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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Yet again: Battles won are not wars won. In the Germantown fight Washington suffered a tactical setback but maintained his strategic advantage by steadily wearing down his foe.

In the fall of 1777, Generals Gates and Arnold (the latter had not yet defected) scored a major victory far to the north, in Saratoga, New York. This proved to be the most significant fight of the war, because it led a few months later to the formal American alliance with France. Thereafter, the British would not just be facing American rebels, but also a major European power, not just in America, but also at sea and around the world.

the British could not figure out an effective way to counter the Fabian approach. Washington faced down four British commanders during the war. As Nathaniel Philbrick puts it, “As one after the other of his British opponents, from Thomas Gage to William Howe (with Clinton and Cornwallis soon to follow), returned to England in disgrace, he had found a way, despite having lost more battles than he had won, to keep his army, and by extension his country, together.”85 Time was on Washington’s side, if he could hold the army together and not lose it in the field.

Long after the war, Washington, in a note to a subordinate, seemed to summarize the change his personality had undergone during those difficult years. “In all important matters,” he advised, “deliberate maturely, but. . . . execute promptly & vigorously.”89 Through the crucible of war he had proven himself to be the noblest Roman of them all.

One winter’s day at Valley Forge, Colonel John Brooks of Massachusetts, who had fought at Concord, White Plains, and Saratoga, confided to a friend that the Army was in worrisome shape: “In my opinion nothing but virtue has kept our army together through this campaign.”1 That sentence is comprehensible only if “virtue” is read in the eighteenth-century sense of the word, meaning public-spiritedness, or putting the common good above one’s own interest.

“A small knowledge of human nature will convince us,” Washington wrote in a report to a visiting committee of Congress, that with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle; and that, almost, every man is more or less, under its influence. Motives of public virtue may for a time, or in particular instances, actuate men to the observance of a conduct purely disinterested; but they are not of themselves sufficient to produce a persevering conformity to the refined dictates and obligations of social duty. Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good.2

Washington was sensing the limits of virtue as a driver of the new country.

To cast Washington as an astute social and political analyst may seem a stretch, until we remember that he was a master at observing and learning from experience, at the difficult task of simply perceiving what was really going on around him.

Washington’s insight would be articulated and then refined into political theory by James Madison ten years later. The two men would work closely together for a time in the 1780s, when Jefferson was off in France. One wonders if they found common ground in realizing that the neoclassical dependence on virtue was insufficient to deal with the new realities of the United States.

One of Washington’s greatest Fabian victories was bloodless, and so tends to be overlooked in most histories of the war. That quiet triumph came at dawn on June 17, 1778, when the British began evacuating Philadelphia.

after this point Loyalists could be “fairly sure of one thing: the British government no longer could or would maintain its presence, and sooner or later the rebels would return. Under these circumstances, civilian attitudes could no longer be manipulated by British policies or actions.”12

“. . . At this point” being the British abandoning Philadelphia.

Watching from outside Philadelphia that summer, Washington now knew exactly what to do and how to do it. He first ordered his militia commander in New Jersey to harass British units, slowing and fatiguing them, and to report back to him constantly.

1778.

As the British entered New Jersey, their baggage train stretched out a full twelve miles, making a long and enticing target for American militiamen.17 Meanwhile, Washington’s regulars caught up with the departing British forces in the middle of New Jersey, in a messy encounter now remembered as the Battle of Monmouth. In a kind of combined arms operation of the eighteenth century, the regulars charged the British while the militias hung on their fringes, especially denying them safe access to watering holes. This would be Washington’s last battle until Yorktown, more than three years later.

Much of the subsequent fighting in the war occurred in the south, as the British searched for more sympathetic Americans on whom to base their operations. But even in the middle colonies there would be constant nipping by irregulars at British forces, who slowly pulled back into the Atlantic ports.

With the French cruising offshore, he besieged the army of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, just to the east of Williamsburg. In large part because of effective French aid, both at sea and on land, this campaign culminated five weeks later with the surrender of Cornwallis’ force. The British army continued to hold New York City, but the war effectively was over. It would take another twenty-two months to arrive at a signed peace treaty, and many months more for both sides to ratify it.

‘He’ was General George Washington.

On Monday, March 10, an unsigned letter circulated in the camp stating that it was time for officers to stop asking Congress for their back pay and to start demanding it. If they did not get satisfaction, it advised, they should consider rebelling. The nation, it claimed, “tramples upon your rights, disdains your Cries—& insults your distresses.” It called on the officers of the camp to “Awake—attend to your Situation & redress yourselves.”28

1783.

“The Storm . . . is dispersed,” he reported to Joseph Jones, his friend in Congress, on March 18.33 “The Virtue, & patient forbearance of the Army, on this, as upon every other trying occasion which has happened to call them into action, has again triumphed.” He had put down “a most insiduous attempt to disturb the repose of the Army, & sow the seeds of discord between the Civil & military powers of the continent.”34 Washington’s quashing of military dissent would resonate down through the decades, underscoring that the American armed forces are subordinate to civilian authority, most especially when the officer corps disagrees with Congress.

