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

by Thomas E. Ricks

Jefferson also disdained most novels, which he termed “poison” that entertained but did not instruct. He seems to have overlooked that works of fiction often can deepen one’s understanding of complex human behavior.

Jefferson emphatically wanted no establishment of religious authority or tests of belief. By contrast, the Delaware state constitution, written and adopted just thirty-five miles to the south in that same summer of 1776, required anyone holding office to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and . . . acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”15

In the context of the late 1700s, it is even a bit pugnacious: Do you think you are better than us?

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.

In the last sentence, the signers “pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour.” In other words: We will not back down. Our virtue is at stake.

Members of Congress took that vow seriously. The initial signing of the document, on July 4, 1776, was a moment of “Silence and Gloom,” Benjamin Rush would recall to John Adams. Decades later, he asked Adams in a letter, Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress, to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants?

The only moment of relief came when the portly Benjamin Harrison (attended William & Mary), a Falstaffian figure, grimly joked to the smaller Elbridge Gerry (Harvard, 1762) that “I shall have a great advantage over you Mr: Gerry when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.”

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.

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.

there eventually would be not one but two biographies of Washington published in America that were written in Latin.2

Then, 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.

Hannibal was certainly the more effective tactician—one of the greatest of all time—but Fabius must be counted the more successful strategist.

The George Washington of 1777 would not be the same man he had been in 1775. At the war’s outset, he did not understand three of its key elements: the role of the militia in the fight, the kind of war he needed to pursue, and the allied intervention that would eventually reshape the war.

There were three stages in Washington’s evolution. First, in 1775 and much of the following year, he was inclined to take the offensive. Second, after a string of stinging setbacks around New York City in the summer of 1776, he shifted to a war of posts. This interim step was, again, not a Fabian approach, but was rather a retreat into fortresses from which he would invite the enemy to bring the fight to him. American troops may not be able to meet British regulars on the open battlefield, Washington was calculating, but perhaps they could fight from behind barriers. The stunning American victory at Bunker Hill a year earlier was the model for this. But when Washington tried it in the New York area later in 1776, this approach of entrenching failed miserably. So by early 1777 he was reluctantly figuring out a third approach—that is, what an indirect, Fabian strategy might look like. He would pursue this for years, only occasionally offering battle when politics forced him to or when the British left an opening.

Effective tactics are helpful to have, but without a strategy, they can be useless, like a powerful car without a steering wheel.

What Washington’s critics did not see then, and sometimes not even now, was that being indecisive was decidedly preferable to being decisively wrong.

One of the most painful moments in Washington’s military career came at this anguished time. On November 30, 1776, he was handed a note written by General Charles Lee, who was commanding a separate force and who had seemed wary of moving it to support Washington’s. The letter was addressed to Washington’s military secretary, Colonel Joseph Reed (Princeton, 1757), but Reed was absent, and Washington, eager to learn Lee’s military plans and assuming it was an official dispatch, opened it. As he read it, he must have been horrified. What he held in his hand was a personal note from General Lee to Reed, and a highly indiscreet one. Reed, it would develop, nine days earlier had dispatched a letter to Lee that detailed the British amusement over Washington’s inept handling of Forts Lee and Washington. They “hold us very cheap in Consequence of the late Affair at Mount Washington where both the Plan of Defence & Execution were contemptible,” he wrote. And Reed knew exactly whom to blame: “An indecisive Mind is one of the greatest Misfortunes that can befall an Army—how often have I lamented it this Campaign.” You, General Lee, would not have left those troops to be captured at Fort Washington, Reed had added: “I have no Doubt had you been here the Garrison at Mount Washington would now have composed a Part of this Army”—rather than being held as prisoners of war.

the British issued an amnesty offer to the people of New Jersey. Some 3,000 would accept, signing oaths of loyalty to the king. Among them was Richard Stockton (Princeton, 1748), who thus became the only signer of the Declaration of Independence to abjure it. (To make matters worse, the malleable Stockton, who was in poor health, later would reverse his reversal and sign an oath supporting the rebels.)

Addressing the third of these questions, sorting out subordinate commanders, was a particularly onerous task for Washington. He would be horribly disappointed in different ways by three of the generals who early in the war appeared most promising: Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, who undercut him, and Benedict Arnold, who betrayed the entire cause.

