Past postings have made the case that two
reasoned traditions affected the thinking of the founding generation of
Americans especially among the educated class.
Of course, these perspectives did not just appear in 1787. They had a history in which one of the
traditions stretches all the way back to the earliest English settlers making
their way across the Atlantic and the other found its beginning in Europe
during the 1700s.
The first was the Calvinist religious
view that promoted a covenant principle – the origin of the federalist thinking
that played such a central role in devising the American constitutional
framework both at the national and state levels. The second was the importation of Enlightenment
ideas that promoted reasoned, observably based evidence in the pursuit of truth.
It also introduced the approach
summarily described as the social contract (or as Daniel Elazar calls it,
social compact) theory. That is the
promotion of a choice option – as opposed to a force or accident option – in
the designing and implementing of a constitutional arrangement for a new polity
or polities in the case of the US federal union.
But major influences did not stop
there. One other source, according to
the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Thomas E. Ricks,[1] was the influence from
long ago, the classical writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This influence can be easily detected in the
writings of the founding fathers.
One common experience among these
founders was the perennialism that characterized their education. Higher education of the time was securely
defined by that curricular philosophy; a philosophy that, to this day.
emphasizes the works of the classical scholars from ancient Greece such as Plato,
Aristotle, and from ancient Rome such as Cicero. Ricks begins his presently cited work with,
The
classical world was far closer to the makers of the American Revolution and the
founders of the United States than it is today … It was present in their lives
… Colonial classicism was not just about ideas.
It was part of the culture, a way of looking at the world and a set of
values. The more one looks around early
America for the influence of ancient Greek and Roman history and literature,
the more one finds.[2]
The influence went beyond academic awe but verged
on and surpassed a romantic attachment.
These
founders decorated their abodes with statues of ancient thinkers, designed
their public buildings using classical architectural plans, and even named
their cities for ancient cities or thinkers – there is Troy or Cicero, for
example.
They
were especially taken with the ancient concern for the quality or word, “virtue.” They saw it as not just what young women
should preserve, but as an irreplaceable character trait for public officials
to have – an unvirtuous office holder was automatically unworthy of the
position and when found out should be removed from any position of trust.
What did it, virtue, mean in this
context? Simply, that anyone entrusted
with public responsibilities – which under a compact-al arrangement meant, to
some degree, any citizen – had to put the common good above any private interest. This served as the cement or some sort of
lynchpin upon which a governing system held together. It also reflects what this blog has offered as
a definition for federal liberty, the right to do what one should do.
And this, Ricks claims, served as a
binding sense among the founders throughout the Revolutionary period. One piece of evidence supporting such a claim
is that after reviewing some 120,000 documents of that time, – a study Ricks
cites – the word “virtue” outnumbers the word “freedom” as virtue appears some six
thousand times.
And as one looks closer to the classical
influence, one finds by a healthy amounts of references, that the Roman effect,
as opposed to the Greek effect, was found to be more practical in their recorded
advice over political and governing matters.
The Greeks were not totally dismissed.
They were cited more as background and in that, Sparta took on a more
privileged position than Athens.
Athenians were judged to be too factionalized, turbulent, and flighty.
Of special admiration, the founders took
a liking to the Roman, Cicero. By one
measure, he was five times the hero that Aristotle was. And that preference extended to European
thinkers, especially the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and
was also noted among the intellectual leaders of the French Revolution.
Of special interest was the reflections American
founders bestowed on the downfall of the Roman Republic during the first
century BC. That became those governing
factors that the founders zeroed in on in their decisions concerning the
various elements of the republican structures they were designing in the late
1700s.
Ricks in his review of that history,
informs his readers of the particular names from the Roman experience upon
which the founders focused. The heroes
include, of course, Cicero, but also Livy, Plutarch, Sallust, Tacitus. As villains that one can easily cite were Catiline
and Julius Caesar. And these names were
not just familiar to the elites of America but also those of Europe.
Two English writers of that time, in the
late 1700s, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, shared their thoughts over that
ancient time in their weekly essays, collectively known as the Cato Letters
(Cato was a Roman soldier and senator).
Apparently, these writers influenced the debate in America of that time as
they were frequently cited by Americans concerning political principles and
theory. The Letters provided
initial promotion of such rights as free speech.
At some future point, this blog will
pick up on the effects classical literature had on this group of – one can
safely characterize – nouveau riche Americans.
This seems relevant to how these founders came about their ideals. Yes, they were members of that age’s elite
class, but they did not inherit their standing from long established family
wealth; they were surely not the product of some aristocratic class.
According to Ricks, of the ninety-nine
signers of either the Declaration of Independence or the US
Constitution, only eight of them had fathers who attended college.
They, in other words, were for the most part first or second-generation men of
means who owed their success to the opportunities America offered. And in that, one can, to some degree,
ascertain they had firsthand knowledge and empathy for the common American of
their times. It also gave them insights as
to what truly constituted human nature.