“The storm” being Washington’s officers and soldiers being fed up Congress hadn’t paid them what they were owed. They were long overdue.

Surprisingly, despite this incident, Hamilton retained Washington’s confidence. Many years after the war, the general would defend Hamilton to John Adams, stating that the young man had served as his “principal & most confidential aid” and that he had found him “enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and his judgment intuitively great: qualities essential to a great military character.”37

Hamilton’s role in trying to leverage the army to get the Continental Congress to start collecting taxes, which would get the Army paid.

Washington issued a warning to his countrymen. We have won the war, he told them in a message issued from his headquarters, but now you must secure the peace:

In this same letter to the states, he also gave a surprisingly long and explicit bow to the Enlightenment, seeing it as a kind of philosophical nest for the fledgling republic: the foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy Age of ignorance and superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of Mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period—The researches of the human Mind after social happiness have been carried to a great extent, the treasures of knowledge acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislators, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the establishment of our forms of Government.

George Washington soon after it was clear the colonies had won the Revolutionary War.

Washington’s last Roman role would become his finest. He had rejected becoming a Caesar. Instead, he would become another Cincinnatus—that is, the Roman soldier who, according to legend, saved his country in 458 bc. Roman tradition states that he was plowing his fields when he was called to lead the rescue of a Roman army that was besieged southeast of the city by an army of Aequians. He was given the temporary title of dictator. He triumphed in just sixteen days, then resigned his office and returned to his waiting plow.

There were few historical examples of military leaders willingly giving up power. And to the contrary, they were conscious of the relatively recent example of Oliver Cromwell, who a century earlier had led the way in establishing an English republic, only to become a dictator who passed power to his inept son. Washington owned a biography of Cromwell; Madison put in his copybook some damning lines about the man by Alexander Pope; and Adams referred to him frequently, writing once that “there never was a greater self deceiver than Oliver Cromwell.”39

It is possible that too much is made of Washington’s decision to step down—but probably not. It was a magnificent deed of renunciation and was recognized as such at the time. He, like the rest of his class, approached it from the perspective of classical republicanism. For him, it was always about virtue—seeking it and being esteemed by those who had it.

Washington understood, as Adams did not, that especially in a new republic, these large gestures would resonate with the people. In this nation, the people were not the governed, they were sovereign, which meant their needs must be addressed. Adams never liked that fact or even really understood it, and that failure would haunt his presidency. It was at about this point, just as the war was ending, that Benjamin Franklin grew exasperated with Adams, who was with him in France for peace talks with the British. In a letter to Robert Livingston, secretary of foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, Franklin summarized Adams memorably: “He means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”47

The Articles of Confederation, which governed the United States from 1781 to 1789, are regarded nowadays as an oddity, a misfired contraption. One single-house legislature, the U.S. Congress, was responsible for running the federal government, but it lacked the power to raise money, except by requesting the states to send it. It was not really a national government, but rather more like the European Union is today, a weak body unable to compel member states.

one modern view is that the Articles really deserve a bit more credit. Under them, the new United States became an alliance of republics. As such, the new confederation was “as strong as any similar republican confederation in history,” concludes Gordon Wood.1

As a permanent structure, the Articles of Confederation did not work. But as a means of transition, a bridge into the future, it served a purpose and, arguably, succeeded brilliantly.

A peaceful outcome was not a given. The Revolutionary generation would have had in mind Montesquieu’s warning that the great first hurdle of nationhood was surviving the shift from war to peace. In his analysis of what ruined Rome, he stressed the difficulties victorious soldiers had in becoming compromise-oriented politicians:

Paine himself is an interesting problem. He is probably the most unfairly neglected of the founders. He played a huge role in the Revolution but is seen, both then and now, as an outsider. Unlike the first four presidents, Paine was not building a society he planned to run. Rather, he was offering a running critique of events, from a point of view skeptical of power and authority.

Hamilton again argued for distance from the classical world: Neither the manners nor the genius of Rome are suited to the republic or age we live in. All her maxims and habits were military, her government was constituted for war. Ours is unfit for it, and our situation still less than our constitution, invites us to emulate the conduct of Rome, or to attempt a display of unprofitable heroism.8

In 1784, believing that the Articles of Confederation system was doomed, Madison began to contemplate the problems of ancient Greek confederacies.

What had brought down ancient republics? What made them so fragile? Were there gaps between their theory and practice? Did they have inherent flaws that caused them to fail? Were these avoidable? Was Montesquieu correct in thinking that republics had to be small? If so, could American government be structured in a different way that would make it more sustainable?

James Madison’s initial thinking after concluding the Articles of Confederation weren’t sustainable. That we needed a new form of government.

Noah Feldman’s biography observes that Madison was doing something novel: Aristotle in his Politics had already engaged in comparisons between different sorts of constitutional arrangements, and Montesquieu had tried to offer a general theory of the relationship between the “spirits” of different polities and the way they were organized. But as a systematic effort to identify the core working elements of all the confederacies known to have existed, Madison’s document was unprecedented.15

In March 1784, Madison asked Jefferson, then preparing to sail to Europe to help in trade negotiations (and later to succeed Benjamin Franklin as the American envoy to France), to ship to him books on the history of ancient systems of government, especially confederations.

