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

by Thomas E. Ricks

“Virtue” most of all declined as a cultural marker. In 1828, Noah Webster, a former editor of a Federalist newspaper, published the first edition of his famous American Dictionary, a project that had taken decades. Among his 70,000 handwritten entries, along with American novelties such as “skunk” and “squash,” was “virtue.”44 His first definition of the word was “strength.” His second was “Bravery; valor.” This was, he noted, “the predominant signification of virtus among the Romans.” But then he buried that meaning, stating that “this sense is nearly or quite obsolete.”45 Andrew Jackson would emphasize “virtue” in his farewell address of 1837, but mainly in the course of justifying his ferocious attacks on his political enemies. By the mid-nineteenth century, Gordon Wood observes, the very meaning of “virtue” had changed, and “at times seemed to mean little more than female chastity.”46