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The Greeks and

America’s Founding Fathers

TIMOTHY SANDEFUR The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers

Timothy Sandefur

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www.TheObjectiveStandard.com Contents

Introduction 5

1. The Greek Frame 6

2. Learning What Not to Do 23

3. The Two Freedoms 40

Endnotes 59 Introduction

ou probably know that the American Founders were substantially Yinfluenced by the thinkers and culture of ancient Greece. But you likely don’t know the whole beautiful story. In this short ebook, which is adapted from a lecture series created for the Politismos Museum of Greek History, Timothy Sandefur presents the essence of this vital history. And it is powerfully concentrated. Chapter 1, “The Greek Frame,” examines the ways in which ancient Greek philosophers and statesmen influenced the Founders. This chapter is packed with illuminating identifications and rich connections that may surprise even the geekiest history buffs. Chapter 2, “Learning What Not to Do,” focuses on ways in which the Founders learned from the Greeks’ mistakes and sought to avoid them in constructing the land of liberty. And chapter 3, “The Two Freedoms,” examines two conflicting conceptions of liberty held by various Western intellectuals and cultures in the long trek toward the individual rights-based ideal held by Objectivists and classical liberals today. The road to our modern conception of liberty was neither straight nor simple, and Sandefur highlights some of the critical curves and complexities that are easy to overlook, yet crucial to understanding how freedom developed conceptually and existentially across time. The ebook closes with one of the most beautiful scenes ever painted with words. Have a tissue handy. —Craig Biddle

The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers • 5 1

The Greek Frame

o place in America more perfectly symbolizes the influence of the Greeks Non America’s founding fathers than the central lawn of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The lawn is framed on three sides by the central Rotunda, which housed the library like the brain of the school, and the two porticoes that reach out like arms and originally housed the dormitories. Some students still reside in them today. The architect who designed these buildings was, of course, the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, who among his many other accomplishments was one of America’s first architects. The style is Roman, and therefore, essentially Greek. Jefferson designed the buildings as a teaching device for the university’s architecture students. As they walk along the central lawn, students can see each of the classical orders represented: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and composite. One reason the university so aptly represents the Founders’ connections to the Greeks is that they largely knew of the Greeks through the Roman lens, not just in building but in thought as well. Jefferson got his classical Greek architecture from Roman models. And it is largely thanks to his efforts that to this day, our government buildings are primarily classical in style. It was his copy of the Roman temple known as the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, France, that became the state capitol building for Virginia. He also collaborated with Benjamin Latrobe in designing the first version of the U.S. Capitol building and even secretly entered a classically inspired design in the competition for the president’s house. In all of these, his model was Italian architecture, adapted to local needs in various elegant ways. Most notably, both his home, Monticello, and the university, though classical in design, are built from brick made locally out of Virginia soil. Jefferson was a state-of-the-art thinker, made—like his buildings—of Virginian materials. But his mind was fashioned on classical forms. As in their architecture, so in their thought, America’s founding fathers looked primarily to the Romans for their political and legal foundations, but what they found were ideas that largely originated with the Greeks. In some

The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers • 6 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame cases, this was because the original writings of, say, Plato and Aristotle, either were still lost, or were obscured by poor translations or by fake books falsely attributed to the ancients during the American Revolutionary period. Despite his classical education, which enabled him to read Greek and Latin—as well as Spanish, Italian, French, and Anglo-Saxon—Jefferson was not adept at spotting forgeries. Among his favorite poets was “Ossian,” purportedly an ancient Anglo-Saxon poet whose work was actually forged by the man who claimed to be his translator. During Jefferson’s life, it was fairly well known among educated men that Ossian was a fake, but Jefferson couldn’t bring himself to believe it.1 As for the ancient Greeks, many were known to the Founders through the Roman lens as well. They got their Plato and Aristotle largely through Cicero, for example, and their Epicurus through Lucretius—as we still do today. I want to focus on Epicurus and Lucretius, because even now Epicurean ideas are not as instantly recognizable to ordinary people as those of Aristotle or Plato. Yet Epicurus had the strongest influence on Thomas Jefferson. This is less true of political ideas—Greek politics largely served the Founders as models to avoid, rather than ideals to be imitated—than of his ideas about the nature of man and what the good life should be. But as we shall see, all of these ideas came together in Jefferson’s final and proudest achievement. • Epicurus was born on Samos in 341 BC. As a young man he moved to Colophon, on the coast of present-day Turkey, and then in 306 BC, to Athens, where he founded a school known as the Garden of Epicurus, not far from Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. He was a brilliant and prolific writer and thinker. Yet thanks to the war against his ideas that Christians waged during the Medieval period, Epicurus has been largely obliterated from our history. Of the three hundred or so books Epicurus is said to have written, only four letters remain today, in addition to some scattered passages quoted in other manuscripts and collected in lists of aphorisms. We also have the writings of some of his followers, the most important of which is the incomplete epic poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, a Roman who lived two and a half centuries after Epicurus, between 99 BC and 55 BC. Even his beautiful and intriguing poem was lost to the West for centuries after the fall of Rome and was not published in translation until less than a century before Jefferson’s birth. Given how little is today remembered about him, one might imagine that Epicurus was a minor figure in the ancient world, but he was among the most

7 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame widely respected thinkers of Greco-Roman era. Schools, like monasteries, devoted to Epicureanism were found in all the major cities. His followers wore jewelry with portraits of him and hung his picture in their homes. Epicureanism was not only influential in this sense, but it was, according to Norman Wentworth Dewitt, “the first missionary philosophy”2—the first school of thought that actively sought to convert others to its central tenets. Yet those tenets were not religious. Epicurus was a thoroughly secular philosopher, and we might call him the true founder of secular liberalism. The two best-known elements of his thought were his materialism and his hedonism, and it was these ideas that, when Rome fell and mysticism rose in the Western world, made him so controversial that Christians sought to purge him from history. To this day, in fact, the Hebrew word for heresy is apikoros, or “Epicurus.” Epicurus’s primary metaphysical doctrine was atomism. All of reality is made up of tiny atoms, or seeds, which exist in a void, moving at different speeds and different directions. These atoms combine or break apart, forming the world around us. Water atoms and earth atoms mix to make clay, which makes up a pot. Light atoms stream through space and strike our eyes, enabling us to see. This idea was not original to Epicurus; an earlier Greek, Democritus, is credited with devising atomism. But with Epicurus, it became the foundation of a philosophic school. There is no such thing as a spiritual or magical influence in the world. Everything is material, including the soul, which is nothing but atoms moving inside of us. The arguments for atomism are strikingly ingenious, given that the men who worked out these ideas had none of the sophisticated scientific equipment we have today. They reached their conclusions purely by abstract reasoning. Even where their arguments are wrong, they are clever and persuasive. For example, when explaining the phenomenon of color, Lucretius tells us that it is the result of atoms of sunlight striking colored objects and knocking off some of their atoms, which in turn bounce off and strike the eye, resulting in the sensation of color. This explains why we do not perceive color in the dark, and why a brightly colored object will fade over time, as more and more of its “seeds” are scattered by sunlight. This is basically correct. Because all that exists are atoms and void, the gods, though they exist, are themselves physical entities, and are not capable of miracles. In fact, they really do not involve themselves in human life at all. Epicurus and his followers were not actually atheists, but believed in what in Jefferson’s day would be called deism: the gods basically let humanity alone. The Epicureans focused their hostility not on the existence of gods, but against the religious beliefs

8 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame that surrounded them. On this subject, they were quite clear: mysticism is a positive evil in the world, the source of anxiety and fear, which can only be dispelled by reason. Lucretius, who begins De Rerum Natura with an invocation to the goddess Venus, explains that his enemy is not the gods, but rather the “superstitions and the threats of priests.”3 Fear of death was a particular malady, because it caused cowardice, despair, superstition, and all number of evils. Yet, death, wrote Epicurus, “is nothing to us,” because “all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation.”4 There is no need to fear death, as once we are dead, we will be unable to feel any pain or terror. Abolishing the fear of death “makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.”5 Worse than the fear of death is the way in which false beliefs about the gods render us vulnerable to manipulation, fraud, and tyranny. This is particularly important to Lucretius. In the most famous passage of De Rerum Natura, he retells the myth of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. The God Apollo had demanded her death as the price of allowing the winds to blow so that Agamemnon could sail to Troy:

