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January 15 - March 30, 2021
I am fond of George Washington’s apoplectic denunciation of an “ananominous” letter written by a mutinous officer during the Revolutionary War. Seeing this reinforces our need to understand that the past really is “a foreign country” where they did things differently, and where words sometimes carried different meanings.
While much attention has been paid to the influence of Enlightenment thinking on the founders—in particular the writings of John Locke—the fact is that these men did not study Locke as much as they did the writings of the ancient world, Greek and Roman philosophy and literature: the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives; the philosophical explorations of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle; and the political speeches and commentaries of Cato and Cicero.
George Washington’s ability to observe and learn seems to me underappreciated. James Madison’s contributions, especially his designing gridlock into the American system, also seem to me to be undervalued. John Adams, by contrast, began to strike me as having an inflated reputation in recent years, with insufficient attention paid to his unhelpful commentary during the War for Independence and also his disastrous presidency. Likewise, though raised by my parents to revere Thomas Jefferson, I increasingly found myself disturbed by his habitual avoidance of reality.
Washington, despite his lack of a classical education, came at different times to embody three of the great Roman role models—Cato, Fabius, and Cincinnatus—while avoiding the temptation of becoming an American version of Julius Caesar.
“Synthesis demands regard for complexity,”
One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”4 It is a question that still hangs in the air more than two centuries later.
Madison, in order to prepare for the drafting of the American Constitution, would spend years engaged in a methodical study of ancient political systems, especially the histories of Greek republics. He was aided greatly by the trunkloads of books shipped to him from Paris by Jefferson. It was partly because of him that the writing of the Constitution became the high-water mark of classical republicanism in America—but also because of him that the pursuit of virtue, the very core of the old viewpoint, was abandoned.
Joseph Addison’s Cato was, after all, one of the most popular plays in pre-Revolutionary America, and indeed the favorite dramatic work of the camp’s commander, General George Washington.2
The colonials named their horses and their enslaved humans after classical figures. A bit down the hill from Jefferson’s house, a stable housed Caractacus, Tarquin, Arcturus, and Diomede.2 This naming habit resulted in asides in correspondence such as one in which Adams instructed his wife that “Cleopatra ought not to be fed too high—she should have no Grain.”3 Among the enslaved, one who worked on contract for Madison was called Plato, while Jefferson held title to Jupiter, Caesar, and Hercules, and Washington to Neptune and Cupid.
The ancient world was present in their lives in ways that, because they gave the country its shape, echo down the corridors of time, mainly in ghostly ways that people today tend not to notice. Our “Senate” meets in “The Capitol”—both references to ancient Rome. Most of its members are either “Republicans,” a name derived from Latin, or “Democrats,” a word of Greek origin.5 Just east of the Capitol building, our Supreme Court convenes in a marbled 1935 imitation of a Roman temple, with great bronze doors at the entrance weighing twenty-six thousand pounds apiece.6 To the west in the Federal
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In upstate New York, it is possible to drive in one day from Troy to Utica to Rome to Syracuse to Ithaca, while passing through Cicero, Hector, Ovid, Solon, Scipio Center, Cincinnatus, Camillus, Romulus, Marcellus, and even Sempronius, who didn’t exist—he was a fictional character in Addison’s Cato.9 Downstate, overlooking New York City’s great harbor, towers a statue of a Roman goddess, though few today might recognize Miss Liberty, or Libertas, as such. Her upheld torch soars 305 feet above the saltwater lapping her little island.
But for the Revolutionary generation, virtue was the essential element of public life. Back then, it actually was masculine. It meant putting the common good before one’s own interests.
The word “virtue” appears about six thousand times in the collected correspondence and other writings of the Revolutionary generation, compiled in the U.S. National Archives’ database, Founders Online (FO), totaling some 120,000 documents.11 That’s more often than “freedom.”
for the Revolutionary generation, Rome stood well in front of Athens, with the Greek world pushed to the background, seen sometimes as a bit obscure and impractical. “It is impossible to read in Thucydides, his account of the factions and confusions throughout all Greece, . . . without horror,” John Adams wrote.12
They saw the Spartans as plainspoken, simple, free, and stable, while they disparaged the Athenians as turbulent, factionalized, and flighty.13 They knew that the Greek historian Polybius had criticized the people of Athens for being like a ship without a commander.
Samuel Adams (Harvard, 1740), desired that their city of Boston would become a “Christian Sparta.”18
The sole ancient dramatist widely read in early America was not a Greek. Rather, it was Terence, a Roman comic playwright who is little read today.
Their readings ranged over more than a thousand years of ancient history, all the way from the Iliad to Justinian’s Codex, but came back again and again to that crucial period of the decline of the Republic. That decades-long process of republican erosion provided their political context, their point of reference, and much of their civic language.
Alexander Hamilton, for instance, flatly asserted in the thirty-fourth of the Federalist Papers that “the Roman Republic attained to the utmost height of human greatness.”27
John Adams considered Caesar a destructive tyrant, the man who “made himself perpetual dictator.”28
In 1722 in one of those Letters, notes another historian, they “first gave unreserved endorsement to free speech as being indispensable to ‘Liberty, Property, true Religion, Arts, Sciences, Learning, Knowledge.’”
Their academic diet consisted mainly of the best-known works of Latin literature, history, and philosophy, with some Greek works thrown in, usually for the more advanced students.33
Many of those teaching were recent graduates of Scottish universities, educated there in the new skeptical, probing way of thinking coming out of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Jefferson and Madison were the most influenced by these young Scots, Adams somewhat, and Washington least. Even in Puritanical New England, Adams picked up the disruptive new attitudes about freedom of religion and expression emanating from this remarkable new generation of Scottish intellectuals. Here they developed their ideas of liberty, of freedom, and of the proper (“natural”) relationship of government to man.
