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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Madison found an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. Samuel Blair, in his overview of the college from the previous decade, emphasized that students were free to disagree with their teachers:

Witherspoon, for his part, divided the subject into “Ethics” and “Politics.”61 The former might be taken as being about governing the individual, while the latter is about governing society. Today such a course might be considered something like an overview of political and social science.62 Back then it would have been seen as instruction on how to be a virtuous person and how to cultivate a society of virtuous individuals—with all the import that virtue carried in the eighteenth century.

A dome, unknown to the Greeks but the characteristic form of Roman architecture, eventually would top the home he designed.71

Monticello.

Nor was Harvard immune to the growing republicanism of the times. In 1773, it ceased the practice of listing members of a given class by their family’s standing, and began to do so alphabetically.

There are several different Thomas Jeffersons—the Latinate lawyer, the flowery wooer of other men’s wives, the slave owner looking to increase his profits, the direct and powerful stylist of the Declaration. He is often a bit pompous, maintaining his distance both socially and emotionally. With Abigail Adams and some other married women he found attractively intelligent, he is tenderly seductive. But with Madison, he is conversational and lucid. It is in his letters to Madison that we probably come as close as we ever can to glimpsing the real Jefferson, or at least the least guarded one.

While Washington still was seeking favor in that empire, while Jefferson quietly was studying law, and while Madison was just a boy, Adams raised the banner of rebellion.

Jefferson had found Henry a bit backwoodsy. “His manners had something of the coarseness of the society he had frequented: his passion was fiddling, dancing & pleasantry. He excelled in the last,” Jefferson wrote.12 This observation was not just Jefferson being a haughty young colonial gentleman. Henry was notorious in the Hanover area as an idler, more fond of hunting, fishing, and dancing than of work. Jefferson was more impressed by Henry’s public speaking. He wrote later that he “heard the splendid display of mr Henry’s talents as a popular orator. They were great indeed; such as I have never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.”13

Jefferson would never be an admirer of Henry’s character. The two would become antagonists during Jefferson’s term as governor of Virginia, and Jefferson after that developed what he called a “mixed aspect” about the rambunctious Henry.

I think he was the best humored man in society I almost ever knew, and the greatest orator that ever lived. He had a consummate knolege of the human heart, which directing the efforts of his eloquence enabled him to attain a degree of popularity with the people at large never perhaps equalled. His judgment in other matters was inaccurate in matters of law it was not worth a copper: He was avaritious & rotten hearted. His two great passions were the love of money & of fame: but when these came into competition the former predominated.16

Thomas Jefferson on Patrick Henry. He admired other aspects of Mr. Henry, but not his knowledge or integrity.

Ten London banking houses failed in mid-1772, leading to a credit crunch. During that contraction, surviving London banks called in their outstanding loans to American planters, among others. This hit especially hard among Virginians, who were responsible for some £1.4 million—that is, about half the total debt in the colonies to British merchants.17 To raise the cash to pay their debts, they flooded the market with tobacco, which in turn caused its price to drop by about half, making their finances even worse.18

A Summary View of the Rights of British America.19

What is most significant about the pamphlet is its flatly militant tone. As Pauline Maier puts it, “Because Jefferson refused to be constrained by the conventions of British politics, including that which insisted ‘the king can do no wrong,’ A Summary View became the first sustained piece of American political writing that subjected the King’s conduct to direct and pointed criticism.”24

A Summary View of the Rights of British America written in 1774.

the British Parliament weeks later declared the colony of Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. When one side in a conflict declares war, common sense would say that a state of war exists. By that reasoning, the American Revolution began then, in February 1775, rather than sixteen months later, when the Second Continental Congress announced to the world its recognition of the fact of war.

when the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, its members looked around and saw few men with martial experience. One, sitting among them, pointedly wearing his old militia uniform, was Colonel George Washington of Virginia. He soon was asked to sit on one committee to raise an army, and on another to finance it.

Washington was to become, in his physical presence, the embodiment of the national defense, quite literally. He was, at first, the sole member of the United States Army.

He had just been given command of a nearly nonexistent army whose mission was to take on the world’s greatest military power. There was no American navy.

George Washington.

Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a possitive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions.47

Contrary to his image, Jefferson was not really a literary man. He had prodigious talents and a boundless range of interests, yet his tastes in literature were surprisingly pedestrian, as his prose often was.

The Declaration is remarkably un-Jeffersonian in its style.