As a maiden, pure of stain, To be impurely slaughtered at the age when she should wed, Sorrowful sacrifice slain at her father’s hand instead, All this for fair and favourable winds to sail the fleet along! So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.6]

The cure for this evil was to sweep away “[t]his dread, these shadows of the mind . . . / by observing Nature and her laws.”7 In the place of mythology and magic, the Epicureans offered a philosophy of materialism, reason, and scientific inquiry. This would not only give us better knowledge of the real world and avert the evils of theocratic rule, but it would accord better with our own happiness. “A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story,” wrote Epicurus. “So that without natural science it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed.”8 For Epicureans the goal of life was happiness, or, to be more precise, pleasure. This has come to be called “hedonism,” but that word has misleading connotations, thanks in large part to the misrepresentations of Epicurus’s religious enemies. The Epicureans were not indulgent pleasure seekers in the

9 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame sense of pursuing whatever feels good at the moment. Epicurus is quite clear about this:

Since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this very reason we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures, when greater discomfort accrues to us as the result of them: and similarly we think many pains better than pleasures, since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pains for a long time. Every pleasure then because of its natural kinship to us is good, yet not every pleasure is to be chosen: even as every pain also is an evil, yet not all are always of a nature to be avoided.9 The true Epicurean is carefully indulgent, often abstinent, so as to avoid the hangovers that inevitably result from unwise choices. On this, Epicurus differs slightly from Aristotle, a philosopher who for the most part is on the same page as Epicurus. For Aristotle, too, happiness is the good, but where Epicurus saw the goal of virtue as pleasure, for Aristotle, the great-souled man aims toward virtue, and happiness arises as a by-product of that effort. Just as a plant or an animal flourishes when it exerts itself to meet its capacities, a human being reaches his end when he strives for virtue by exercising his practical wisdom. Pleasure is not the goal; full living, or self- abundance, is the end of human life. Virtuous actions are done for the sake of their nobility, not for the consequent pleasure. This is a subtle difference, but it manifests itself in two ways. In a famous passage of his Nichomachean Ethics,10 Aristotle depicts the great-souled (megalopsychos) man as being like an artist or an artisan. He will spend his money in “large and fitting” ways “for honour’s sake.”11 He will walk, but never run. Although not fond of danger, he will face it unstintingly when it comes, “knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth having.”12 He gives generously but is reluctant to receive gifts, and is more reluctant to ask for help. He is dignified but unassuming, candid about what he hates and loves, honest and without concern for the opinions of those beneath him. He does not make his life revolve around another and is in general “a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones.” He is a fundamentally self-sufficient man. He is a sort of ideal striver for perfection. Epicurus depicts a much less strenuous and aristocratic ideal. His goal is not greatness but tranquility—ataraxia—harmony with the world and with the self. This means that happiness is not the pursuit of excellence but the avoidance of pain. Epicurean man is retiring and calm. He enjoys the study of nature, relishes its bounty but does not pursue honors or seek great and

10 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame notable deeds. To reiterate, this does not mean self-indulgence or shyness, let alone cowardice, which is a state of fear and therefore of disharmony. He is virtuous in a bourgeois sense, rather than an aristocratic sense.13 “It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, and honorably and justly,” says Epicurus, “nor again to live a life of prudence, honor and justice without living pleasantly. And the man who does not possess the pleasant life, is not living prudently and honorably and justly, and the man who does not possess the virtuous life cannot possibly live pleasantly.”14 Where the Aristotelian great-souled man prizes excellence because it is excellent, Epicurean man prizes happiness and is content to till his own garden, to accept what cannot be changed, and to relish the pleasant experiences of life. This difference affected their different political ideas as well—though we must always keep in mind that we have so little of Epicurus’s writings or those of his disciples that it is hard to be certain of what they believed when it comes to politics. Neither Aristotle nor Epicurus distinguished sharply between government and society—that distinction was one of the great discoveries of Jefferson’s own age. But for Aristotle, political society was an outgrowth of man’s nature in a hierarchically structured world. He is normally viewed as holding an “organic” view of politics, associated with the conservatism of Edmund Burke (and thus the polar opposite of Jefferson’s views): seeing political society not as an artificial product of conscious deliberation but as a consequence of natural drives, like the family.15 Epicurus’s followers, on the other hand, offered a sort of social compact theory that harmonizes well with the views of America’s founding fathers. According to Lucretius—who, by the way, gives a fascinating vision of biological evolution some nineteen hundred years before Darwin—government is not created by the gods or by nature but is a human construct. In the beginning, mankind lived in a savage state, without language or civilization: “They did not know how to treat things with fire, or know about / The use of hides, or how to dress in skins despoiled from kills.”16 Eventually, “Nature gave the tongue its different sounds to say,”17 and with the power of language mankind made the great discoveries of fire, metalworking, and organized hunting. At last, “cities and citadels sprang up, founded by kings, / Who constructed these defenses for their own protection and / Divided up among their subjects herds and lots of land.”18 This monarchism, however, had its downside, for people soon began to compete for political advantage, “[a]nd at the apex of their climb, / Often Envy would blast them like a thunderbolt, to fell / Them with disdain and hurl them in the pit of hateful Hell.”19 These political conflicts eventually led to social

11 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame collapse, “[a]nd mankind was reduced once more / To chaos, the very bottom of the barrel, as each sought / Power and glory only for himself.” After many years, mankind—“sick to death of spending their lives in violence”—learned how to create a new, better kind of political society that would protect people from danger without leading to such constant civil strife. This was the idea of the rule of law:

Later, some taught Men to establish a constitution, set magistrates in place, That people would want to live by laws; because the human race, Weary of leading all their days in violence, bled dry From constant clashes, were all the more eager to put by Their own will and submit to the rigid rule of law.20

This is obviously a direct ancestor of the social compact theory that more than sixteen centuries later would be articulated by John Locke and by the American founding fathers. • How can we be sure of the influence here? In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt tells the dramatic story of how Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura was almost entirely lost to history—destroyed and neglected by Christian scholars, until January of 1417, when a book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini managed to find what may have been the world’s only surviving copy in the library of a German monastery. Literary collectors snatched up copies in the decades that followed. One of them was Niccolò Machiavelli, whose own personal copy, dated 1497, still resides in the Vatican library. Another was the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi, whose writings were especially prized by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. Machiavelli is best known today as the author of The Prince (Il Principe), a short and nasty work of political advice to tyrants on the best ways to stay in power. He may seem an unlikely figure to place at the beginning of modern political philosophy, but what made his writing unique was his single-minded focus on human and practical concerns: gods, miracles, and the realization of abstract virtues play little role in his philosophy; his political perspective is, so to speak, from the bottom up. He takes a strictly mechanistic view of society, in which people and rulers are motivated by practical self-interest, rather than seeking to manifest transcendent principles.

