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

by Thomas E. Ricks

“I then went out a Volunteer with Genl Braddock and lost all my Horses.”65 In truth, he had little to show for it. What he wanted in life, he told the governor plainly, was “Honor and Reputation in the Service”—the noblest of goals from a classical perspective, which he had absorbed as an aspiring member of Virginia’s ruling class.66

He also won election as a delegate to Virginia’s House of Burgesses, the colony’s elected legislative body. He took his seat a month after his wedding, on his twenty-seventh birthday, and served there for fifteen years. He would not do much as a member, but it is significant that he repeatedly stood for public office and was consistently reelected, and then he was chosen to be part of Virginia’s delegation to the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774. Yes, he later would be a general who became president. But before that, he was an officer who became a local politician. He was a member of the House of Burgesses far longer than he was a general at war.

Which would prove more influential in American history, Washington’s practical education on the frontier or the study by Adams, Jefferson, and Madison of classical history, philosophy, and rhetoric? It is impossible to say. The answer is probably that both were essential. His college-educated comrades learned what was needed to found and design a new kind of nation; Washington, in a different but equally daunting school, learned what was necessary to liberate it and lead it toward stability. More than any other founder, concludes Gordon Wood, Washington “always understood power and how to use it.”76 What could be more Roman than the prudent exercise of power?

The dominant political narrative of colonial American elites was the story of how the Roman orator Cicero put down the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome. John Adams aspired to be the Cicero of his time—that is, the key political figure in late-eighteenth-century America.

Harvard College, had been in existence for over a century when John Adams enrolled there in 1751.

Adams, born in 1735, was 16 when he enrolled.

Breakfast was two hunks of bread with butter and a half pint of beer. The college had its own brewhouse to keep the students’ mugs filled. Noon brought a dinner with meat, baked or boiled, except on Saturdays, when it was salted fish. Supper was either a meat pie or a pint of milk and a big biscuit.

Adams idolized Cicero, the great Roman orator. As an old man, he would write that, “I have read him, for almost 70 years and seeme to have him almost by heart.”10

To Adams, Cicero’s life must have looked like a career plan. Here was a man who, lacking wealth, noble birth, or military glory, rose to the top of Roman society through his powerful rhetorical skills.

Among all the founders, it was Adams who seems most to have consciously used Cicero as a model for his life.

Adams always lived modestly, especially when compared to the other three presidents. He was accustomed to chopping his own firewood.

One issue that concerned Enlightenment thinkers was who was the greater man, Cicero or Cato? Montesquieu thought Cato was. As regards to Cicero, he concluded, His genius was superb, but his soul was often common. With Cicero, virtue was the accessory, with Cato, glory. Cicero always thought of himself first, Cato always forgot about himself. The latter wanted to save the republic for its own sake, the former in order to boast of it.39 If Adams was a Cicero, Washington was a Cato—a comparison that would frustrate Adams later in life. For the Revolutionary generation, silent virtue almost always would be valued more than loud eloquence.

A cultural historian, Howard Mumford Jones, concludes that from 1775 to 1815, religion had less influence in American life than it did in any later such forty-year period.49

Immanuel Kant, when asked in 1784 to define “enlightenment,” called it a “true reform in ways of thinking.”53 To be sure, there were commonalities in what was thought about. Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, “To be enlightened was to be filled with hope.”54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was “superstition, intolerance, tyranny.”55

they thought it possible to use reason and observation to discern the eternal laws of nature and then to use that understanding to aid human progress.

Early enlightened people.

In his magisterial study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay states that Montesquieu invented sociology in The Spirit of Laws, that Edward Gibbon founded the modern writing of history with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and that Adam Smith did the same for economics with The Wealth of Nations.57

Adams criticized himself constantly in his diary. One reason for this may have been that throughout his life, he seems not to have acquired any genuine mentor or personal lodestar. Washington had his older half brother Lawrence, and later Christopher Gist on the frontier. Jefferson had George Wythe. Madison in turn had Jefferson.

