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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Hamilton also considered John Adams to be incompetent and unequipped for the tasks of the presidency, though presumably Adams’ reluctance to give Hamilton a top position in the Army played some role.

Adams, for his part, would later write of Hamilton that he possessed “all the Vanity and Timidity of Cicero, all the Debauchery of Marc Anthony and All the Ambition of Julius Caesar.”8

Jefferson’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1801, is a statement of an opposition party taking over.

The will of the majority would prevail, but “the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”

Thomas Jefferson, that most unmilitary of presidents, did something that is often forgotten: He introduced and signed into law a bill to establish the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.20 The new school soon would illuminate one path toward nonclassical higher education in America, with a curriculum that, by the 1820s, featured civil and military engineering, mathematics, French, chemistry, and geography.21

Henry Adams, a great-grandson of John Adams, would write in one of his histories that “the West Point engineers doubled the capacity of the little American army for resistance, and introduced a new and scientific character into American life.”22

“I thought I had made a good exchange . . . of honors & virtues, for manure.”25 Given his deeply held classical perspective and his equally intense self-esteem, Adams could conclude only that the American people, having rejected him, lacked sufficient virtue. “The Virtue and good Sense of Americans, which I own I once had some dependence on, and which have been trumpetted with more extravagance by others, are become a byword,” he mourned.26

Putting that project aside, he retreated into rereading a biography of Cicero. There he found eerie parallels between the decline of the Roman Republic and the condition of the United States. “I Seem to read . . . the History of our own Country for forty years past. Change the Names and every Anecdote will be applicable to Us.”33

John Adams setting aside the writing of his autobiography. This is a nice illustration of human beings reading to much of history into our present condition.

As the historian Linda Kerber notes in an aside, Adams had an image of himself as “The Last Roman.”36 He was stuck in time. It is probably fortunate for him that he never produced a finished memoir. It would only have diminished his reputation further, had he written it in the tone he used years later in a letter to Jefferson: “How many Martyrdoms must I Suffer?”37

the Federalists, realizing that to survive they would have to act like a party, formed more than two hundred chapters of a new Washington Benevolent Society.55 These were, writes Gordon Wood, “ostensibly charitable organizations but in reality arms of the party.” Yet even this effort was halfhearted, he adds, because “they saw themselves as the wise, natural rulers of society, and thus found it virtually impossible to conceive of themselves as an opposition party.”56

was too late to save the Federalists. A new social order, stripped of classical republicanism, and even opposed to it, was emerging in America. The Federalists rejected it, and it in turn rejected them. In the following decades the party slowly would evaporate, absent from the ballot box, but still present for a while in the judiciary.

In 1807, for example, Theophilus Parsons (Harvard, 1769), the Federalist chief justice of Massachusetts, ruled that not all citizens were equal before the law in the case at hand, a slander charge, because “rank and condition” affected the degree of injury caused by act.57 The judge seems not to have understood that Ame...

Burr was, Gordon Wood concludes, a man of secrets and lies. The biggest difference between him and the founders was not ideological. Rather, it was that he just did not care about the things they cared about. “One searches Burr’s papers in vain for a single thoughtful letter about political philosophy or government,” Wood wrote. He was “immune to the ideology and values of the Revolution,” especially its “classical conception of leadership.”66

Meanwhile, the aging Jefferson, after presiding over the national political shift away from classical values, began himself to recede into the classical world. He may have helped unleash American culture, but did not necessarily like the direction the people were taking it. Rather than change with the times, he reverted to the ways of his youth, to his classical pursuits, especially the Greeks, favoring Homer over Virgil, for example. His granddaughter reported that in his last years, “He went over to the works of Eschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.”72

This after he retired as president and James Madison was elected.

At the age of sixty-nine, he was still on horseback every day, he noted, but walked little, “a single mile being too much for me.” As for politics, he said, “I think little of them, and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.”75

Thomas Jefferson.

