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

by Thomas E. Ricks

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 moment had come, he continues, to consider whether “the vices could, through wise contrivance, be made to do the work of virtues.”40 Thinking through this apparent paradox would beco...

In February 1787, Madison worried that the Confederation government was nearing collapse: the present System neither has nor deserves advocates; and if some very strong props are not applied will quickly tumble to the ground. No money is paid into the public Treasury; no respect is paid to the federal authority. Not a single State complies with the requisitions, several pass them over in silence, and some positively reject them. The payments ever since the peace have been decreasing, and of late fall short even of the pittance necessary for the Civil list of the Confederacy. It is not possible that a Government can last long under these circumstances.43

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?

the Virginia plan, which in turn would be the core of the eventual Constitution.

“the now widely accepted view that Madison was the most astute, profound, and original political theorist among the founding fathers.”47

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.

In addition, Madison’s account is not entirely reliable. The historian Mary Sarah Bilder demonstrated in an intricate 2015 study that Madison fiddled with his notes on the Constitution all his life, combining some speeches, revising others, and omitting some of his comments that would be politically embarrassing if revealed, such as his desire in 1787 to constrain the powers of the states.5

Pierce Butler of South Carolina worried about excessive executive power, asking, “Why might not a Cataline or a Cromwell arise in this Country as well as in others?”

James Wilson, a Scottish-born lawyer from Philadelphia, warned against having a multi-headed presidency: “Three will contend among themselves till one becomes the master of his colleagues. In the triumvirates of Rome first Caesar, then Augustus, are witnesses to this truth. The Kings of Sparta, & the Consuls of Rome prove also the factious consequences of dividing the Executive Magistracy.”

Madison had the ear of the conventioneers. “Every Person seems to acknowledge his greatness,” recalled one delegate, Georgia’s William Pierce (attended William & Mary). He continued: He blends together the profound politician, with the Scholar. In the management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention, and tho’ he cannot be called an Orator, he is a most agreeable, eloquent, and convincing Speaker. From a spirit of industry and application which he possesses in a most eminent degree, he always comes forward the best informed Man on any point in debate. . . . He is easy and unreserved among his acquaintance, and has a most agreeable style of conversation.

The Amphictyonic League was a familiar subject to them, cited often as a possible model for restructuring the government of the colonies. One historian, reviewing the early American record, moaned that the Amphictyonic Council was “a parallel used almost ad nauseam during the colonial period, . . . commended as a force for interstate good will.”

He believed that it was regionalism, not differing sizes of states, that most threatened the future of the Union. “The great division of interests in the U. States,” he said, according to his notes, “did not lie between the large & small states; It lay between the Northern & Southern.”23 In the long term he was right, unfortunately. But the solutions the conventioneers devised to placate the South and keep it part of the country, especially giving constitutional protections to the institution of slavery, would seven decades later lead the nation to civil war.

“From the day he entered politics,” they conclude, “the energies of James Madison were involved in continental rather than state problems. . . . His nationalism was hardly accidental.”24

Madison would lose on a point he considered key, that of giving Congress the power to veto state laws.

But no one got everything they wanted from the Constitution. When considering the document, it is useful to see it as a kind of peace treaty between the states.29

Classicism would recede later in the convention, but it still would surface on occasion, most notably in the Southern defense of slavery.

Here the founders’ reliance on the ancients was at odds with their other great influence, the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu and Locke had both questioned slavery, but more in puzzlement than in flat-out denunciation, though Montesquieu came close when he wrote sarcastically that “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow, that we ourselves are not Christians.”31

Princeton’s John Witherspoon, who had signed the Declaration of Independence and would sit in the New Jersey meeting that gave that state’s assent to the Constitution, was a leading advocate of liberty, yet he owned two slaves who labored in the hundreds of acres around his country house, Tusculum. At the same time, he admitted two free blacks to Princeton in the 1770s.33

That said, there was one very powerful part of the Constitution that would resonate through the ages. Its three most essential words stand at the very beginning of the document: “We the people.” It is the people, not the states or the federal government, that hold ultimate power. As James Madison would later write, “If we advert to the nature of republican government, we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.”

Jefferson seemed to have a different sense of the world when he was in Paris with the philosophes than he did when he was in rural Virginia, where he expressed views that tended to closely mirror “those of his planter brethren,” as one historian phrases it.36

Jefferson would base his design of the capitol of Virginia on that shrine in Nîmes. While secretary of state, he would become deeply involved in the neoclassical design of the new capital of Washington, DC. Those acts alone would have earned him a place in history. As Gordon Wood puts it, “Almost single-handedly he became responsible for making America’s public buildings resemble Roman temples.”39

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”41

Yet unlike Jefferson, both Madison and Hamilton believed that ratifying the proposed Constitution, with all its flaws and compromises, was far more desirable than continuing the government under the Articles of Confederation.

Hamilton and Madison, the younger founders, differed from their elders in their relationship to classicism. They knew the ancient texts, but had less faith in the classical values propounded there. Some twenty-three of the eighty-five Federalist Papers quote or reflect classical authorities, and all of them were published under the pen name Publius.46 There are twice as many references to Greeks as to Romans, mainly because of Madison’s interest in the governance of ancient Greek republics.47

As early as 1775, Hamilton had mused in a letter that “it is not safe to trust to the virtue of any people.”

“We must take man as we find him,” he had argued. “A reliance on pure patriotism has been the source of many of our errors.”49 Reading that phrase raises an image of Hamilton and Washington conversing in a military tent on a dark night during the war on the thorny topic of the limits of virtue and patriotism.