Adams wrote that despite studying law, he didn’t really know much about local Massachusetts laws: “I know much less than I do of the Roman law.”77 He immersed himself in the works of Cicero and other ancient Romans—Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius. His library eventually would amount to over three thousand books, with the ancients looming much larger than did modern writers, of whom he appears only to have dipped into Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Addison, and Swift.78

For Adams, education was always a means to an end. For a smart, driven young man from a modest background, books about government, politics, and law were the road to reputation, honor, and power.

Jefferson was the only one of the first four presidents to be arguably more Greek than Roman, more Epicurean than Ciceronian.

generally speaking, Jefferson “was more partial to the Greek than the Roman literature; and among the Greeks, the Athenians were, in all respects, his chosen people.”4 In his tastes and cast of mind, Jefferson was ahead of his time. Both these inclinations, toward ancient Greece and especially its Athenians, were a departure from the eighteenth-century norm, but would become fashionable in the nineteenth. This preference for the Greeks may have inoculated Jefferson against the stiff, Roman-like Federalism of Adams and Washington.

Not surprisingly, given Jefferson’s years of being taught by Douglas and Small, two Scots, his views would come to reflect Scottish thinkers of the time. The historian Ralph Ketcham detects in Jefferson’s thinking “the basic influence . . . of Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers.”17 This Scottish influence would remain with him throughout his life, most notably in its emphasis on testing ideas against observation through one’s own senses.

Scotland’s influence on American history was profound and remains underappreciated.

In the early eighteenth century, Scotland was a poor country, isolated in the northwestern corner of Europe. Yet in the subsequent decades it achieved a high literacy rate and enjoyed an intellectual explosion, with, as noted above, Scots more or less inventing the fields of modern economics and geology, as well as eventually setting off the Industrial Revolution with the steam engine.

By 1750, according to some estimates, 75 percent of Scots could read, compared to 53 percent in England. Scotland’s literacy rate may have been the highest in Europe.19

The Scottish institutions led the English-speaking world in having their faculty members specialize in one or two subjects, instead of making them responsible for teaching the university’s entire curriculum. Edinburgh made this change in 1708; Glasgow followed in 1727.25

Scottish universities were remarkably cosmopolitan for their time, far more integrated into the European intellectual world than were their English peers, which by law required oaths of religious allegiance.

“many Scottish lawyers in the seventeenth century still went to France to complete their law training rather than to England.” That’s significant in the context of classicism because much more than English law, French jurisprudence had its roots in ancient Rome.

Scottish legal thinking deferred less to precedent than the English did, and was more open to classical principles and judgments based on reason.

some 211 men who had college or university degrees from Scotland emigrated to America between 1680 and 1780, with many of them landing in tobacco country on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. That region received more graduates from Scottish institutions than from Oxford and Cambridge. Likewise, more Americans enrolled at the University of Glasgow during the colonial period than went to either Oxford or Cambridge.55

The story of the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment and the transmission of its ideas to America is fundamental to the history of American thought.”62

In 1767, Jefferson, without any fanfare, transitioned into practicing law. Two years later he was elected to the House of Burgesses. Perhaps as a consequence of his new political position, his reading turned from philosophy to governance. He ordered a stack of books from T. Cadell, a London bookshop, among them John Locke’s On Government and the works of Montesquieu.83

he would declare that “I too am an Epicurean.”91 He considered the ancient Greek to have given us the “most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients, as frugal of vicious indulgence, and fruitful of virtue as the hyperbolical extravagancies of his rival sects.”92 When one seeks to understand Jefferson, it is almost always helpful to look to Epicurus.

vital to remember what Jefferson did not know or do. He would not bear arms in the War for Independence. He criticized slavery repeatedly in his life but never did much to end it. Nor did he ever personally experience the American frontier, which is odd. Washington had traveled deeply into it, and Jefferson’s own father rode all over Virginia’s frontier, but Jefferson would never go beyond Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, just a day’s ride west of his home.94

Of the first four presidents, James Madison was the one most influenced by Scottish thinking of the time, which led him to the Enlightenment and from there to Roman and Greek history and philosophy.