Because of slavery, fears of a civil war bubbled constantly under the surface. In his second inaugural, Jefferson had conceded that some feared that by expanding the country, his Louisiana Purchase “would endanger our union.” He countered, Madison-like, that “the larger our association, the less it will be shaken by local passions.”4 As would become evident some fifty-six years later, Jefferson and Madison were wrong.

he claimed that he had been warning the country for some “fifty years” about the pitfalls it faced, only to be disregarded.

“[he]” is John Adams in reference to our acceptance of slavery in the new nation.

he despised the most famous book with that word as its title, Plato’s Republic. He considered the great Greek philosopher an obscure mystic.7

“[he]” is Thomas Jefferson.

It was no secret to his contemporaries that Jefferson had been influenced far more by the philosophers of the ancient world and of the Enlightenment than he had been by Christian beliefs.

“I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ’76. to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.”12

“I” is Thomas Jefferson lamenting the Missouri Compromise and it’s Tennessee cut-off between slave (south) and free (north). Most interesting here is that he identifies himself as, “the generation of ‘76”; and not when the Constitution was ratified.

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.

South Carolina’s William Smith chimed in with another Southern theme, that the Romans, when a republic, had endorsed slavery, but lost their freedoms when they incited slave rebellions. “No human efforts can ever abolish slavery,” he assured the Senate.15

One chronicler counts some seventy violent incidents between members of Congress in the three decades after 1830.16

A traveler in Virginia in May 1833 went out of his way to visit Madison because, he wrote, he wished to visit “almost the last of the Romans.” He found the former president lying in his bed in a thick silk robe, reading a book, and observed that Madison had realized the “happy old age that Cicero has so touchingly and beautifully described.”19 Madison died three years later.

“Democratic peoples hold erudition in very low esteem and care little about what happened in Rome and Athens,” he wrote in his celebrated study, Democracy in America. “What they want to hear about is themselves, and what they ask to be shown is a picture of the present.”20 But then Tocqueville himself may have been unsympathetic to Greco-Roman studies, having failed in classics as a schoolboy.21

Alexis de Tocqueville.

The Enlightenment also was falling into disrepute. In Europe, the disappointments of the Age of Reason—most notably, the butchery of the French Revolution—led to less adulation of rationality and more of feeling. The smoke, slums, and labor abuses of the Industrial Revolution also led some people to question the centrality of reason and to a new appreciation of nature. From these feelings emerged nineteenth-century Romanticism.

The great English Romantic poets—Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Coleridge—all went Greek, each in his own way. “We are all Greeks,” Shelley mandated. “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.”22 Shelley was not correct in this, but accuracy was not the point of such passionate enthusiasm.

The last president to feel thoroughly at home in the classics was the crotchety John Quincy Adams, a former professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard who, before taking his seat in Congress, had spent months reading Cicero for two hours a day.

Jackson, though a slaveholder and cotton planter, responded with a powerful rejection of such sentiments, shocking the Southerners present by flatly toasting, “Our Federal Union. It must be preserved.”25 Later, in a formal rejection of nullification, Jackson stated that, “The Constitution of the United States . . . forms a government, not a league.”26 That last word would resonate with anyone familiar with the debates around the time of the writing of the Constitution that examined the leagues and confederacies of the ancient Greek republics.

After being reelected, Jackson was invited to visit Harvard to receive an honorary doctorate of laws. John Quincy Adams, appalled, asked the president of Harvard if the offer could be withdrawn. “Why, no,” came the democratic reply. “As the people have twice decided this man knows enough to be their ruler, it is not for Harvard College to maintain that they are mistaken.”27 Adams did not attend the ceremony for Jackson, recording in his diary that he did not desire to witness Harvard’s “disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”28

Americans in the early nineteenth century—at least white ones—began to enjoy a competitive free market in three crucial areas: commerce, politics, and religion. In sharp contrast to the ways of Europe, all three of those realms were unregulated, non-hierarchical, and driven by individual decisions. As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “You pays your money and you takes your choice!”30 That may be the most American sentence ever written.