Jefferson responded with trunks full of books for Madison’s “course of reading,” shipping a total of about two hundred volumes to his younger friend and also inviting Madison to “make free use” of the extensive library he had left behind in Monticello.18

Madison sat in the library at his father’s house near Orange, Virginia, its three tall windows looking west across a long descending pasture toward a beautiful vista of the Blue Ridge. And he stayed in that room and read for months and months. It may be just an accident that Jefferson’s Monticello and Madison’s Montpelier, for all their similarities, such as Doric columns, bricks, and fine views, have a fundamental difference in orientation: Jefferson’s creation faces east, toward the flatter part of Virginia, while Madison’s inherited house looks westward, toward the mountains and, beyond them, the future of the nation.

Most famously, Jefferson in creating Monticello sought to conceal the face of slavery as much as possible, placing it underground. His house sat atop a tunnel that held the kitchen, the smokehouse, and other areas where his enslaved people worked. A dumbwaiter and a revolving shelved door further minimized their presence around his dining table.

In this rambling constitutional study, Adams surveyed all sorts of governments in the ancient and modern worlds, and concluded, as others did, that the most effective and sustainable form is one that is “a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, extolled by Polybius.”20

In his history of the rise of Rome, Polybius attributes the power of the city in part to its culture of loyalty and virtue, but also to the mixture of powers within the Republic. He saw the consuls bringing an element of monarchy and the Senate an aspect of aristocracy, but the people also holding power in the form of tribunes who could veto acts of the consuls and Senate. “The best constitution,” he wrote, is “that which partakes of all these three elements.” This view deeply influenced Adams and many other Americans of the Revolutionary generation.21

He further recommended an independent judiciary and legislature, with no mixture of the executive and legislature (as, for example, is the case in Britain, with members of Parliament becoming cabinet members). Moreover, he applauded having more than one legislative body, in order to hamper the passage of laws in the heat of the moment.22 As he put it in a letter at about the same time, “Human Passions are all unlimited and insatiable.”23 He also advocated having a strong executive with the power to constrain the other two branches of government.

John Adams.

Adams reminds us, “Pythagoras, as well as Socrates, Plato, and Xenophon, were persuaded that the happiness of nations depended chiefly on the form of their government.”24

The Shays affair effectively set the table for the Constitutional Convention by highlighting the ineffectiveness and fragility of the existing system. “It may, in fact, be difficult to overemphasize the degree to which this rebellion jolted American political reflections,” writes the historian John Agresto.33 Shays and his comrades ultimately would be given a silent memorial in the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, which among other things guarantees the states protection against both foreign invasion and “domestic Violence.”

Even those running the government were growing impatient with the inept functioning of the American system. Early in 1787, Jay reported to Jefferson in Paris that “our Governments want Energy, and there is Reason to fear that too much has been expected from the Virtue and good Sense of the People.”37 He told John Adams that “our Government is unequal to the Task assigned it, and the People begin also to perceive its Inefficiency.”38

As the historian Daniel Howe puts it, the founding generation was “fed up with the Articles of Confederation and their reliance on uncoerced public virtue.”

The system shaped by classical republicanism was not working, he asserted. “Republican Theory” was one thing, he wrote, but “fact and experience” have proven another. Not only was the structure of the United States flawed, but so was the classical conception behind it, he argued. The time had come to accept that “all civilized societies are divided into different interests and factions, as they happen to be creditors or debtors—Rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants or manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property &c &c.”44 But if “different interests and factions” were inevitable, then faction would have to be accepted and interest would have to be seen not as sinful but as natural. What would a government designed to accommodate them look like?

Madison also told George Washington that “to give a new System its proper validity and energy, a ratification must be obtained from the people, and not merely from the ordinary authority of the Legislatures.”46 In these letters he laid out the basic elements of what would become known as the Virginia plan, which in turn would be the core of the eventual Constitution.

The higher the stakes, the more the Revolutionary generation tended to turn for wisdom to the Romans and Greeks. American classicism crested during the 1780s, as Americans pondered the future shape of their government. Yet by the end of the Constitutional Convention, the tide had begun to turn against such faith in ancient wisdom. And by the time of the state meetings to decide whether to ratify the proposed Constitution, the current was running out hard.

Foremost among that group was Montesquieu, who accounted for some 60 percent of references made to Enlightenment writers by American political commentators of the 1780s.1 One reason for the Frenchman’s ubiquity is that both sides, Federalists and anti-Federalists, would find in his works passages to support their positions.

“That group” being “enlightenment thinkers”.

surprisingly unclassical: a Constitutional Convention that would devise what one historian calls “a new basis of republican government, a way of achieving a viable self-government that did not require virtue as its base.”2 There would be no mention of “virtue” in the new foundational document that emerged. In a way, the drafters used classical thought to escape its influence.

In his research, he had been struck by the lack of records of how the governments of ancient states were established, and thus seized the opportunity to leave behind a thorough accounting.

“His” is James Madison.