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

by Thomas E. Ricks

search for a given quotation in Founders Online, the National Archives’ wonderful digital compilation of the papers of the leaders of the early United States.

I also have chosen to use the term “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.”

Before that Tuesday night in November 2016, I had thought I understood my country. But the result of that election shocked me. Clearly, many of my fellow citizens had an understanding of our nation profoundly different from mine.

Author Thomas E. Ricks.

dozens of wonderful biographies of members of the Revolutionary generation have been published, but they tend to gloss over the educations of those people.

I embarked on an intellectual quest to try to find my way toward answering a question: What is America supposed to be, anyway?

So I read the books they read and the letters they wrote to one another about those books. While much attention has been paid to the influence of Enlightenment thinking on the founders—in particular the writings of John Locke—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.2

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.

To my knowledge, no one has written a book addressing these questions before, examining and comparing the educations of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

the 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.

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.

Jefferson and Madison’s Scottish tutors.

Scottish legal thinking was far more rooted in Roman philosophy than was English law, which was more oriented toward local precedent and tradition.

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.

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

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, studying the ancient world almost as a political scientist.

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.

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.

“Their reading in the classics was highly purposeful, adaptive and selective,” notes Meyer Reinhold, one of the pioneer scholars of this topic. Before them, he writes, the classical world was important mainly to colonial Americans preparing to be clergymen. After them, it was used to train members of the elite, especially in law and oratory.

live drama was one of the few forms of public art. 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.

Joseph Addison’s play, Cato.

Just east of the Capitol building, our Supreme Court convenes in a marbled 1935 imitation of a Roman temple, with great bronze doors at the entrance weighing twenty-six thousand pounds apiece.6

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.7

The best place to begin to understand the views of the Revolutionary generation is with a look at the word “virtue.”

But 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 founders used it incessantly in their public statements. 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.”

Published in 1909, it selected works from twice as many Greeks (Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Epictetus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes) as Romans (Virgil, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Pliny the Younger).

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.

But for the Revolutionary generation, Rome stood well in front of Athens, with the Greek world pushed to the background, seen someti...

They did on occasion look with admiration on the Greeks, but when they did, it was more often toward Sparta than Athens. They saw the Spartans as plainspoken, simple, free, and stable, while they disparaged the Athenians as turbulent, factionalized, and flighty.13

“They” are either the four subjects of this book, or American revolutionaries in general.

Their attention to Rome was itself uneven, focused heavily on the demise of the Republic in the first century bc.25 Their readings ranged over more than a thousand years of ancient history, all the way from the Iliad to Justinian’s Codex, but came back again and again to that crucial period of the decline of the Republic.

historian Bernard Bailyn concludes in his classic study of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, “was the political history of Rome from the conquests in the east and the civil wars in the early first century bc to the establishment of the empire on the ruins of the republic at the end of the second century ad.”26 It was not just their core narrative, it was their lodestar.

“the Roman Republic attained to the utmost height of human greatness.”27

Alexander Hamilton in the 34th Federalist Papers. . .

Their heroes were the orators portrayed in those books defending the Republic, led by Cato and Cicero. Their villains were those who brought it down, especially Catiline and Julius Caesar. John Adams considered Caesar a destructive tyrant, the man who “made himself perpetual dictator.”28

They were an economic elite, but a new one. They were emphatically not products of a long-standing aristocracy. Of the ninety-nine men who would sign the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, only eight had fathers who themselves were college-educated.31

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.

Teaching at America’s first colleges.

their classical knowledge ultimately steered the founders wrong on three crucial issues: First, on 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, a proposition that would be tested almost instantly during the War for Independence. Second, on 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. Third, and most troubling, was their acceptance of human bondage,

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.40

Because classicism was the cultural context of upper-crust colonial America, acting in a Roman manner was the clearest way to rise in that part of society. The best example of this is George Washington, which is surprising, because he was the least learned of the first four American presidents.

He did not have a classical education, nor even a good education of any kind. He spoke only English, and was not widely read even in that language, mainly favoring books about farming, military affairs, and political pamphlets. He never traveled to Europe.

George Washington.

“His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; . . . and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion.”5

Thomas Jefferson’s perspective on George Washington.

Jefferson was many things, but he was never a soldier, so he probably did not grasp that in military life, a mind “slow in operation” tends to be not a fault but a strength. Indeed, it was a skill Washington had acquired rather painfully in his two wars.

His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known.”7 Prudent, considerate, careful, determined, honest, and inflexible: Jefferson did not quite say so, but he was describing Washington as the American Cato, the eighteenth century’s embodiment of virtue, the very ideal of what a public man should be. Even people who might not know anything about Cato would recognize these as the traits expected of great public men.

Washington came closer to the Roman example than his peers precisely because he was a man of deeds, not of words.

Ron Chernow, in a fine study of Washington, states that “the goal of the present biography is to create a fresh portrait of Washington that will make him real, credible, and charismatic in the same way that he was perceived by his contemporaries.”11

In the America of 1775, there were only nine colleges, and out of a population of 2.5 million, there were just three thousand college graduates.14

one specialist in the history of American theater, eighteenth-century audiences expected lengthy declamations and were not put off by predictable plots. They came primed to enjoy the play’s “crisp and quotable epigrams and the beautiful expression of worthy sentiments.”

The popular play of the day, “Cato”, would not have resonated in our time.

Cato denounced Caesar as pleading for false mercy that endangered the state. For the next two decades, the men would be relentless enemies as Cato struggled to preserve the Republic against Caesar’s dictatorial ambitions.

To become an American Cato, Washington would need to become a man of recognized great virtue. Despite his lack of education, he understood that for someone of his time and place, attainment of public virtue was the highest goal one could have in life.28

Washington, the fatherless adolescent and third son for the purposes of inheritance, enjoyed no such advantage. “Justifying by virtue is a way of escaping hereditary control,” observes Gordon Wood.32 Young George Washington had something to prove, and he saw how to do it.

Washington, riding about the battlefield to try to bring some order to the chaotic scene, had several shots pass through his clothes but was not wounded.

Braddock’s big defeat against American Indians, Washington was a young (21?) officer who fought valiantly.

of a total British force of about 1,200, about two-thirds were killed or wounded, an extraordinary toll. The numbers differ in various histories because some reports included the casualties suffered by wagoneers and other civilians. The British officers were especially hard hit, with about sixty of eight-five killed or wounded, leaving the force almost decapitated. A small number of the British were taken prisoners. Their First Peoples captors marched them back to Fort Duquesne and burned some of them at the stake.60

General Braddock’s big defeat.