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

by Thomas E. Ricks

In 1821, Jefferson, fearful that imposing federal decisions about slavery on the Southern states would lead to war, cast the issue in classical terms: “if Congress has a power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the states, within the states, it will be but another exercise of that power to declare that all shall be free. are we then to see again Athenian and Lacedemonian confederacies? to wage another Peloponnesian war to settle the ascendancy between them?”14 That was indeed exactly what would happen four decades later, when a new Confederacy, priding itself on its warrior skills, emerged to challenge the more urban North.