12 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame

At any rate, that was what his English admirer Francis Bacon thought. Bacon, who lived from 1561 to 1626, is often overlooked in American political history, but he was one of the three men—along with John Locke and Isaac Newton—whom Jefferson admired most. He esteemed Bacon principally for his scientific work; Bacon is largely thought of as the father of the experimental method in science. But Bacon was also a great lawyer who tried to codify the laws of England21—a project Jefferson replicated in 1776 when he took on an enormous project of cataloging and revising the laws of Virginia.22 It is Bacon who first uttered the famous dictum that knowledge is power. We sometimes forget just what he meant by this. The Medieval era had sought power—had focused on ways to command nature by the invocation of some special formula that might overpower nature’s ordinary behavior and breach the boundary between the material and the spiritual. Esoteric mysteries could transform lead into gold or achieve other feats through magic.23 This was the goal of the alchemists, the wizards, the occultists. Against this, Bacon contrasted knowledge—the understanding of nature’s laws that would allow man to exploit nature’s already existing powers, not by reaching into the spiritual realm but by focusing on this world, with its mechanistic causes and effects. To say that knowledge is power meant that the powers were not esoteric but real and open to any person’s understanding. This was the potential of science. Bacon was a materialist in the same vein as Lucretius, and he cites Lucretius in his writings.24 He cites Machiavelli as well—praising him for “writ[ing] what men do and not what they ought to do.”25 And Bacon’s personal secretary was Thomas Hobbes, who later authored the infamous book Leviathan and is considered by many to be the father of liberal social compact theory. If we are looking for a direct person-to-person transfer of the knowledge of Epicurean philosophy, then, we have it: Lucretius to Machiavelli to Bacon to Hobbes, which in a sense echoes the earlier intellectual family of ancient Athens: Socrates to Plato to Aristotle to Alexander. But it is not necessary to assume the influence of these particular individuals. Epicurean ideas were circulating among the intellectual elites across Europe in the years following the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura. Pierre Gassendi, too, was an admirer of Lucretius, as well as an acquaintance of Hobbes, and Locke and Jefferson were enthusiasts for his writing. It is in any event clear that the rediscovery of Epicurean philosophy in 1417, in the form of De Rerum Natura, sparked a tremendous intellectual explosion. It became one of the centerpieces of the Renaissance and, thanks to Bacon and Locke, of the Enlightenment.

13 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame

The Enlightenment was a period in which intellectual leaders devoted themselves to rational, scientific investigation and the pursuit of the good life in especially Epicurean terms. The word “enlightenment” itself comes from a philosopher of this period: Immanuel Kant, who defined it as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.”26 That meant putting away the myths by which mankind had so long lived, whether it be the myth that lightning is the wrath of God—dispelled, of course, by Benjamin Franklin—or the myth of the divine right of kings—dispelled in large part by Jefferson himself. Very often this Enlightenment skepticism clashed with the religious orthodoxy of the time; and just as Epicurus had often been accused of atheism in his day, so Enlightenment figures such as Thomas Jefferson were also frequently accused of atheism. In reality, Jefferson was not an atheist, but his religious views are close enough to those of Epicurus and Lucretius. Jefferson denied the possibility of miracles—to such an extent that while he was president, he literally took a penknife to the Bible, eliminating everything he considered unnecessary or forged. The result was a short pamphlet now known as The Jefferson Bible, which includes none of the Old Testament, no virgin birth, and no rising from the dead. Jefferson said later that the task of picking out the genuine doctrines of Christ from among the falsehoods was as easy as picking diamonds out of a dunghill.27 Jefferson even flirted with the idea that the soul itself is a purely physical property, like magnetism or gravity. “I can concieve [sic] thought to be an action of a particular organisation of matter,” he wrote, “formed for that purpose by it’s [sic] creator, as well as that attraction in an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone.” People who deny materialism and claim the soul is an immaterial spirit are the true heretics, he argued, because they are actually denying the reality of the soul: “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. . . . [T]his heresy of immaterialism [is] masked atheism.”28 These arguments parallel those of Epicurus and Lucretius, although unlike them, Jefferson seems to have believed the soul was immortal. Lucretius argued that it was not—that the soul, like everything else, is made of atoms, and that when we die, it floats away like smoke.29Jefferson considered himself a Christian because he found Jesus’s ethical teachings valuable—equal, in fact, to those of Epicurus—but he was a materialist and thought the spiritual or mystical aspects of Christian dogma had been fraudulently attached to Jesus’s actual teachings over the centuries. Although Jefferson was careful to keep his views concealed from the public during his lifetime—he certainly never told any but his closest friends

14 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame about cutting up the Bible—he was nevertheless accused of atheism and heresy throughout his political career. According to one story, Jefferson was visiting a friend’s plantation just outside Washington, when the friend’s slave accidentally cut his leg with an ax. Jefferson helped to sew up the wound, and as he walked back to the house, remarked that it was strange for God to have put the fleshy part of the leg on the back, instead of the front where it might cushion the shinbone. An anti-Jeffersonian politician on hearing of the remark cried, “What is the world coming to! Here this fellow Jefferson, after turning upside down everything on the earth, is now quarrelling with God Almighty himself!”30 • I have said that Epicurus’s political ideas were less of an influence on America’s Founders than his views on the good life, and I want to return to that, because there is an important sense in which those two realms of thought do intersect. And that intersection affects the way many of us live our lives in modern America. In 1819 Jefferson exchanged letters with William Short, who had once been his protégé when Jefferson was serving as the United States’ ambassador in Paris in the 1780s. Short was now an ailing, sixty-year-old former ambassador himself. “I feel the effects of advancing age,” Short wrote.

I have come to consider repose as the summum bonum, so that when driven out of this heated brick kiln in the summer, my first aim is to reach that place of repose which can be the soonest & the easiest attained. . . . This growing indolence (which I know I am wrong to indulge & yet continue to do so . . .) has made me give up by degrees my daily exercise on horseback—I have so far adopted the principles of Epicurus, (who, after all I am inclined to believe was the wisest of all the ancient Philosophers, as he is certainly the least understand & the most calumniated among them) as to consult my ease towards the attainment of happiness in this poor world, poor even in making the best of it.31

To this, Jefferson replied,

As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. . . . [The Stoics’ and Platonists’] great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines. . . . Epicurus give[s] laws for governing

15 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame

ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others. . . .32 But Jefferson also paused to scold his former pupil. I take the liberty of observing that you are not a true disciple of our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding. One of his canons, you know, was that “the indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided.” Your love of repose will lead, in its progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which the well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure; fortitude, you know, is one of his four cardinal virtues. That teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like cowards; and to fly, too, in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at every turn of our road. . . .33 Jefferson was reiterating the point I made earlier about Epicurus’s hedonism. The philosopher did not mean that one should indulge in all pleasures or lead a life of indolence but that the good life was one of carefully measured, properly proportioned activity. It meant the pursuit of knowledge, proper exercise, relishing the goods of life—a life of harmony and fulfillment. In short, it meant the pursuit of happiness. This phrase “pursuit of happiness” is best known to us from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, although Jefferson was paraphrasing the words of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, issued a month before his own Declaration, and written by his friend George Mason. According to Mason’s Declaration, “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights,” which include “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”34 But, Mason continued, “no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.”35 This wording is profoundly Epicurean. It supposes that the purpose of government is not to make people good, or to ensure that they act in compliance with the will of God—but that the state exists to help protect the freedoms of people who are “pursuing” their “happiness” and seeking “the enjoyment of life.” This word “enjoyment,” in particular, is an especially Epicurean concept. No other philosopher of the classical age emphasized the value of enjoyment as thoroughly as Epicurus. For Aristotle, the goal of life

16 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame was flourishing, achieving one’s natural end, which will tend to result in a state of joy, but the enjoyment itself is not the purpose of the activity. For the Stoics, the purpose of life was virtue, even—perhaps especially—when that virtue led to suffering. But for the Epicureans, the purpose of life is enjoyment, meaning an unimpeded harmony with nature—and an active harmony, not mere passive indulgence36—not a “relaxation of mind” or an “indifference to everything around you.” If there were any doubt on this front, we can consult John Locke, who first used the exact phrase “pursuit of happiness” in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was heavily influenced by Gassendi. Locke wrote:

The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action.37

And when the Virginia Declaration of Rights says that “a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue” goes hand in hand with the pursuit of happiness, it echoes Epicurus’s warning that it is “not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, and honorably and justly.” • In short, Epicureans such as Locke and Jefferson believed that if our souls are to be rightly ordered, we will pursue pleasure in the right way by exerting ourselves appropriately toward those things that will, in fact, make us happy by enabling us to enjoy an active harmony with the world; eliminating pain or suffering and empowering us to relish life: proportionality, intelligence, proper exercise and nutrition, curiosity, love, reason, friendship, good literature, good wine, good conversation. Incidentally, this last is one of the most charming of Greek contributions to civilization: The Greeks were so fond of conversation that they invented the tradition of writing it down. Joyful conversation, exertion in thought and work, were essential to Jefferson’s way of life. Visitors to Monticello or to the White House during Jefferson’s presidency were often treated to sparkling dinnertime conversation from some of the most brilliant minds America had to offer.38 Jefferson hosted