Madison’s most extraordinary contribution would be his debut, Federalist 10, published on November 22, 1787. In it, he attacked the conventional classical republican view that to pursue one’s own interest was to violate public spirit.

No, Madison responded. Do not waste your energies fighting party and faction. They will always be there. “The causes of faction cannot be removed,” he stated, which means that “relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”54 The way to do that is to harness its energies by involving “the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.”

In other words, use one man’s interest against another’s. The more interests that are in play in the political arena, the smaller the chance that one intense passion will prevail. “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”

Madison also was borrowing a bit from Montesquieu, who wrote that, “Constant experience shows us, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it. . . . To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.”56

In the new nation, knowledge would be seen not as a good in itself, but as a tool, to be judged by its usefulness, which would become the new American measure of things.

Smith pointed across the room at Singletary. “My honorable old daddy there won’t think that I expect to be a Congress-man, and swallow up the liberties of the people. I never had any such post, nor do I want one.”66

In Federalist 41, Madison mulled the existence of a standing army, saying it might be necessary but also should be watched most carefully. The lesson in the back of his mind was the ancient one: “the liberties of Rome proved the final victim to her military triumphs.”70

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. . . . It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to controul the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

Henry went on to portray the proposed Constitution as dangerous. “I see great jeopardy in this new Government. I see none from our present one.” The Articles of Confederation had worked admirably, he maintained:

Madison fired back. It was not the actions of the few, he contended, but of the many that most threatened the stability of the republic. “On a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.”80 Madison sparred with Henry for weeks. But it took a toll on him. After one debate, Madison took to his bed for three days, perhaps with one of his epileptic-like seizures. Jefferson would salute Madison’s skill in responding to “the fervid declamation of Mr. Henry.”81

Jefferson had drafted the more affecting Declaration, but Madison played a central role in the more practical Constitution.

At the end of 1788, Washington wrote from Mount Vernon to a Revolutionary War comrade that “it is my most earnest wish that none but the most disinterested, able and virtuous men may be appointed to either house of Congress: because, I think, the tranquility and happiness of this Country will depend essentially upon that circumstance.”

Partisanship emerged stealthily. No one wanted to admit to it, and so no formal political organizations emerged as such. There were no conventions or primaries. Rather, early in the decade, loose groups began to form, mainly in opposition to the growing power within the Washington administration of Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795. Political parrying took the form of slashing personal attacks on the morals and ethics of emerging opponents, often describing them as disloyal conspirators. Some of this surfaced in squabbles between cabinet members. But it became public in the pages of the fiercely partisan newspapers of the day, as they battled over the defining issues of the decade—Hamilton’s plans for the federal government, the proper response to the Whiskey Rebellion, the meaning of the French Revolution, and finally, the Federal counterattack on the newspapers themselves, in the form of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In his first inaugural address, delivered in New York City on April 30, 1789, Washington promised to be a good steward of “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”5 Washington uttered the words, but they almost certainly were drafted by James Madison, America’s first great political insider.

Another stumbling block was conceptual. The notion of a “loyal opposition” is that part of the process of good governance is organized questioning and criticism by those out of power, who in turn maintain deference to the larger state. But that concept had not yet developed in the Anglo-American world. Indeed, the phrase “His Majesty’s Opposition” was not used in Parliament until decades later, in 1826.8

During the 1790s, there was not yet a vocabulary, or psychological space, for political competition.

The classical mindset would prove a poor framework in which to view the emerging politics of the 1790s, only making the situation worse.11 To describe their political foes, they reached back once again to Roman history, all too often to the Catilinarian conspiracy. Remember here that to be a “Catiline” was not just to grab for power, but to attack the soul of the nation, to threaten its way of life.

Catilinism was a signal not just of political opposition but of impending national catastrophe. “The conspiracies of Catiline and Caesar against the liberty of their country, were . . . the immediate cause of the destruction of the Republick,”

Just to be politically aligned was, at least in the eyes of some Federalists, immoral and perhaps treasonous.16 Even Jefferson at this point remained reluctant to embrace factionalism, at least in public. It meant giving up a conception of governance that he and his peers had held all their lives. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all,” he avowed from Paris in March 1789.17 But he would soon sing a different hymn.

Jefferson did not say so, but he must also have understood that moving the federal headquarters to the banks of the Potomac also placed it in an environment more inclined to support the perpetuation of slavery.

Washington personally selected the site of the White House.22 Under Jefferson’s influence, the major buildings of the new capital would display Roman stylings, shimmering white under the southern sun. “The Federal City on the Potomac . . . was one of Thomas Jefferson’s dearest undertakings,” write Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick. “He subsequently gave more of his time, energy, and thought to that problem than did any other officer of the state.”23 As secretary of state, he conceived of a competition to design a building for the Congress. He decided that it would be called not “The Congress House,” as originally listed, but the Capitol, a nod to ancient history. This building, home to both houses of the federal legislature, would dominate Washington, DC, just as the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill had been the most prominent religious building in ancient Rome. The upper house was already called the Senate, after the Roman example. The winning design—classical, as might be expected—was submitted by William Thornton, who had trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh and later received a degree from the University of Aberdeen.

Charles Dickens, visiting the city decades later, when it still had a raw feel, would label it “the City of Magnificent Intentions,” a phrase that also summarizes Jefferson well.27

Madison went on in that short essay to claim that natural law supported the existence of parties. “In all political societies, different interests and parties arise out of the nature of things, and the great art of politicians lies in making them checks and balances to each other.”

Madison’s own contributions to the Gazette hammered home a new insight. Faction in all its manifestations—partisanship, political competition, contention, compromises, rivalry, and the cutting of deals—was not part of the problem, it was part of the solution.