The few Federalists still around turned up their noses at the new men of religion, often self-selected and relatively uneducated, and more moved by the inner spirit than by the written word. Thomas Green Fessenden wrote a satire that ridiculed these “bawling, itinerant, field and barn preachers.” He continued: A stupid wretch, who cannot read, (A very likely thing indeed) Receives from Heaven a calling; He leaves his plough, he drops his hoe, Gets on his meeting clothes, and lo, Sets up the trade of bawling.32

“By the early nineteenth century, America had already emerged as the most egalitarian, most materialistic, most individualistic—and most evangelical Christian—society in Western history,” writes Wood. “In many respects this new democratic society was the very opposite of the one the revolutionary leaders had envisaged.”

Given the option to do so, Americans in the nineteenth century abandoned the rationalist secularism of the Revolutionary generation. In 1775, there was one minister for every 1,500 Americans. In 1845, there was one for every 500—a tripling of the ratio.38

This new religiosity led some to question the morality of heeding examples from pagan Rome. The phrase “In God We Trust” would appear, not in Latin but in English, on American coins in the middle of the nineteenth century.40

“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

In opposing the spirit of the times, the South clung to the ancient world to defend the institution of slavery. The origins of this lay early in Aristotle’s Politics, where there is a short passage, almost an aside, that, as one historian put it, had “a far greater influence on nineteenth century America than it ever did on ancient thought.”54 Discussing the basic elements of the structure of society, such as family and village, Aristotle stated that “barbarians . . . have never yet risen to the rank of men, that is, of men fit to govern; wherefore the poets say, ‘Tis right the Greeks should govern the barbarians.’” A bit later, he added that the master holds his place not because he is more skilled at the tasks at hand. Rather, he explained, “This authority is founded on the general superiority of his character.”55 These passages, comments one historian, made Aristotle “virtually a sectional American hero. . . . Whenever a writer wished to stress the natural hierarchy of races and the ineradicable differences between types of men, he rushed straightaway to Aristotle’s Politics.”56

the whole history of the world proves that this is far from being the case. In the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, where the spirit of liberty glowed with the most intensity, the slaves were more numerous than the freemen. Aristotle, and the great men of antiquity, believed slavery necessary to keep alive the spirit of freedom. Yet even in this unhappy matter, classicism began to take a back seat to resurgent Christianity. The final line of defense for slavery was not ancient philosophy but the Bible. As Dew wrote, “When we turn to the New Testament, we find not one single passage at all calculated to disturb the conscience of an honest slaveholder.”58

Thomas Dew, president of William & Mary from 1836 to 1846.

Twenty-four years after President Jackson stepped down, another frontiersman, the very different Abraham Lincoln, moved into the White House. Like Jackson, he lacked a classical education, but he had immersed himself in two great reservoirs of the English language—the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Lincoln vowed to prevail in that war, even if, he said in his second inaugural address—one of the most powerful speeches in American history—it meant that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

Well into the twentieth century, Yale College maintained a requirement that all students pass a basic Latin examination. Former president William Howard Taft, a member of the Yale Corporation, had stood in the way of dropping it. But he died in 1930, and the requirement followed him to the grave a year later.67

I have learned in researching this book that America is a moving target, a goal that must always be pursued but never quite reached.

I think the founders would be appalled by how money has come to dominate American politics,

We should drop the bizarre American legal fiction that corporations are people, enjoying all the rights of citizens, including unfettered campaign donations as a form of free speech.

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 reminded America of a lesson it had forgotten about the public good—a phrase that occurs over 1,300 times in Founders Online. Health is a public good—which is one reason everyone should have access to health care. In the longer term, so are education, transportation infrastructure, the environment, and public safety. These are the things that come under “the general welfare” of the people that is mentioned twice in the Constitution—the preamble and Article I, Section 8.