Third, and most troubling, was their acceptance of human bondage, which would prove disastrous to the nation they designed. Often seeing it a natural part of the social order, they wrote it into the fundamental law of the nation, and so sustained a system that was deeply inhumane and rested on a foundation of physical and sexual abuse, including torture.
Some of George Washington’s “famous false teeth,” notes the historian Henry Wiencek, came from enslaved humans, and had been pulled from their living jaws.
Americans, and especially Southerners, were fond of noting that both the Greeks and Romans embraced systems of slavery. But in leaning on classical justifications, they neglected the fact that their system of slavery tended to be harsher than ancient forms. A particularly malign aspect of this was the racial justification for American slavery.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, that black people, whether enslaved or free, were social outcasts who were not citizens and in fact could never become so. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that they were “beings of an inferior order” who “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Thomas Jefferson also was long perplexed by Washington’s ability to make his way in the world without having the sort of education then considered essential for a public life. He recognized that there was something unusual in the man. “His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; . . . and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion.”5
One of the more thoughtful commentators on Washington, Adrienne Harrison, herself a former Army officer, observes that early in his military career, Washington had a “propensity for rashness.” He had to learn the hard way to operate more deliberately.6
“Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known.”7 Prudent, considerate, careful, determined, honest, and inflexible: Jefferson did not quite say so, but he was describing Washington as the American Cato, the eighteenth century’s embodiment of virtue, the very ideal of what a public man should be. Even people
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But his chroniclers, in pursuing this humanizing mission, in fact seek to undo Washington’s work of a lifetime, which was to discipline his turbulent emotions, build an image of lofty distance, and most of all, establish a reputation for valiant leadership, unselfish virtue, and unyielding honor—that is, someone with the makings of a great man.
Anecdote about Hamilton’s challenge to Morris to greet Washington in a friendly way. It doesn’t go well. P. 17
In the America of 1775, there were only nine colleges, and out of a population of 2.5 million, there were just three thousand college graduates.14
In colonial America, the typical young white boy got at best a year or two of schooling from four to six hours a day, which was enough to learn to read a bit and to add and subtract.
During the eighteenth century, Cato was the very embodiment of virtue.22 “Think Cato sees thee,” was one of Franklin’s sayings in his “almanacks.”
Catiline, a populist patrician who had stood for consul three times, only to be rejected each time. After the third such rebuff, Catiline and his followers apparently planned a violent takeover of the city.
He also may have sensed that eighteenth-century “virtue” was essentially male—the root of the word is vir, the Latin word for man.29 To be virtuous was to be a public man with a reputation for selflessness.
“Justifying by virtue is a way of escaping hereditary control,” observes Gordon Wood.32 Young George Washington had something to prove, and he saw how to do it.
As Plutarch wrote of Cato, “He was resolute in his purposes, much beyond the strength of his age, to go through with whatever he undertook.”
“I am heartily concerned, that the officers have such real cause to complain,” he wrote to Governor Dinwiddie. “I really do not see why the lives of his Majesty’s subjects in Virginia should be of less value, than of those in other parts of his American dominions; especially when it is well known, that we must undergo double their hardship. I could enumerate a thousand difficulties that we have met with, and must expect to meet with, more than other officers who have almost double our pay.”
The skirmish was short and shocking. Soon ten Frenchmen lay dead or dying. One fled, while the surviving twenty-one surrendered. Among the dead was Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, the leader of the French party. “The Indians scalped the Dead,” Washington noted in his diary.43 Washington’s party suffered just one dead and two or three wounded. The fight lasted just fifteen minutes, yet marked the start of a conflict that would last almost a decade and flare around the world—the French and Indian War. The French would claim that Jumonville was on a diplomatic mission to tell the British to
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It isn’t clear whether Washington knew that in signing his name to the damp paper, he was confessing to what the document termed the “assassination” of Jumonville.
Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Autobiography years later that when he met with Braddock about getting the government of Pennsylvania to send wagons and supplies, “he had too much self-confidence, too high an Opinion of the Validity of Regular Troops, and too mean a One of both Americans and Indians.”
Braddock “slighted & neglected” the tribal scouts, “and they gradually left him.” When Franklin expressed some doubts to Braddock himself, he added, the general responded dismissively that “these Savages may indeed be a formidable Enemy to your raw America Militia; but, upon the King’s regular & disciplin’d Troops, Sir, it is impossible they should make any Impression.”49
One can only wonder if he was familiar with a comment of Cicero’s, in an echo of Xenophon, that “of all sources of wealth, farming is the best, the most agreeable, the most profitable, the most noble.”
Yes, he later would be a general who became president. But before that, he was an officer who became a local politician.
Know yourself, and know those you are fighting. This is a more complex proposition than it may seem, as it requires introspection, strategic thinking, and reliable intelligence. Study the terrain and make it your friend. As circumstances change, be ready to change views and abandon assumptions. Listen to dissenters and know how to weigh alternatives.
In strategic terms, he had seen events that would resonate with him decades later during the War for Independence. First, he had seen the French appear to be on the cusp of victory in the war, only to lose years later. Second, he had witnessed an army of British regulars shattered in a battle with people born in North America. Third, he had seen in Braddock’s spectacular failure what can happen to a general who disregards informed advice and fails to adapt his approach to the circumstances.
His conclusion as a commander, he wrote in 1757, was that “Discipline is the soul of an army.”
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?