Washington, to his everlasting credit, did not fail. By early in 1777, writes Kwasny, in one of the best studies of Washington’s generalship, “he clearly had abandoned the strategy of a war of posts.” Rather, he became a modified Fabian, pursuing “a more fluid war of maneuver, skirmish, and occasionally full-scale battle. As long as the British kept coming out of their camps and fighting, he could use the militia and detached regulars to inflict damage while protecting the main army.”49

The British became painfully conscious of this new American approach. “Though it was once the fashion of this army to treat them in the most contemptible light, they are now become a formidable enemy,” a British colonel in New Jersey reported to his father in England.

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

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

The Marquis de Lafayette, the young Frenchman who advised Washington and rose to high position in the American Army, also grew concerned by the critics. He wrote to Washington later that year denouncing, in a palpably French accent, those “Stupid men who without knowing a Single word about war undertake to judge You, to make Ridiculous Comparisons; they are infatuated with [General Horatio] Gates without thinking of the different Circumstances, and Believe that attaking is the only thing Necessary to Conquer. . . . who want to push You in a moment of ill Humour to Some Rash enterprise Upon the lines or Against a much stronger army.”

Washington would emerge from the war, Phelps adds, persuaded that “in republican government, virtue must always be tied to interest.”4

In sum, the British withdrawal from Philadelphia was a major defeat, if a nearly silent one.

Thomas Jefferson did not have a good Revolutionary War. As governor of Virginia, from 1779 to 1781, he was a bust.

if Washington had behaved as slowly and ineffectively during the Revolution as Jefferson did, the war could have ended with a British victory by December of 1776.

The nearby College of William & Mary was a casualty of this last major fight. The college buildings had been occupied by French troops, who converted them into a hospital for their ill and injured. They erected a huge three-story latrine on one side of the building, with a pit underneath it, thus enabling the patients to defecate without having to go up or down the stairs. The resulting stench was astonishing, reported James Tilton, a Delaware regiment surgeon assigned to tend to the American wounded sent there. He remembered that “this sink of nastiness perfumed the whole house very sensibly and, without doubt, vitiated all the air within the wards.”22

As the war faded away, Washington rejected yet another Roman model: He would not become a Julius Caesar, the general who takes over the nation. He probably could easily have done so, had he wanted to.

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.

Washington then reproached Hamilton for trying to pull the Army into domestic politics. “I will now, in strict confidence, mention a matter which may be useful for you to be informed of,” he began. Some “leading” members of the Army, he wrote, suspect that some members of Congress have tried to use the Army as “mere Puppits to establish Continental funds.” He chided Hamilton for toying with the national defense simply to raise revenue. “The Army (considering the irritable state it is in, its sufferings & composition) is a dangerous instrument to play with,” he warned.36

it is in their choice and depends upon their conduct, whether they will be respectable and prosperous or contemptible and Miserable as a Nation. . . . it is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse: a blessing or a curse, not to the present Age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn Millions be involved.

“The Militia of this Country must be considerd as the Palladium of our security and the first effectual resort,” he told the states.38 He was at war’s end a very different man from the one he had been in 1775.

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.

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 This pithy sentence may be the single most illuminating thing ever written about John Adams.

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.

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.

“Warriors who were so proud, so audacious, so terrible abroad could not be very moderate at home. To ask for men in a free state who are bold in war and timid in peace is to wish the impossible.”3

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.

In 1783, Madison, then thirty-two years old, wrote to his father about Billey’s future with a mixture of personal anxiety and political understanding. “I have judged it most prudent not to force Billey back to Va. even if could be done. . . . I am persuaded his mind is too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virga.” The nature of that “taint” was that Billey had seen freedom, Madison noted. “I . . . cannot think of punishing him by transportation merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.”

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?

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. After all, buildings can convey messages their designers may not have intended.

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.”

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

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.”

“Faction, which in Rome was ever written in bloody inscriptions, is unknown” in the United States, he asserted. “It is unknown, because the American democracies are governments of laws and not of parties.”25 Just how wrong Vans Murray was about the state of American politics would soon became evident. Violence and faction lurked around the corner.

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.”

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

Internal divisions only invited foreign intervention, Jefferson worried. He later wrote that, under the Articles of Confederation, “it could not but occur to every one that these separate independancies, like the petty states of Greece, would be eternally at war with each other, & would become at length the mere partisans & satellites of the leading powers of Europe.”39