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January 15 - March 30, 2021
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.
He was also the only one of the four never to own an enslaved human being.
Most significant of all, Adams also was the first of the four men to move toward revolt.
long before the adolescent Adams crossed the Charles River to Harvard, he was full of thoughts about how to better resist British authority. It helped that he was both bright and naturally irascible. He had been questioning authority for years. More than most men, he was born to do so.
Zabdiel Boylston, uncle to John’s mother, Susanna, was one of the most prominent physicians in colonial America, the first to perform some kinds of surgeries, and also the first to perform a smallpox inoculation—using a technique apparently learned from an African who was enslaved.
Cicero would become what the Romans called a “new man,” one who would become ennobled by eventually holding high office.
Plutarch always balances his praise of great men by emphasizing one great shortcoming. In Cicero’s case, this was vanity. “He was always excessively pleased with his own praise, and continued to the very last to be passionately fond of glory; which often interfered with the prosecution of his wisest resolutions.”14 Adams would also exhibit this flaw.
The students would know from reading Plutarch that “Catiline has plotted a dreadful and entire subversion of the Roman state by sedition and open war, but being convicted by Cicero, was forced to flee the city.”
Who is our modern day Cicero, in the face of sedition?
The fact that Catiline was a charismatic populist, calling for land reform and cancellation of debts, received less attention.
Cicero famously began his first speech against Catiline with striking urgency: “How far wilt thou, O Catiline! abuse our patience?”
“How long shall thy Madness outbrave our justice?”17
What kind of country had Rome become? Cicero asked. “There are here, among our fellow-senators, my lords, . . . men who are meditating the destruction of us all, the total ruin of this city and in fact of the civilised world.”18
“Let the disloyal then withdraw, let them separate themselves from the loyal. . . . get you gone to your unholy and abominable campaign.”20
indeed, death cannot be disgraceful to a brave man, nor premature to one of consular rank, nor miserable to a wise man.”
Julius Caesar called for mercy, saying that the Senate should not yield to anger. Rather, he said, the conspirators should be stripped of their wealth and exiled to provincial cities. Otherwise, he warned, the Senate would set a precedent of giving a consul powers that would be difficult to restrain. Cato rose in indignant response. These men conspired to burn the city, summoned the Gauls to make war on Rome, and still have an army in the field, he said, and then asked, almost incredulously, “Do you, then, still hesitate and doubt what to do with the enemies caught inside the walls?”28
Catiline among the battlefield dead.
“Cicero, it may be said, was the one man, above all others, who made the Romans feel how great a charm eloquence lends to what is good, and how invincible justice is, if it be well spoken,” writes Plutarch.
Also, he taught Romans “to prefer that which is honest before that which is popular.”
Today we would call Cicero’s self-promotion efforts over the top—for example, writing to beg a historian to write an account extolling how well he put down the Catiline’s conspiracy: “I have a very strong, and, I trust, a very pardonable passion, of being celebrated in your writings. . . . I hope you will excuse my impatience. . . . [I have] the most ardent desire of being immediately distinguished in your glorious annals.”36
Adams was conscious of his great pride, writing in his diary in May 1756, at the age of thirty, that “Vanity I am sensible, is my cardinal Vice and cardinal Folly, and I am in continual Danger, when in Company, of being led an ignis fatuus [will-o’-the-wisp] Chase by it, without the strictest Caution and watchfulness over my self.”38 But he would continue to let it run barely checked all his life, eventually doing great damage to his presidency.
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.
Robert Dodsley’s The Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education Wherein the First Principles of Polite Learning Are Laid Down in a Way most suitable for trying the Genius, and advancing the Instruction of Youth.
One major reason to study history, The Preceptor explains, is that too many people hold high opinions of figures such as Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. “They never consider them as the Authors of Misery to thousands, as laying waste Countries out of Wantonness and Ambition, spreading Desolation where-ever they came, and depriving Multitudes of what they hold most dear and valuable.”
