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

by Thomas E. Ricks

A month after Washington sent that letter, Hamilton wrote privately about the nakedly ambitious Aaron Burr (Princeton, 1772), then a senator from New York, that “if we have an embryo-Cæsar in the United States ’tis Burr.”35 There were few worse insults in eighteenth-century America.

He observed at one point that it was producing sufficient potatoes and clover “to feed every animal on my farm except my negroes.”49 On the negative side, this is perhaps for us today the most stomach-turning sentence he ever wrote.

“Shall the general will prevail, or the will of a faction? shall there be government, or no government?”53 The only proper response, he added in the next essay, two days later, was to quote Cicero: “How long, ye Catilines, will you abuse our patience.”

“It was very hard for Federalists to believe that these outbursts, these lawless proceedings so uncomfortably reminiscent of the French Revolution, were spontaneous,” writes historian Marshall Smelser. “There simply had to be a plot.”56

Washington was indeed concerned that the American experiment seemed to be falling apart.

Washington is on the one-dollar bill, Jefferson on the two, and even Hamilton on the ten, but Adams appears on none. At Mount Rushmore, Washington and Jefferson gaze out shoulder to shoulder, and again, Adams is nowhere to be seen. In one of his more discerning comments, he would reflect late in life that “Mausoleums, Statues, Monuments will never be erected to me.”61

Populism tends to look good from a distance, but close up it can be frightening.

Adams never would have casually commented, as Jefferson once did to Adams’ wife, that, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.”63 Jefferson wrote that sentence a few weeks after receiving the pamphlet in which Adams condemned the brutality of the people.

Like the Americans, he might have added, the French revolutionaries were dazzled by classicism. They often invoked Cicero and accused their political enemies of Catilinism.

Even worse, Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the French radicals, claimed that his group was motivated by virtue: If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.67 This is a striking equation, insisting that terror and virtue go hand in hand.

Blount became the first federal official to be impeached and was expelled from the Senate.

When we seek to understand John Adams, it always helps to look to Cicero. And in considering Cicero, notes the classicist Moses Hadas, it is vital to remember that to him, “nothing was more important than the maintenance of the established order.”74 Cicero, writes one of his biographers, was “a temperamental conservative caught in the nets of revolution.”75 So, too, was Adams.

The American two-party system, the nation’s enduring source of political stability, was forged in—and, fair to say, created by—the nation’s newspapers. Newspapers had shaped the ratification debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and by 1791 newspapers were already beginning to shape the first party system, a contest between Federalists and those who aligned themselves with a newly emerging opposition.81

In his will Washington tried to free as many of the enslaved people on his plantation as legally possible. Some were the property of Martha and her heirs. Others were married to those owned by Martha. He was the only founder involved in human bondage who tried to emancipate so many enslaved people. One can only wonder if this is because, as a man who learned mainly by observation and experience, he had come to see the practice of race-based slavery differently than his peers did. Jefferson was far better at avoiding reality than was Washington.

The truest test of a new democracy is not whether a new leader is elected, but whether that new leader holds a second election and eventually turns over power.

Jefferson made clear that he and his party had won, and that the Federalists had lost. But he vowed that he would not be vindictive. 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.” He promised “equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political.” Indeed, anti-Republicanism views would be left to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated.”

The world the Federalists had known and briefly ruled was going away. Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, by then the speaker of the house, mourned that “the aristocracy of virtue is destroyed.”54 He was right, even if he did not like the fact of the matter.

But it 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 America was rapidly becoming a nation where the notion of social rank no longer existed.

I would advise you to undertake a regular course of history & poetry in both languages, in Greek, go first thro’ the Cyropaedia, and then read Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon’s Hellenies & Anabasis, Arrian’s Alexander, & Plutarch’s lives, for prose reading: Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey, Euripides, Sophocles in poetry, & Demosthenes in Oratory; alternating prose & verse as most agreeable to yourself. In Latin read Livy, Caesar, Sallust Tacitus, Cicero’s Philosophies, and some of his Orations, in prose; and Virgil, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Horace, Terence & Juvenal for poetry.9

“This mementous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” he wrote after the congressional vote on this Missouri Compromise. “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” Such a division, he added, amounted to an “act of suicide on themselves and of treason against the hopes of the world.”

“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.” The Revolution, he concludes, had not failed—rather, it had exceeded the expectations of those who led it.37

As John Adams wrote, “Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.”1