times: the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton. It was to the America of the 1760s what the University of California at Berkeley would be two hundred years later, a hotbed of political activism, capturing public attention.
King’s was the most Tory of any college in the colonies, having been founded by Anglicans in conservative reaction to Princeton and Yale.
proclaimed that it was “a Seminary of Loyalty, as well as Learning, and Piety; a Nursery for the State, as well as the Church.”
About Princeton
was a striking point at which to begin assessing the political situation, by looking deep into the future of the nation, when it would be vastly more populous than it was when he was writing. This is Adams at his best, taking the longest possible view as a way of organizing his strategic thinking, looking at American politics as the Scotsman Hutton had looked at the rocks of the Earth.
The only moment of relief came when the portly Benjamin Harrison (attended William & Mary), a Falstaffian figure, grimly joked to the smaller Elbridge Gerry (Harvard, 1762) that “I shall have a great advantage over you Mr: Gerry when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.”
We were robbed in 1776 of having this be a moment between colonies/states instead of smoothing over intra-colony division. Col. McKean says this to Mr. George Reed.
part of the power of this section of the Declaration is that it’s more about “what we ought to be” rather than “what we are.”
paradox of Washington is that this least classically educated of the first four presidents was also the most Roman of them in character, and was seen as such by his contemporaries. While Washington’s peers threw themselves into ancient Rome, he had Rome thrown at him. It was his fate to become “the most thoroughly classicized figure of his generation,” according to one specialist in American classicism.
In his youth, he had been interested in Caesar and had read a bit about him. Later, as an adult, he sought to model his public persona upon Cato—upright, honest, patriotic, self-sacrificing, and a bit remote. Then, fighting for American independence, Washington had a new Roman role thrust upon him, that of the celebrated general Fabius, who defeated an invader from overseas mainly by avoiding battle and wearing out his foe. Finally, after the war, he would play his greatest role, the commander who relinquished power and returned to his farm, an American Cincinnatus.
Roman general 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.
There is no equivalent book today with which familiarity would be assumed by all members of a political elite.
Abt. Plutarch's Lives
Even Washington, not much of a reader except in a handful of topics that intrigued him—notably agricultural innovation and, late in his life, the abolition of slavery—owned a copy of Plutarch’s Lives.
This is the conflation of two distinctly different approaches: a war of posts and a Fabian strategy. In the former, one fights defensive battles from fortresses; in the latter, one avoids battle altogether and seeks to defeat an enemy by wearing him out.
He was better at this sort of observation and contemplation than were most of his contemporaries, and indeed than most generals are, both then and now. It was Washington’s greatest military skill. It may not have been genius, but it was close.
People like to talk about how change is good, but they often forget how awkward, even exhausting and painful, it can be.
What Washington’s critics did not see then, and sometimes not even now, was that being indecisive was decidedly preferable to being decisively wrong.
Kwasny, in one of the best studies of Washington’s generalship,
Adams, who for unknown reasons seemed to believe he was an expert on military affairs, was having none of it.
Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good.
he was a master at observing and learning from experience, at the difficult task of simply perceiving what was really going on around him.
“in republican government, virtue must always be tied to interest.”4
John Shy, one of the most insightful analysts of the war,
In this nation, the people were not the governed, they were sovereign, which meant their needs must be addressed. Adams never liked that fact or even really understood it, and that failure would haunt his presidency.
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.
European Union is today, a weak body unable to compel member states.
Under them, the new United States became an alliance of republics. As such, the new confederation was “as strong as any similar republican confederation in history,” concludes Gordon Wood.1
permanent structure, the Articles of Confederation did not work. But as a means of transition, a bridge into the future, it served a purpose and, arguably, succeeded brilliantly.
In the same work, Montesquieu made a striking observation: “At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.”4 So the real issue facing the victors of the American Revolution was to create a structure solid enough to survive and begin to develop institutions that would sustain it in the long term. The question was, how to get to the point where American institutions could develop leaders?
Paine was not building a society he planned to run. Rather, he was offering a running critique of events, from a point of view skeptical of power and authority.