17 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame dinner parties virtually every other day, and during just the first year of his presidency, spent $2,262.33 on wine.39 Of course, being a true Epicurean, Jefferson is never known to have become intoxicated. On any one night, Jefferson—himself an inventor and philosopher of the highest order; president of the American Philosophical Society; creator of a new kind of plow; the first archaeologist in America—might have at his table Thomas Paine, the author ofRights of Man and The Age of Reason; scientist Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen and founded the Unitarian Church; the woman of letters Margaret Bayard Smith; the comedian John Bernard; the poet Joel Barlow; the artist John Trumbull; the explorer John Ledyard; the physician Benjamin Rush; the young prodigy John Quincy Adams; and many others. Political conversations were purposely avoided at these dinners, and the guests might discuss instead the latest news of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the best place to view the Potomac at sunset, or how to attract more Italian immigrants to America to ensure that the new nation had sufficient musical talent.40 For Jefferson, an intellectually stimulating conversation around a well-stocked table was the very sweetness of life. During the Revolutionary War, while he was serving as governor of Virginia, Jefferson invited a French military officer to dine at Monticello. Discovering that they were both admirers of Ossian, they quoted lines from the poet to one another until at last they had to pull down a copy and read it out loud. A little thing like a war could not be expected to interrupt an exciting conversation about books.41 Yet the pursuit of happiness, Epicurus believed, was inconsistent with the life of politics. In his view, politics means conflict, ambition, deceit, frustration, and disharmony that at best distract us from the pursuit of happiness. Thus he and Lucretius are unambiguous in recommending against becoming political involvement.42 This may seem strange, given Jefferson’s lifelong participation in politics—he was elected to the Virginia legislature at the age of twenty-six and, with only brief interruptions, served in public office for some forty years. But he spent almost all that time lamenting that he was compelled to serve and claiming that he yielded to that call only because of the extraordinary urgency of the times.43 Of course, it is easy to dismiss this as mere talk—it was part of the required code of conduct for any eighteenth-century Virginia gentleman that he disclaim any desire for office, and some of his contemporaries thought it was all a show. John Adams thought so; Jefferson, he said, was secretly as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell.44 But however much Jefferson may have taken the opportunity to govern, he appears to have actually wished not to. He genuinely preferred “my family, my farm, and my books,”45 and loved more to cultivate his garden and

18 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame oversee construction at Monticello than to attend to political business. He believed strongly in the mission of 1776, and in what he called the Revolution of 1800, when his countrymen chose him over John Adams. He therefore did not shrink from advancing these principles whenever he had the chance.46 But he never sought out political arguments as, for instance, Alexander Hamilton did. Whenever one was unavoidable, he looked for ways other than direct confrontation, often sending deputies into the fight instead. This gained him a reputation in some quarters for duplicity or cowardice, but it seems to have genuinely pained him to come into political conflict.47 He was a practical and extremely successful politician, but his maneuvers to avoid political strife were not just for show. Washington could stare down his political opponents; Adams seemed sometimes to relish disapproval; Madison would argue and cajole and even write newspaper editorials. But Jefferson did none of this. He genuinely tried, as he put it in one particularly Epicurean phrase, to “take things by the smooth handle.”48 Even in retirement, when he and his former arch-nemesis Adams reconnected, he refused to take any of Adams’s repeated invitations to political debate. And unlike Washington, Patrick Henry, or even Madison—who all served in some public capacity after they retired—Jefferson left the presidency in 1808 and never again left the state of Virginia. He would write to politicians about his ideas and engage in lively political conversations around the Monticello dinner table, but true to his Epicureanism, he never again sought public office.49 • Instead, he devoted the final decade and a half of his life to his most Epicurean project of all: the founding of the University of Virginia. Jefferson’s plans for the university were a radical departure from the European tradition. Not only was the architecture based on his distinctive blend of classical and Virginian—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian pillars framing brick buildings made from Virginia soil—but there would be no chapel. (In fact, Jefferson at first planned not even to include religion in the school’s curriculum, although this proved too controversial and he was obliged to reverse.) European universities had always been centered around a church. But Jefferson’s university would be centered around the library instead. That architecture announced a dramatic new educational plan. The University of Virginia would be the first secular college in the United States—and a lighthouse of the Enlightenment.

19 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame

More than that, the university would take a quintessentially Epicurean attitude toward education. “All that is necessary for a student,” Jefferson wrote, “is access to a library, and directions in what order the books are to be read.”50 This and free-flowing discussion were the keys to learning. This was a quintessentially Greek attitude. The philosophical dialogues of Plato are where we get the word symposium, after all. And Jefferson attributed his own education less to his formal instruction at the College of William and Mary than to the many hours he had spent in the company of his teachers and scholars in Williamsburg a half century earlier, when he had been a frequent dinner guest of Professor William Small and Virginia Governor Francis Fauquier. Jefferson’s original vision for the university was modeled on this conception. There would be no mandated curriculum; students would choose their own classes through a revolutionary new “elective system.” Nor would there be degrees in the sense common at the time; the institution would award only the title of “Graduate” to students who completed one or another course of study, and “Doctor” to advanced research students. It would not be a sort of advanced English boarding school as William and Mary had been when Jefferson was a student there; instead it would be an “academical village,”51with learning based on a combination of independent study and critical conversation with others. As to discipline, the students would maintain that themselves, through a student-run honor court that would mete out punishment to wrongdoers.52 And the school would be centered around a lawn that echoes the famous Garden of Epicurus53—that would, he said, “afford that quiet retirement friendly to study.”54 We today think of a university as a source of intellectual breakthroughs and a boisterous training ground for the next generation of upwardly mobile entrepreneurs and activists. But Jefferson envisioned his university as a place of learning for a generation of virtuous American farmers—a people who would strive for self-sufficiency, virtue, and tranquility. This ideal was part of what some have called Jefferson’s “moral agrarianism”55—a basically Epicurean notion that to live the good life of harmony and pleasure requires that we interact directly with nature. “Though an old man,” Jefferson wrote in the years when he was working on the school, “I am a young gardener.”56 The university lawn—and the areas he planned for a school of botany and an experimental farm—would help connect students to the earth and teach them the agrarian virtue that was central to his version of Epicureanism. Sadly, Jefferson’s original plan soon clashed with crowds of rowdy students more interested in drinking and carousing than in careful study. In 1825, less

20 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame than a year before his death, students at the university rioted. One of the three leaders of the riot was Jefferson’s own grandnephew. When the university’s governing board—which along with Jefferson included James Madison and James Monroe—met to determine how the students would be punished, the elderly Jefferson collapsed in tears. “The shock,” said Margaret Bayard Smith, “was electric.”57 The grandnephew was expelled. Sadly, although the board adopted a more stringent disciplinary system afterward, the situation improved little. Not for another half century would the University of Virginia gain the respectable reputation it now enjoys. Still, many of Jefferson’s other innovations did survive. Secularization is now the norm in American colleges, and a version of the elective system is now typical. And although universities today award degrees, they are specialized by major in a way that mimics Jefferson’s original plan for abolishing the degree system that existed in his day. Epicurus’s garden outside Athens had been a famously egalitarian school, open to both sexes, open even to slaves interested in learning and philosophy. Jefferson certainly did not go that far. But considering that universities in Jefferson’s era were steeped in script and rote memorization, dreary traditionalism, mandatory religious observances, and that even Harvard ranked its students by their family’s social status rather than by scholastic achievement, we can respect how essentially democratic Jefferson’s educational ideas truly were. • I have focused on Thomas Jefferson here—although obviously he was not America’s only founding father, and his beliefs on matters of religion and politics were often unpopular among his contemporaries—because he was nevertheless at the intellectual forefront of the American Revolution. His friend Benjamin Rush once remarked that while Washington fought for America, Jefferson and Adams thought for America.58 Jefferson’s life is easily summed up in a famous phrase now carved into his monument in Washington, D.C.: “I have sworn upon the altar of God,” he wrote, “eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”59 We can judge how well he accomplished this by consulting his grave marker, which he himself designed. He asked that it list the three achievements of which he was proudest: the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the founding of the University of Virginia. Each of these makes good on his belief in freedom in a different way: the Declaration stands for political freedom, the Statute