Here is how Dodsley captures the lesson of that most crucial of events, the fall of the Roman Republic: Could Rome have been saved from Slavery, the Eloquence of Cicero, and the Virtue of Cato, those intrepid Defenders of Liberty and Law, seemed to offer fair for it. . . . Brutus and Cassius, animated by a Zeal for Liberty, endeavoured to rescue their Country from Slavery by killing the Usurper; and the Eloquence of Cicero seconding the glorious Design, gave at first some Hopes that Rome might yet see better Days.45
As the People are the Fountain of Power and Authority, the original Seat of Majesty, the Authors of Laws, and the Creators of Officers to execute them; if they shall find the Power they have conferred abused by their Trustees, their Majesty violated by Tyranny or by Usurpation, their Authority prostituted to support Violence or screen Corruption, the Laws grown pernicious through Accidents unforeseen or unavoidable, or rendered ineffectual through the Infidelity and Corruption of the Executors of them; then it is their Right, and what is their Right is their Duty, to resume that delegated
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Christianity simply did not loom as large in colonial America as it would a century later, or indeed does now in much of the United States.
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 This would change in the decades after the Revolution as elite control of American culture weakened.
what was distinctive about the Enlightenment was not a system of political thought or a set of new philosophical notions. Rather, the Enlightenment was more a process than a result.
Immanuel Kant, when asked in 1784 to define “enlightenment,” called it a “true reform in ways of thinking.”
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.”
“What was most important and really new about the Age of Reason was the sublime confidence of the intellectuals and societal leaders in the power of man’s reason,” writes the scholar William Goetzmann. “Human nature, like all other nature, was a constant that yielded to rational inquiry.”56 In other words, 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.
Pastor Jonathon Mayhew is responsible for “no taxation without representation.”
Scottish philosophers long had maintained that it is natural and right for there to be limits on the power of monarchs.
Is it really surprising this was a Scottish belief??
An eighteenth-century Scottish poet summarized the thought, Of pow’r THE PEOPLE are the source, The fountain-head of human force; Spurn’d by their Subjects, WHAT ARE KINGS, But useless, helpless, haughty things?61
The next step from there was to actively oppose their government as a matter of religious conscience. That is, if the people are ultimately responsible and if they are faithful Christians, they must oppose the government when they see its actions conflict with being a good Christian.
Indeed, such resistance to authority was “a duty, not a crime.”63
There was, he wrote, “in 1760 and 1761, An Awakening and a Revival of American Principles and Feelings, with an Enthusiasm which went on increasing till in 1775 it burst out in open Violence, Hostility and Fury.” He considered Mayhew to be among the five leading figures in this movement, the people who were “the most conspicuous, the most ardent and influential.”
It was during this time as well that Adams drafted an essay on power that restated ancient Greek views on government—that monarchy degenerates into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into anarchy.
An observation by the novelist Anthony Trollope also applies to Adams: “Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his weakness. . . . He was very great while he spoke of his country, which he did so often; but he was almost as little when he spoke of himself—which he did as often.”
he proudly told John Adams that “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
Jefferson was the only one of the first four presidents to be arguably more Greek than Roman, more Epicurean than Ciceronian.
This preference for the Greeks may have inoculated Jefferson against the stiff, Roman-like Federalism of Adams and Washington.
An entry in Fithian’s diary underscores the social aspect of learning. One Monday in March 1774, Bob Carter, then aged sixteen, “begg’d me to learn him lattin; his Reason he tells me is that yesterday Mrs Taylor told him he must not have either of her Daughters unless he learn’d Latin.”5
The purpose of education among Virginian elites was not to produce intellectuals, or even doctors or lawyers, but to form young gentlemen, and dancing was treated as just as essential as reading books.
Cicero’s Tusculum Disputations
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.
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.
The Enlightenment unfolded far differently in Scotland than in England. Uniquely, Scotland’s Enlightenment was university-based, giving its academic institutions a dynamism that English universities in particular lacked.
“I spent fourteen months” at Oxford, Edward Gibbon disapprovingly recalled. “They proved the fourteen most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.”22 Adam Smith, who won a scholarship to Oxford for graduate work after taking a degree at Glasgow, complained in The Wealth of Nations that “in the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.”23
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