The reason for this departure in his style, he explained years later, is that he tried to write in simple, clear terms because he considered the Declaration to be “an appeal to the tribunal of the world.”11

he was writing not for his elite peers, but for the people.

Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Paine, whose essay Common Sense had appeared six months before Jefferson drafted the Declaration and had quickly become a national sensation, appearing in some twenty-five editions within the year.12 In the pamphlet, Paine eschewed classical citations and allusions, relying more on references to the Bible and images from farm life.

Paine was emphatically not about the past. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he proclaimed in a postscript to Common Sense appended a month after its first appearance.

He set out in the Declaration, he asserted, not just to present his own views but to give “expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” But that was disingenuous. Jefferson really was attempting something far more difficult. He was employing a plain American idiom while attempting to move the American mind into the future. He was pushing them hard, and far beyond any existing consensus. One month before the Declaration was passed, only four colonies had instructed their delegates to support independence. But the Declaration’s appearance would do much to change that.

At twenty-two lines, the second is the longest paragraph in the document. The first sentence of this paragraph ends with the assertion that among the “unalienable rights” of these equal men are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the essence of Epicureanism.

The language here also makes explicit Jefferson’s divergence from Locke, who in his “Second Treatise on Civil Government” had used the phrase, “life, liberty and estate” (that is, property). Jefferson here replaced that last word with “happiness”—and in the process encouraged a social revolution.17

Jonathan Israel summarizes the alteration: Where in Locke property is the basis of social division into classes, Jefferson’s formulation marginalized the principle of social class. The landless could no longer be regarded as either so marginal or so subordinate as in Locke. Where Locke nurtured a negative conception of liberty, centered on protection of property, for Jeffersonians liberty was a positive, developmental concept to be upheld and advanced by the state and its agencies.18

Jefferson moves on in the next sentence to demolish the notion of the divine origin of government. Governments are made by men, he states, and receive their powers from “the consent of the governed.” Although he does not mention it, that idea originated with the Scottish philosopher George Buchanan almost two hundred years earlier, starting a train of thought that was carried by Scottish tutors to their American pupils. It means that all power comes from the people—a notion that would be reinforced eleven years later by the opening phrase of the Constitution, “We the people.”

Jefferson then delivers the sum of this indictment. The American people have weighed the character of the king and found him wanting. He just is not good enough for them. “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Reading this, one can almost hear the applause of the Scottish political philosophers.

They were conscious that they represented only part of the American population, faced many internal opponents, and possessed no army to speak of—and that they were publicly challenging the world’s leading power. Jefferson’s old tutors would have been proud: Nineteen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration were of Scottish or Ulster Scot extraction.25

echo came, of course, in the Gettysburg Address. Midway through the nation’s most severe test, President Abraham Lincoln, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the battle that had ended there on July 4, 1863, began by invoking Jefferson’s words: “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”33 Lincoln owned a little leather-bound notebook in which he had pasted newspaper clippings as well as the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.34

As Pauline Maier observes, part of the power of this section of the Declaration is that it’s more about “what we ought to be” rather than “what we are.”37 As such, it continues to speak to us now, issuing a challenge across more than two centuries.

The paradox of Washington is that this least classically educated of the first four presidents was also the most Roman of them in character, and was seen as such by his contemporaries.

he never learned Latin. Nor is there a record of him reading many of the ancient works in translation.

Washington.

In his youth, he had been interested in Caesar and had read a bit about him. Later, as an adult, he sought to model his public persona upon Cato—upright, honest, patriotic, self-sacrificing, and a bit remote.

Washington.

fighting for American independence, Washington had a new Roman role thrust upon him, that of the celebrated general Fabius, who defeated an invader from overseas mainly by avoiding battle and wearing out his foe. Finally, after the war, he would play his greatest role, the commander who relinquished power and returned to his farm, an American Cincinnatus.

All of the first four presidents possessed copies of Plutarch’s Lives, as did most educated people of the time. Adams, Jefferson, and Madison cited him frequently. John Adams once mourned to a friend that “we are so bigoted to Thucidies Livy, Plutarch and Tacitus, Hume Robertson and Gibbon that we read little else.”5 There is no equivalent book today with which familiarity would be assumed by all members of a political elite.

there is no evidence that he ever read the book, as he never quotes Plutarch in his surviving writings—his diary, speeches, orders, and letters.

Washington.