21 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Greek Frame for Religious Freedom stands for the liberty of conscience, and the University represents intellectual liberty. Each in its way demonstrates the commitment to thought and virtue that makes good on the debt America’s founding fathers owed to the philosophers of ancient Greece—in this case, particularly to Epicurus. Thus, although Jefferson was a leading intellectual, sometimes far ahead of his countrymen, much of his philosophy was shared with the millions of Americans who voted for him, admired him, and celebrated his memory after he died. I will leave you with one example of how pervasive these sentiments were. Some time after he became president, Jefferson began putting together a scrapbook of poems that he liked. He would cut them out of newspapers and paste them into the book—which eventually grew to four volumes. These poems were written for the most part by ordinary Americans: by teachers, lawyers, newspaper editors, and others who were not particularly good poets but who enjoyed expressing themselves in this way. Jefferson even wrote a few of them himself. One of these poems was actually an extract from a Renaissance-era poem called “Mirror for Magistrates,” written by an unknown author. It expresses the connection between virtue and the good life, particularly for political leaders, that was essential to Jefferson’s version of Epicureanism. What doth avail to have a princely place, A name of honour, and a high degree; To come by kindred of a noble race, Except we princely, worthy, noble be! The fruit declares the goodness of the tree. Do brag no more of birth or lineage then; For virtue, grace, and manners make the man. Beside this poem, Jefferson wrote in pencil, “As good now as when it was written.”60

22 2

Learning What Not to Do

n part one of this essay, I said that America’s founders modeled themselves Imore on the Romans than the Greeks. There were several reasons for this, including the fact that in their day, much of ancient Greek literature was still undiscovered or unavailable in English translation. Also, the British Empire enjoyed the pretension of following in the footsteps of Rome. But another important reason was that, for the American founders, ancient Greece stood more as a warning than a model. Although Greek philosophy was a basic framework for the founders’ thinking, Greek political writings were of less importance to America’s founders than were the writings of such Romans as Cicero or Tacitus. Thomas Jefferson explained why in an 1816 letter in which he essentially brushed aside Aristotle’s Politics as largely irrelevant to the American Constitution. This may seem surprising, given that Jefferson elsewhere cited Aristotle as one of the four most important political thinkers for the American Revolutionaries—the others being Cicero and the Englishmen John Locke and Algernon Sidney.1 But he explained that “the style of society” in ancient Greece was so different . . . from what it is now and with us, that I think little edification can be obtained from their writings on the subject of government. They had just ideas of the value of personal liberty, but none at all of the structure of government best calculated to preserve it. They knew no medium between a democracy . . . and an abandonment of themselves to an aristocracy, or a tyranny independent of the people. It seems not to have occurred that where the citizens cannot meet to transact their business in person, they alone have the right to choose the agents who shall transact it; and that in this way a republican, or popular government, of the second grade of purity, may be exercised over any extent of country. The full experiment of a government democratical, but representative, was and is still reserved for [the Americans to try].2 In other words, the principle of elected representation was a revolution in political thinking. There were elements of it in the British Parliamentary

The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers • 23 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do system—though the House of Lords was still an aristocratic body, and the House of Commons was so badly apportioned that it was not really representative. And there were elements of it in the Roman Senate, which was not elected at all. But a government in which the people chose representatives to deliberate over public business and be responsible to the voters had never been tried on anything like the scale of the American Constitution. Indeed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest appearance of the word “responsibility” was in The Federalist, written in 1788 by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay as part of the campaign to persuade Americans to adopt the Constitution.3 This concept of representation, however, turned on a deeper distinction between the Greek and the Roman legacies. That was the principle of the rule of law. The history of the Greek city-states was a history of turbulence and warfare, and those city-states were themselves either tyrannies such as Sparta or direct democracies such as Athens. Tyranny and democracy are Greek words, and both have essentially the same connotations: lawless rule in which citizens enjoy no protections against the government. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates,” wrote James Madison in the Federalist, “every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”4 True, we find a basic conception of the Rule of Law in the writings of Aristotle and some others, but the history of ancient Greece, and particularly of Athens, showed that these principles were more often betrayed than honored. Rome stood for the principle of law, as opposed to democracy: The Roman ideal was a society in which everyone was bound by reasonable, comprehensible rules, rather than being subject to the shifting, unpredictable will of the majority. The historian Polybius, writing during the Roman republic, thought the history of the Greek city-states revealed a six-step cycle. This begins with despotism, but when the people can no longer stand being ruled by a despot, a few brave leaders rise to overthrow their oppressors. Those leaders then become an aristocracy, but their children grow up in luxury and excess, and are prone to “avarice and unscrupulous love of money . . . to drinking and . . . debaucheries . . . [or] to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys.” They abuse their power until the citizens finally overthrow them, too. “[B]eing still in terror of the injustice to which this led before,” the people do not dare to trust any new ruler, so they take the power into their own hands. This is democracy. But democracy can only last a generation or two, because

24 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do

as soon as . . . the democracy has descended to their children’s children, long association weakens their value for equality and freedom, and some seek to become more powerful than the ordinary citizens; and the most liable to this temptation are the rich. So when they begin to be fond of office, and find themselves unable to obtain it by their own unassisted efforts and their own merits, they ruin their estates, while enticing and corrupting the common people. . . . [W]hen, in their senseless mania for reputation, they have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot.5

This warning was well founded. Consider the history of just one city: Athens. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes established the foundation of what we call the Athenian democracy by dividing up the traditional tribal alliances into a more modernized voting system. Eighteen years later came the glorious victory over the Persians, and shortly thereafter the Greeks formed the Delian League, pledging their alliance against the Persians. Only eighteen years later, the Peloponnesian wars began, which lasted until 445, during which time Pericles and other aristocrats exercised virtually unlimited authority under Athens’s so-called democracy. War with Sparta erupted again in 432 and lasted until 404, when victorious Sparta abolished the democracy and instated an occupation government known as the Thirty Tyrants. Democracy was again restored a year later, but in the 330s, the Macedonians, Philip and Alexander, took over Athens, and the democracy was essentially destroyed. To put that in perspective, the Athenian democracy lasted about 170 years, roughly the same amount of time that California has been part of the United States. That does not count the various temporary interruptions of democratic rule. Of that 170 years, at least 114 were years of war. Little wonder that James Madison regarded the Athenian democracy as a failure. “[D] emocracies have [always] been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” he wrote, “have [always] been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”6 In other words, Greek history taught America’s founding fathers what not to do.

