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February 17 - March 21, 2021
Unless we can return a little more to first principles, & act a little more upon patriotic ground, I do not know . . . what may be the issue of the contest. —George Washington to James Warren, March 31, 1779
Where did they get their political ideas, their political vocabularies?
What ideas and attitudes would they take from college to adulthood and into the public arenas of Revolutionary America?
the fact is that these men did not study Locke as much as they did the writings of the ancient world, Greek and Roman philosophy and literature: the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives; the philosophical explorations of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle; and the political speeches and commentaries of Cato and Cicero.
though raised by my parents to revere Thomas Jefferson, I increasingly found
We are a nation fundamentally dedicated to equal standing before the law, yet also have developed a political system in which one of the two major parties always seems to have offered a home to white supremacists, up to the present day.
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.
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 philosophy embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Finally I examine 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 virtue, by which they meant public-mindedness. In
I’ll explore the moral and intellectual void that opened as classical ideals yielded in the nineteenth to the rise of religious evangelism and commercial culture, and consider if we might develop a new sense of public-spiritedness in our own time.
One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”4 It is a question that still hangs in the air more than two centuries later.
They grew into distinctly dissimilar men: Washington a stiff-necked soldier; Adams a brilliant, honest, self-absorbed crank; Jefferson a dreamer of liberty who lived in hypocritical luxury off the sweat of captive humans; Madison already with one foot in the next generation, perhaps more of an American than a Virginian, and an unapologetic politician. Like Alexander Hamilton, he was more skeptical than his elders of the verities of the Enlightenment, with its core faith in human improvement.
“Their reading in the classics was highly purposeful, adaptive and selective,” notes Meyer Reinhold, one of the pioneer scholars of this topic.
The classical world was far closer to the makers of the American Revolution and the founders of the United States than it is to us today.
Classicism wafted even in the air of colonial romance. When John Adams and Abigail Smith courted, they used classical pseudonyms in their letters—Lysander for him, Diana for her.
Thomas Jefferson’s front hall at Monticello greeted visitors with, among other things, a marble statue of Ariadne, the princess of Crete who led Theseus out of the minotaur’s labyrinth.
“Republicans,” a name derived from Latin, or “Democrats,” a word of Greek origin.
The proverbs offered in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack often were updated versions of Greek and Roman sayings. “He does not possess Wealth, it possesses him,” for example, comes from the Greek philosopher Aristippus.
In upstate New York, it is possible to drive in one day from Troy to Utica to Rome to Syracuse to Ithaca, while passing through Cicero, Hector, Ovid, Solon, Scipio Center, Cincinnatus, Camillus, Romulus, Marcellus, and even Sempronius, who didn’t exist—he was a fictional character in Addison’s Cato.
for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life. Back then, it actually was masculine. It meant putting the common good before one’s own interests.
The word “virtue” appears about six thousand times in the collected correspondence and other writings of the Revolutionary generation, compiled in the U.S. National Archives’ database, Founders Online (FO), totaling some 120,000 documents.11 That’s more often than “freedom.”
Great Books of the Western World, which grew out of the University of Chicago in the 1940s, emphasizes the Greeks even more heavily, with four times as many of them as Romans.
“The history of Athens abounds with instances of the levity and inconstancy of that unsteady people,” Edward Wortley Montagu warned in 1759.
Samuel Adams (Harvard, 1740), desired that their city of Boston would become a “Christian Sparta.”
Gross
Scottish Enlightenment
David Hume,
Many of those teaching were recent graduates of Scottish universities, educated there in the new skeptical, probing way of thinking coming out of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Jefferson and Madison were the most influenced by these young Scots, Adams somewhat, and Washington least. Even in Puritanical New England, Adams picked up the disruptive new attitudes about freedom of religion and expression emanating from this remarkable new generation of Scottish intellectuals. Here they developed their ideas of liberty, of freedom, and of the proper (“natural”) relationship of government to man.
Third, and 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, and so sustained a system that was deeply inhumane and rested on a foundation of physical and sexual abuse, including torture.
On this last, it is vital to remember that, despite the Southern images of moonlight and magnolias, of gracious living and mint juleps on the porch, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all came from what the historian Annette Gordon-Reed calls “a society built on and sustained by violence, actual and threatened.”
Some of George Washington’s “famous false teeth,” notes the historian Henry Wiencek, came from enslaved humans, and had been pulled from their living jaws.
At Jefferson’s Monticello, Wiencek adds, “A small boy being horsewhipped by a visitor was just part of the background of the bustling plantation scene.”
“Roman slavery was a nonracist and fluid system where the places from which slaves came varied considerably from one period to another,” concludes one historian.42 Roman slavery could be very cruel, but generally, states legal historian David Bederman, it was “not as harsh and exploitative as its modern analogues.”
Washington “was So ignorant, that he had never read any Thing, not even on military Affairs: he could not write A Sentence of Grammar, nor Spell his Words.” And so on.
no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion.”
it was a skill Washington had acquired rather painfully in his two wars. In leading combat operations, slow and steady thinking, followed with energetic execution, often is more effective than a series of hasty moves that tend to exhaust a force and expose it to attack.
every consideration was maturely weighed;
Washington as the American Cato, the eighteenth century’s embodiment of virtue, the very
They came primed to enjoy the play’s “crisp and quotable epigrams and the beautiful expression of worthy sentiments.”
his countenance seldom relaxed even into a smile.
Stoic
Cicero, who had been elected consul the previous year, exposed the conspiracy of Catiline, a populist patrician who had stood for consul three times, only to be rejected each time.
He also may have sensed that eighteenth-century “virtue” was essentially male—the root of the word is vir, the Latin word for man.
More than almost all his peers, he became able to study a situation, evaluate its facts, decide which ones were meaningful, develop a course of action in response to work toward a desired outcome, and verbalize the orders that needed to be issued.
Gist was to be George’s teacher in the art of the frontiersman.
Iroquois scouts working for Washington
the impervious darkness occasioned by the close shade of thick wood.
Desertions became a major problem. He ordered the building of a huge gallows, towering nearly forty feet, as a warning to his men. “I am determined, if I can be justified in the proceeding, to hang two or three on it, as an example to others,” he wrote.69 Two weeks later, he did just that, ordering the executions of two deserters—William Smith, a twenty-year-old saddler, and Ignatius Edwards, twenty-five, a carpenter described as “a great Dancer & Fidler.” He pardoned twelve others who were convicted with them, with some of those reprieved being flogged instead.70 “They were proper objects to
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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 in Braddock’s spectacular failure what can happen to a general who disregards informed advice and fails to adapt his approach to the circumstances.
“Discipline is the soul of an army.”
Gordon Wood, Washington “always understood power and how to use it.”76 What could be more Roman than the prudent exercise of power?
Zabdiel Boylston, uncle to John’s mother, Susanna, was one of the most prominent physicians in colonial America, the first to perform some kinds of surgeries, and also the first to perform a smallpox inoculation—using a technique apparently learned from an African who was enslaved. He also was a member of the Royal Society.