Montesquieu constituted a bridge between the Enlightenment and the classical world. In his study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay finds that “Montesquieu was the most influential writer of the eighteenth century.” The Frenchman’s thinking had an impact from France to Russia to Italy, Gay adds, but most of all in Scotland.

Montesquieu’s impact remains all around us, pervasive yet often unseen, in the form of modern liberal democracy.

advocated constitutionalism, the preservation of civil liberties, the abolition of slavery; gradualism, moderation, peace, internationalism, social and economic progress with due respect to national and local tradition. He believed in justice and the rule of law; defended freedom of opinion and association; detested all forms of extremism and fanaticism; put his faith in the balance of power and the division of authority as a weapon against despotic rule by individuals or groups or majorities; and approved of social equality, but not to the point at which it threatened individual liberty; and of liberty, but not to the point where it threatened to disrupt orderly government.6

Montesquieu

Madison’s decision to go to distant Princeton “an act of near-treason to Virginia.”13 Madison said later that with his fragile health, he wanted to avoid the swampy, even pestilential climate of Williamsburg. He also may have been put off by the Virginia college’s decaying reputation—it was, reports one historian, “in a dissolute and unenviable state.”14

King’s College in New York, now Columbia University. King’s was the most Tory of any college in the colonies, having been founded by Anglicans in conservative reaction to Princeton and Yale.18

Unlike much of Virginia’s gentry, Madison was never seduced by the pastimes of gambling, boozing, and horseracing.

Young Madison was a good match for the young college, which led American higher education at the time in both educational progressivism and political activism. Its leaders expressly looked beyond educating ministers to preparing men to run their society.

Like the Scottish universities, it was religiously tolerant. The college’s founders had stated “that those of every religious Denomination may have free and equal Liberty and Advantage of Education in the said College any different Sentiments in Religion notwithstanding.”22

Princeton.

Madison must have reveled in colonial Princeton. As one biographer phrases it, the college “smoked with rebellion.” One visitor to the campus was perplexed to find that the young men, whom he had expected to be preparing for the ministry, plunged into “discussing . . . the most perplexing political topics.”26 As another Madison biographer put it, “The College of New Jersey in Madison’s day was the seedbed of sedition and nursery of rebels Tory critics charged it with being.”27

The College of New Jersey of 1769 was “a provincial carbon copy of Edinburgh,” concludes Douglass Adair, a specialist in the intellectual history of the founders.34 The resemblance was in large part attributable to one dynamic man, John Witherspoon, the Scottish-born president of the college. Witherspoon in just a few years, states one of Madison’s biographers, had “remade the college into a major outpost of the Scottish enlightenment.”35

“Witherspoon put the College of New Jersey at the head of higher education in America, where it remained at least until the revitalization of Yale under Timothy Dwight at the end of the eighteenth century and the renaissance of Harvard early in the nineteenth.”40

Princeton, Witherspoon wrote a speech describing the college’s approach. The curriculum was the classical one of Greek and Latin languages, philosophy, history, and mathematics. But he also was making room for the teaching of science, as well as English and French literature, at the time considered daring moves.

He also was a progressive about discipline. He informed his audiences that he did not believe in flogging his students: “No correction by stripes is permitted.” Rather, he said, the students are governed by “the principles of honor and shame.”

John Witherspoon, president of Princeton when James Madison attended.

All the teaching, he said, was done by himself and three tutors,

pale, sickly, and small, standing a few inches above five feet and weighing less than 140 pounds.48 He was slight even by the standards of his own time. The writer Washington Irving, encountering him years later, would write, “Ah! poor Jemmy!—he is but a withered little apple-John.”49 Madison was extremely discreet about his health, but many years later would allude to his seizures in autobiographical notes, stating that “causes preventing him from entering the Army, viz his feeble health, and a Constitutional liability, to sudden attacks, somewhat resembling Epilepsy, and suspending the intellectual functions.”50

Madison’s fellows noticed almost immediately his intense studiousness.51