25 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do • Three examples of the problems of Athenian democracy were particularly instructive to the American founders. The first lay in the financial history of the Greek city-states. In case after case, the poor outnumbered the rich, and fed their resentments into political action by supporting demagogues who promised that, if they were given political power, they would seize wealth from the rich and give it to the poor, or cancel all outstanding debts. Pisistratus, Nabis, and other dictators came to power in this way. The problem, of course, is that canceling debts destroys the possibility of credit, because lenders will refuse to extend loans in the future. Businessmen and the poor then cannot borrow the money they need, and the engine of economic growth shuts down. On the other hand, if debts are treated like crimes, as they were in ancient Athens, borrowers will be punished so severely that they will be essentially transformed into slaves. One of the greatest achievements of the Athenian lawgiver Solon, whom the Greeks regarded as among their wisest men, was to end the debt-slavery system that reduced so many people to bondage. Historian Will Durant put the problem well: “Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than liberty, and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.”7 Could a way be found to prevent the majority from using political power to destroy the economic system out of envy or need? The attraction of the poor toward demagogues suggests the second reason the American founding fathers regarded Greek democracy with skepticism: the democratic susceptibility to popular heroes and agitators. Consider the career of the Athenian general Alcibiades. During the Peloponnesian War, he argued for the so-called Sicilian Expedition, an illegal attack that was advantageous to Athens’s interests. The plan was controversial, but Alcibiades won the day, and his fleet sailed for Sicily. His political enemies, however, found a way to trump up false charges against him the instant he sailed—accusing him of defacing certain religious monuments in the city—so that in his absence, they could put him on trial for blasphemy. They convicted him and sentenced him to death if he should return, so he chose to abandon Athens and join its arch- nemesis, Sparta. Without his leadership, the Athenian military was defeated disastrously in Sicily, resulting in the death or enslavement of some ten thousand men. Yet the Spartans, too, quarreled with Alcibiades, and he again

26 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do defected, this time to the Persians. At last, when members of the Athenian military plotted a coup against the city’s anti-democratic leadership, they recalled Alcibiades to Athens. He then led a series of Greek military attacks around the ancient world until he at last returned to Athens in 407 BC. All of this took less than a decade. To the American founding fathers, Alcibiades’s career symbolized the dangers of unlimited, direct democracy: a strongman, handsome and brilliant, clothed in military glory, enjoying extraordinary skill, intoxicating charisma, and boundless ambition, he accumulates a worshipful audience as well as bitter enemies, and comes to imagine himself above the law—leading to civil war. He seemed to foreshadow Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte. As Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The people commonly intend the public good,” but they do not always “reason right about the means.” In fact, it is a “wonder” that the majority do not go wrong more often than they do, given that the people are continually “beset” by “parasites and sycophants . . . , the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by . . . men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.” Sometimes good leaders must “withstand” the people’s “temporary delusion[s], in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.”8 Could the American founders create a system that would help the people to resist parasites, sycophants, and demagogues, and help the people to overcome their “temporary delusions” before they harmed themselves? This, in turn, suggests the third and most famous of the problems of Athenian democracy: its instability. The Athenians could celebrate Alcibiades one moment and sentence him to death the next. In another infamous episode, when the city of Mytilene rebelled against Athenian rule, an Athenian general persuaded them to punish Mytileneans by sending troops to kill all of the men and enslave all of the women and children. The next day, an opposing politician persuaded the people to change their minds, and the Athenians dispatched a ship to overtake their previous expedition and stop them. Fortunately, the second ship arrived in time to spare the Mytileneans. But once again, the Athenian democracy had proven itself too easily swayed, subject to wild reversals of policy. “Athens,” wrote John Adams in 1787, was never a place of “[s]obriety, abstinence, and severity.” Instead, “from the first to the last moment of her democratical constitution, levity, gayety, inconstancy,

27 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do dissipation, intemperance, debauchery, and a dissolution of manners, were the prevailing character of the whole nation.”9 By far the most notorious example of the weakness of Athenian mob rule was the trial and execution of Socrates. Socrates (born in about 470 BC) worked as a stonecutter and a soldier before taking up his famous philosophical inquiries. This was at a time when Sparta was prevailing against Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and historian Bettany Hughes has argued that the war and other circumstances led to a populist reaction against avant-garde liberal intellectuals such as Socrates, who had led the city into this disastrous war and who despised the Athenian democracy.10 Certainly Socrates’s reputation cannot have been helped by the fact that he surrounded himself with such figures as Plato, whose hostility to democracy is well known; and Xenophon, who was so repelled by democracy that he moved to Sparta. His most notorious follower was, of all people, Alcibiades, with whom Socrates had served in the army and who felt for Socrates more than friendly attraction. When Athens’s fortunes suffered in its war against Sparta, it would only have been natural for the people to turn their resentment against the city’s lazy, philosophical, homoerotic intellectual elite, and particularly against their leader. In 423 BC, the playwright Aristophanes presented a comedy, The Clouds, which satirized Socrates as an airy philosopher who encourages sexual deviancy and teaches sons to rebel against their fathers. The play ends with the city’s respectable citizens burning down Socrates’s school and chasing him out of the city. That was twenty years before Athens was defeated in the war, and Sparta installed the Thirty Tyrants to rule over Athens. When the Tyrants drew up a list of three thousand Athenians they thought could be trusted, Socrates was on the list. Yet when they ordered him to help them round up troublemaking Athenians, he refused.11 This gave reason for both the Spartans and the Athenians to distrust Socrates, who was left without a protector. In 399 BC, he was charged with two crimes against the state: atheism and misleading the youths. He was convicted and sentenced to death, and Western civilization today regards him as a martyr of free speech—a martyr against democracy, not against monarchy or dictatorship, because it was the people of Athens, the voting majority, who put him to death. • Two thousand years later, by the time of the American Revolution, Western intellectuals had reached a consensus that democracy was a foolhardy, futile,

28 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do and dangerous form of government. The crucial political question was not who should hold political power, but how to impose a rule of law on society. If the majority is subject to no will but its own, then they are essentially above the law. They have power, but they may not exercise that power rightly. What force can make the people obey the law? The people themselves? Or is that like the dieter who tries to hide the chocolate cake from himself? In 1776, most political philosophers believed that the people could not give law to themselves and that democratic rule would inevitably collapse into chaos, instability, and the various evils of Athenian history. We must not roll our eyes at this consensus, or assume that previous generations were ignorant or prejudiced against democracy. These questions are still very much with us—a matter of life and death to millions in the Middle East today. Since 9/11, the United States and allied countries have struggled with the question of whether Islamic nations can thrive under democratic rule, or whether they are forever doomed to rule by one strong-armed dictator after another. And U.S. policy has oscillated accordingly. Recall that the second Bush administration became persuaded that supporting foreign dictators was not in the United States’ long-term best interests and that “linking international policy to building free societies”12 was both more to our interests and more humane. The administration initially met with success in replacing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein— whom previous administrations had regarded as a useful son of a bitch— with democratic rule. But among the many missteps that followed, Western leaders continued to prioritize the majoritarian aspects of democracy over the protections of individual rights. When given the opportunity to cast their votes, the Middle Easterners overwhelmingly preferred some form of dictatorial or totalitarian rule instead of political freedom. The results of the West’s naive democracy-first approach were such parodies of democracy as the triumph of Islamofascists in Egypt and Tunisia, and the rise of ISIS. Today, prominent voices once more tout the benefits of political repression.13 • How can we balance the rule of the majority with the need to keep the majority in check? How can the people make law for themselves and also follow it? To borrow a quintessentially Greek metaphor, can the people, like Odysseus, bind themselves to the mast so that they will not be tempted away from what they know is right?