Astute chroniclers of military operations therefore focus not just on battles but on what actually wins wars.

When Washington wrote that letter, he had not yet developed a strategic understanding of the conflict. Lacking that, he in that note slipped back to tactical matters, as generals sometimes do when they are overwhelmed or new to the fight. Until he began to understand the war at the level of generalship, he would not know how to prosecute it and so would not grasp the effect the militias could have if used well. That understanding would come as he reflected on the nature of his war and began to adapt his operations to reflect those recognitions. He was better at this sort of observation and contemplation than were most of his contemporaries, and indeed than most generals are, both then and now. It was Washington’s greatest military skill. It may not have been genius, but it was close.

The Americans first were driven off Long Island and then northward across Manhattan. Washington committed a series of blunders and was lucky to escape the two battles with as many men as he did. He wrote of the fight in Manhattan that he was stunned to see his men “running away in the most disgraceful and shamefull manner, nor could my utmost efforts rally them or prevent their flight.”24 This is a general at odds with his troops, blaming them too much in order to avoid the hard fact that he had not led them well.

Washington had tried to fight the British in two different ways, and both had failed. His army was melting way. His senior subordinates doubted him. The people were losing heart.

Early-winter of 1776-77.

“General Washington as every defender ought has followed directly the contrary conduct, by indeavoring to Skirmish with the Enemy at all times, and avoid a general engagement.”56

Alexander Hamilton, as articulate as he was brash, joined Washington’s staff in March 1777.

he laid out the logic of waging indirect war: I know the comments that some people will make on our Fabian conduct. It will be imputed either to cowardice or to weakness: But the more discerning, I trust, will not find it difficult to conceive that it proceeds from the truest policy, and is an argument neither of the one nor the other. The liberties of America are an infinite stake. We should not play a desperate game for it or put it upon the issue of a single cast of the die. The loss of one general engagement may effectually ruin us, and it would certainly be folly to hazard it, unless our resources for keeping up an army were at an end, and some decisive blow was absolutely necessary; or unless our strength was so great as to give certainty of success. Neither is the case. America can in all probability maintain its army for years, and our numbers though such as would give a reasonable hope of success are not such as should make us intirely sanguine. Hamilton concluded with a marvelously succinct summary of American strategy: “Our business then is to avoid a General engagement and waste the enemy away by constantly goading their sides, in a desultory teazing way.”60

Hamilton had an odd kind of genius about waging war. In this, as in so many other ways, good and bad, he was the opposite of John Adams. Two years earlier, when the war was barely underway, he had foreseen how the Americans should fight. Hamilton wrote in an essay that The circumstances of our country put it in our power, to evade a pitched battle. It will be better policy, to harass and exhaust the soldiery, by frequent skirmishes and incursions, than to take the open field with them, by which means, they would have the full benefit of their superior regularity and skill.62

The strategic key was the Continental Army. If it remained intact as an effective fighting force, the American Revolution remained alive. The British army could occupy Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and it did. The British navy could blockade and bombard American seaports with impunity, and it did. The Continental Congress could be driven from one location to another like a covey of pigeons, and it was. But as long as Washington held the Continental Army together, the British could not win the war, which in turn meant that they would eventually lose it.66

66. “The strategic key was the Continental Army”: Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Vintage, 2002), 130–31.

Washington was implementing a smart variation on the Fabian strategy. With hindsight it is clear that there existed a strong strategic parallel between the circumstances of the ancient Roman situation and the American Revolution. In both cases, the defender was facing an invader from overseas who had to cross land and sea barriers in order to bring in additional supplies and troops.68 Those hurdles made attacking the invader’s supply lines and exhausting his troops an especially productive approach. Supplies were harder for him to find, and replacements had to come from afar. That point was made repeatedly in the small bookshelf of the military instruction manuals that became part of Washington’s traveling headquarters.69

Adams also was 180 degrees off in judging the benefits of foreign military assistance. He advocated that the United States have “no military Connection” with France and “receive no Troops from her.”73 Had his advice been followed, the decisive Battle of Yorktown—at which French ships proved essential and French troops helpful—might have turned out differently or never happened at all.

Washington certainly was aware of such sentiments, and may have shared some of them himself. A naturally aggressive commander, he would always be a reluctant Fabian. “He was a fighter,” states the British scholar Marcus Cunliffe. “He erred not through timidity, which would have proved fatal in the long run, but through pugnacity.”75