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

by Thomas E. Ricks

He would be horribly disappointed in different ways by three of the generals who early in the war appeared most promising: Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, who undercut him, and Benedict Arnold, who betrayed the entire cause. Washington, to his everlasting credit,

with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle; and that, almost, every man is more or less, under its influence. Motives of public virtue may for a time, or in particular instances, actuate men to the observance of a conduct purely disinterested; but they are not of themselves sufficient to produce a persevering conformity to the refined dictates and obligations of social duty. Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good.

Men may speculate as they will—they may talk of patriotism—they may draw a few examples from ancient story of great atchievements performed by it’s influence; but, whoever builds upon it, as a sufficient basis, for conducting a long and bloody War, will find themselves deceived in the end. . . . I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting War can never be supported on this principle alone—It must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward. For a time it may, of itself, push men to action—to bear much—to encounter difficulties; but it will not endure unassisted by interest.

“in republican government, virtue must always be tied to interest.”

Washington understood, as Adams did not, that especially in a new republic, these large gestures would resonate with the people. 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.

“If the American Revolution was in any sense a civil war”—which in part it was—“the Confederation did a much faster and better job of reconstruction than the United States did after Appomattox.”

“At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.”

“there can be no government of laws, without a balance, and there can be no balance without the three orders.”

In December, it prevented the holding of courts, stopping seizures of forfeit land and freezing the collection of debts. The following month, three columns of men, one of them led by Shays, marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, which held more than a thousand barrels of gunpowder, as well as thousands of muskets with bayonets.

Shays’ Rebellion would provide the backdrop for the great event of the next two years—the convening of a meeting that, exceeding its mandate, would write a new fundamental law for the nation.

Shays and his comrades ultimately would be given a silent memorial in the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, which among other things guarantees the states protection against both foreign invasion and “domestic Violence.”

As the historian Daniel Howe puts it, the founding generation was “fed up with the Articles of Confederation and their reliance on uncoerced public virtue.”

“Republican Theory” was one thing, he wrote, but “fact and experience” have proven another. Not only was the structure of the United States flawed, but so was the classical conception behind it, he argued. The time had come to accept that “all civilized societies are divided into different interests and factions, as they happen to be creditors or debtors—Rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants or manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property &c &c.”44 But if “different interests and factions” were inevitable, then faction would have to be accepted and interest would have to be seen not as sinful but as natural. What would a government designed to accommodate them look like?

“a new basis of republican government, a way of achieving a viable self-government that did not require virtue as its base.”

“The great division of interests in the U. States,” he said, according to his notes, “did not lie between the large & small states; It lay between the Northern & Southern.”

For whatever reason, Madison would lose on a point he considered key, that of giving Congress the power to veto state laws. “The want of some provision seems to have been mortal to the antient Confederacies, and to be the disease of the modern,”

But no one got everything they wanted from the Constitution. When considering the document, it is useful to see it as a kind of peace treaty between the states.

Montesquieu and Locke had both questioned slavery, but more in puzzlement than in flat-out denunciation, though Montesquieu came close when he wrote sarcastically that “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow, that we ourselves are not Christians.”

In the same letter, he made his famous assertion: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”

In the world of the Federalist Papers, the pillar of “virtue” has fallen.50 When Madison does write about virtue, it often is not to invoke it but to emphasize that it is a finite resource in humans.

Federalist 10, published on November 22, 1787. In it, he attacked the conventional classical republican view that to pursue one’s own interest was to violate public spirit.

“Constant experience shows us, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it. . . . To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.”

The lesson of this history, he concluded, is that “it emphatically illustrates the tendency of federal bodies, rather to anarchy among the members than to tyranny in the head.”

These lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this Constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks . . . just as the whale swallowed up Jonah. This is what I am afraid of.

Another stumbling block was conceptual. The notion of a “loyal opposition” is that part of the process of good governance is organized questioning and criticism by those out of power, who in turn maintain deference to the larger state.

Remember here that to be a “Catiline” was not just to grab for power, but to attack the soul of the nation, to threaten its way of life.

He may have thought he was being conciliatory when he wrote to his cousin Sam Adams that “whenever I Use the Word Republick, with approbation I mean a Government, in which the People have, collectively or by Representation, an essential share in the Sovereignty.”

“Is not the whole sovereignty, my friend, essentially in the People?”

“In all political societies, different interests and parties arise out of the nature of things, and the great art of politicians lies in making them checks and balances to each other.”

It was Caesar, the liberal, “who overturned the republic,” he noted, while it was Cato, the conservative, “who died for it.”

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.

Make it clear, he added, that, “Our vessel is moored at such a distance, that should theirs blow up, ours is still safe.”69 To that end, he added, we need to respect the will of the majority, even when we think it wrong, in the hope and belief that it eventually will come right.

American slaveholders watched this unfold with fear. This was their worst nightmare.

Viewed in this Roman light, the Sedition Law of 1798 was “the capstone of the new Federalist system,” writes legal historian Leonard Levy.77 But seen in the context of American history, it was the last gasp effort of classical republicanism to stave off surging populism.

“Webster’s main motivation for writing and publishing it was not to celebrate American life or to expand independence. Instead, he sought to counteract social disruption and reestablish the deferential world order that he believed was disintegrating.”

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

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.

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. Callender wrote that Hemings’ oldest son bore “a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself.”18 Two years later, in July 1803, Callender’s corpse would be found floating in shallow water in the James River.

He introduced and signed into law a bill to establish the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.20 The new school soon would illuminate one path toward nonclassical higher education in America, with a curriculum that, by the 1820s, featured civil and military engineering, mathematics, French, chemistry, and geography.21 Henry Adams, a great-grandson of John Adams, would write in one of his histories that “the West Point engineers doubled the capacity of the little American army for resistance, and introduced a new and scientific character into American life.”

Open patronage had become the coin of American politics.

Privately, Ames also was giving up on the United States. “Our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratick for liberty,” he confided to a friend at about this time.

Burr was, Gordon Wood concludes, a man of secrets and lies. The biggest difference between him and the founders was not ideological. Rather, it was that he just did not care about the things they cared about. “One searches Burr’s papers in vain for a single thoughtful letter about political philosophy or government,” Wood wrote. He was “immune to the ideology and values of the Revolution,” especially its “classical conception of leadership.”66 Jefferson took to calling him “our Cataline.”

Meanwhile, the aging Jefferson, after presiding over the national political shift away from classical values, began himself to recede into the classical world. He may have helped unleash American culture, but did not necessarily like the direction the people were taking it.

First, there was built into the system a tension between elitism, with an aging aristocracy still trying to tell the rest of the country how to live, and a growing egalitarianism, under which the majority rejected such guidance. That was resolvable.

The republic had built into it a fatal contradiction: It was founded on a faith in freedom yet on the fact of slavery.

“Democratic peoples hold erudition in very low esteem and care little about what happened in Rome and Athens,”

Jackson was an anti-intellectual who knew what he didn’t like, which included secessionists.

Adams did not attend the ceremony for Jackson, recording in his diary that he did not desire to witness Harvard’s “disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”

“By the early nineteenth century, America had already emerged as the most egalitarian, most materialistic, most individualistic—and most evangelical Christian—society in Western history,”

“In many respects this new democratic society was the very opposite of the one the revolutionary leaders had envisaged.” The Revolution, he concludes, had not failed—rather, it had exceeded the expectations of those who led it.