29 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do

This question was particularly important to the English-speaking world at the time of the American Revolution, because a century earlier, England had been torn by civil war and by a brief experiment with something approaching democracy. In 1649, the English executed their king and established a new, written constitution under which Parliament would govern. This experiment lasted only four years before collapsing into military dictatorship, which lasted only six more years before the English gave up and restored their monarchy. To Europeans, this proved once more that the people are incapable of ruling themselves and must be controlled by a strong and independent power. Montesquieu, the political thinker most admired by America’s founding fathers, called the whole thing “a very droll spectacle” that proved that the people can only govern if they are virtuous. But virtue is a hard thing to maintain:

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law; and as each citizen is like a slave who has run away from his master, that which was a maxim of equity he [now] calls rigour; that which was a rule of action he [now] styles constraint; and to precaution he gives the name of fear. . . . The members of the commonwealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of a few, and the license of many.14

Note how this echoes the warnings of Polybius. Was there a way for the American founders to create a popular government that would also be lawful? In which the people would possess power but would also be subject to the law? That was the question that faced James Madison and his colleagues when they sat down in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a constitution. “In framing a government,” James Madison wrote, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control . . . but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”15 It was Madison, more than any other thinker, who would fashion the United States’ unique solution to this problem. He was born in Orange County, Virginia, in 1751 and, unusually for that time, attended college in the North, at what is now Princeton. He stayed on to study even after graduating, becoming America’s first graduate student. He studied some law but never became a

30 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do lawyer. Instead, at the age of twenty-three, he served on the Committee of Public Safety in his home county, the beginning of a career in public office that would last until his retirement at the age of sixty-six. Of his many political interests, his first and most fundamental was his belief in religious freedom. One of his earliest surviving letters is a note to a friend complaining about religious intolerance in Virginia, where the Anglican Church was the official religion, and Baptists were being persecuted for preaching, even in private homes.16 Religion, Madison believed, was a matter purely of individual conscience. If one person harmed another on the basis of a religious belief, the state should intervene, but a person’s private beliefs and religious practices are simply none of the government’s business. It was among the rights that no government, whether monarchical or democratic, could justly violate. The purpose of government is to protect individual freedom, not to empower the majority to do its will. Note how undemocratic this thinking is. For the Athenians—even for Socrates—the individual belonged to the city, and the city’s rulers had the power to determine how the individual should be treated. Although the laws of Athens were highly tolerant, Greek political philosophy had no fully formed concept of individualism. Remember that Socrates was executed in part because of his unorthodox religious views. According to the rules of pure Athenian democracy, nothing about this was unjust. He himself did not regard it as unjust and made no reference to any individual right of freedom of conscience in his defense before the court. On the contrary, he refused the opportunity to save himself from death because he agreed that the laws were on the side of the prosecution. He viewed himself as owned by the laws of Athens—he called himself their “child and servant”—and believed that for him to defy the majority’s legal judgments would “destroy” the city.17 Athenians such as Socrates were free, but they had no rights—no moral and political principles they could assert against the power of the city-state. By Madison’s day, John Locke and others had formulated the principle of individual rights and argued that government may not give or take our freedom in accordance with the state’s view of what is tolerable or intolerable. Rather, we have rights to freedom that precede government, and the state must respect and protect those rights. This change in thinking is clearest, again, in the case of religious freedom.18 At the time of the Revolution, British law accorded subjects broad religious toleration. Any Protestant sect that acknowledged the king’s supremacy was free to practice its faith—although Catholics and non-Christians were

31 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do excluded, and people of all faiths were still forced to support the Anglican Church through taxes. The British considered this an extremely liberal policy, and it was, relatively speaking. But for Madison and his allies, toleration was not enough. Instead, they insisted on religious liberty. Madison’s friend Thomas Paine denounced the idea of toleration: “Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it,” he wrote. “Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it.”19 George Washington agreed. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of,” he wrote, “as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” In the United States, “[a]ll possess alike liberty of conscience.”20 In 1776, the Virginia legislature asked the respected fifty-one-year- old statesman George Mason to prepare a Declaration of Rights. Madison, then half Mason’s age, was new to the state legislature, but he was not too shy to object to part of Mason’s draft. Madison later wrote that although he had been “young & in the midst of distinguished and experienced members of the Convention,” he had “suggested amendments,” including a change to “the terms in which the freedom of Conscience was expressed.” Where Mason had “inadvertently adopted the word toleration,” Madison urged the elder statesman to “substitute a phraseology which declared the freedom of conscience to be a natural and absolute right.”21 If religious freedom is a “natural and absolute right,” then it is not something government may justly intrude upon, regardless of whether that government is a monarchy or a democracy. The majority may justly take action only so long as it respects individual rights. In Madison’s words, “the Sovereignty of the Society as vested in & exerciseable by the majority, may do any thing that could be rightfully done, by the unanimous concurrence of the members.” Madison himself emphasized the word rightfully because “the reserved rights of individuals (of Conscience for example)” are “beyond the legitimate reach of Sovereignty, wherever vested or however viewed.”22 But, of course, the majority easily can be carried away by a “common impulse of passion or interest”23 and violate those rights. This is the problem known as “the tyranny of the majority.” “Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression,” Madison wrote. “In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”24

32 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do

Consider again the three examples of Athenian misrule: the tendency of the poor majority to use political power to plunder the wealthy; the popularity of strongmen such as Alcibiades, or demagogues who can sway the majority one direction one day and another on the next; and the instability of the laws, such that unpopular individuals such as Socrates could be put to death unjustly. Madison diagnosed these problems in The Federalist. In a “pure democracy,” groups of people motivated by a “common passion or interest” will often act in ways “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Often, the majority of the people are themselves members of a faction, and “there is nothing to check [their] inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual” such as Socrates.25 Living under a government of this kind—in which the individual can never be sure what the majority might do to him—is even more dangerous than living with no government at all. “In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may . . . truly be said to reign . . . [because] the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.”26 Historically, the most common solution to this problem had been monarchy. Because kings are not elected and do not depend directly on the people for their power, they can act in ways the majority disapproves. They can stop the people from persecuting an unpopular group, or insist on imposing some unpleasant but necessary rule that is in the people’s best interest—but one they would not choose if left to their own devices. Like Middle Eastern dictators today, the king could keep the lid on the dangerous passions and irrational acts of different factions in society. But, of course, the king can also exploit that position for his own private interest and ignore the majority’s will even when it should be obeyed. “In absolute monarchies,” wrote Madison, “the Prince may be tolerably neutral towards different classes of his subjects, but may sacrifice the happiness of all to his personal ambition or avarice.” Aside from an absolute monarch, the only other solutions philosophers had proposed for restraining the majority were prudence, respect for character, and religious scruples. All of these were helpful but not exactly reliable. Madison found a new solution, or at least a partial solution, and again it was inspired by his scholarship on religious freedom. The reason Britain and America enjoyed relative religious freedom was that so many different religious groups were vying for position in society that they tended to balance out each other. Their competition ensured that no one faction could seize political power and impose its will on the nation. In the same way, Madison argued, different social and economic groups might also be balanced against

33 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do one another so as to prevent the government from falling into the hands of any one class of citizens. “Divide [and conquer],” he wrote, is “the only policy by which a republic can be administered on just principles.”27 • This was what the Constitution of 1787 set out to do. It would include democratic elements, but it would place those elements within a rigid legal framework that would limit and balance the majority’s power in different ways. The House of Representatives—the most democratic part of the constitutional system—would be elected directly by the people every two years. The Senate, by contrast, would be elected by state legislatures, in a staggered fashion so that only one-third of the Senate faces election at any one time, and senators would serve six-year terms, the longest term of any elected officials. The people would not choose the president, but neither would he be unelected—he would be chosen by electors specially chosen for the purpose of selecting a president. And the courts would be staffed by judges appointed for life by this indirectly elected president. Coming full circle to the democratic elements again, the financial system giving life to the entire scheme would be primarily in the hands of the House of Representatives. In The Federalist, Madison set out to explain this system to ordinary Americans. The basic problem of democratic government, he wrote, is this problem of faction—the danger that private interest groups will use government power to impose their desires at the expense of their rivals. “It is in vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests,” Madison wrote, for “[e]nlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” There are two other solutions to the problem of faction: destroy its causes or limit its consequences. Destroying the causes of faction Madison rejects out of hand. This is because the cause of faction is freedom itself. “Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire.” Freedom leads to some people becoming richer than others, some being more successful than others, some greedier or crueler or better educated or more tolerant than others. Competing interest groups are therefore inevitable. “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions.” The only way to eliminate the causes of faction, therefore, would be to curtail freedom of speech and assembly, do away with voting, and subject everyone to rigid control by the state to ensure that no one is able to express any interests. This,

34 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do

Madison writes, would be as foolish as getting rid of air because it sometimes leads to fires. Life, too, depends on air—and abolishing liberty to destroy faction would be a remedy “worse than the disease.”28 This point is worth emphasizing, because many of today’s leading politicians urge proposals that they believe will stifle faction in just this way: specifically, campaign finance laws, which each year impose heavier and heavier restrictions on political speech and lobbying groups. This effort to stamp out faction by restricting liberty is just the path the Constitution’s authors chose not to take. Madison endorsed the second alternative: limiting the effects of faction. This can be done by “creating a will in the community independent of the majority” that can limit the majority’s power.29 The Constitution does this, in part, by establishing an independent judiciary, which shall prevent the legislature from going beyond its constitutional limits.30 Such separation of powers is “essential to the preservation of liberty.” Another way to protect the people from the problem of faction is the limitation of powers: the government cannot abuse authority that it lacks. But the most important method is to “render an unjust combination of a majority of the [people] very improbable, if not impracticable” by balancing different groups against one another. Here again, Madison used the analogy to religious freedom: “In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case of the multiplicity of interests, and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects.” This was a radical new idea in political science. The most admired political philosopher of the age, Montesquieu, had argued that democracy could survive only if the people were virtuous, and therefore that a democratic government could exist only in a small geographical area, where people could know one another. Madison was arguing the reverse: A larger country could be better protected against the evils of democracy, because its size would prevent the factional problems that had caused so much trouble in Athens. “[T]he larger the society,” he argued, “the more duly capable it will be of self-government.”31 • The Constitution’s authors, therefore, hoped that they had solved the problems that since the days of ancient Athens had plagued democratic rule. But the Constitution they were writing was not just for a single government—it was also supposed to bring together thirteen states, each of which had its own political and social institutions. During the Revolution, the colonies had often had trouble putting their internal differences aside, and it was not until 1781

35 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do that they had ratified the Articles of Confederation. It took just six years for Americans to realize that the Articles were not working, primarily because they left too much power with the individual state governments. To fix those problems, a new Constitutional Convention was scheduled for May 1787. Madison sat down with his books to prepare for the Convention and wrote out two sets of notes to guide his thinking. In one, he listed the “Vices of the Political Systems of the United States.”32 In the other, he wrote out a list of notes “On Ancient And Modern Confederacies,” beginning with three Greek confederacies: the Lycian Confederacy (200 BC to 43 BC), the Amphictyonic League (which began at an unknown time—Madison believed about 1500 BC— and ended some time in the 2nd century AD), and the Achean Confederacy (280 BC–146 BC). He also included more recent leagues and confederacies in his study, listing under each how their powers were divided between the states and the central government, and the problems that each had encountered. For example, he noted that under the Amphictyonic League, each Greek city sent two deputies to the central government, that the members of the League were bound by oath to defend each other, that the central government was responsible for deciding conflicts between the members, had the authority to enforce its decrees with military power, and so forth. But under “vices,” he noted, that “[t]he Execution of [these] powers was very different from the Theory. . . . It did not restrain the parties from warring agst. each other. Athens & Sparta were members during their conflicts.” This lack of real authority was why Greece had been unable to resist the invasion of Philip of Macedon. “If [Greece’s] confederation had been stricter, & been persevered in,” he wrote, “she would never have yielded to Macedon, and might have proved a Barrier to the vast projects of Rome.”33 These notes came in handy at the Constitutional Convention and later when he urged Virginians to ratify the Constitution. For Madison and his supporters, the overwhelming concern of the Convention was to create something that would keep the union of states together. God forbid American states fall into war against one another the way the cities of Greece or the nations of Europe had. True, American states shared a common religion and a common language, but as one of Madison’s colleagues at the Convention observed, the Greeks had also shared “[a] common language, a common law, common usages and manners, and a common interest in being united,” but they had nevertheless “destroy[ed] every tie.”34 How could the civil wars that marked European and ancient Greek history be avoided? In Madison’s view, the primary reason the ancient Greek confederacies had failed was the weakness of the central authority. A “weak government,

36 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do when not at war,” he wrote, “is ever agitated by internal dissensions,” which “never fail to bring on fresh calamities from abroad.”35 In Federalist Number 18, he used the notes he had prepared on Greek confederacies to make this point. The Persians had constantly exploited the rivalry between Sparta and Athens, and the Greek cities had been unable to discipline themselves enough to present a united front against the Macedonians or the Romans. If the American states quarreled with each other now, the British, French, or Spanish—all of whom owned vast territory in North America at the time— might see a similar opportunity to divide and conquer the New World. Americans needed to act now to prevent the union from collapsing. Consider one example of the ways in which the Articles of Confederation committed the same mistakes as the ancient Amphictyonic League. Under the Articles, the Congress had no power to implement its own orders. It could ask states to provide tax dollars or to supply troops for the needs of the union, but it had no power to tax directly, raise its own armies, or enforce national laws if the states chose to resist. As Madison put it, the Articles of Confederation were “derived from the dependent derivative authority of the legislatures of the states.”36 It was not created by the people directly.37 The same was true of the Amphictyonic League. Its powers “were administered by deputies appointed wholly by the cities in their political capacities.”38 This meant that if the central government tried to pursue a policy that a city disliked, that city could easily jam up the works, and the only thing the central government could do to enforce its decrees was to go to war against that city. The American Articles were already showing signs of the same problem: A single state could stymie national projects, and even such states-rights enthusiasts as Thomas Jefferson were suggesting that Congress could use the military to force states to comply.39 The “great and radical vice” of the Articles, wrote Madison’s ally Hamilton in The Federalist, was that it only allowed Congress to legislate “for states or governments, in their corporate or collective capacities” instead of allowing Congress to adopt laws that bound individuals directly.40 “If a number of political societies enter into a larger political society, the laws which the latter may enact . . . must necessarily be supreme over those societies, and the individuals of whom they are composed. It would otherwise be a mere treaty . . . and not a government.”41 It was because the ancient Greek confederations lacked that supremacy that they had collapsed and the Greek city-states fell to bickering among themselves—making them “ineffectual for the preservation of harmony, and a prey to their own dissentions and foreign invasions.”42 The new Constitution would avoid this mistake by replacing the

37 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do treaty-style Articles of Confederation with an actual Constitution—one that would be the “supreme law of the land,” which all states as well as national officers would be required to obey. In crucial respects, the federal government would be a single unit, not a mere League of sovereignties as in ancient Greece. • Thus the Greek experience taught Americans important lessons about the dangers of democratic politics, both internally and externally. Internally, the power of the majority had to be bound by the limits of law—a law that would divide the majority’s power in ways that would enable the people to control their government but would prevent them from becoming a tyrannical majority. “An elective despotism,” wrote Jefferson, “was not the government we fought for.” Instead, the Revolutionary generation hoped to create a government “which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced . . . that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained.”43 Externally, the Greek experience with leagues and confederations showed the necessity of a strong central government that could prevent the states from flying off in their own directions. “Governments destitute of energy, will ever produce anarchy,” Madison told his fellow Virginians when urging them to ratify the Constitution.44 He did not mean by this what we mean when we speak of “big government” today; Madison believed in a government that did a few things well, rather than one that does a lot badly. The states should retain most day-to-day government power. But on matters that concerned the American nation, the federal government should have the power to make national policy, and make it stick. These two lessons relate in an important way. The founders hoped that a strong central government would not only enable the American states to resist foreign attack and avoid conflict with each other, but that it would also protect citizens against tyranny at the hands of their own states. At the top of Madison’s priorities when he went to the Constitutional Convention was a federal power to veto state laws, especially laws that violated his favorite individual right: religious liberty. He was unable to persuade the Convention to agree. This was the worst defeat of Madison’s career, and for a while he considered his work in Philadelphia practically a failure because of it.45 Later, he tried to get the proposal added to the Bill of Rights and again failed. Not

38 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers Learning What Not to Do until 1868, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, would this omission be corrected. Still, the Constitution restricted the states in important ways that did help, though imperfectly, to restrain the majority from acting tyrannically. By dividing power between the states and the federal government, the Constitution created a “compound republic” in which power “is first divided between two distinct governments”—state and federal—“and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments.” This would give “a double security . . . to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.”46 The creation of the United States of America was the work of many great minds. But of the founding political thinkers, James Madison was arguably the most ingenious. Jefferson was a brilliant abstract theorist, John Adams a principled and practical man. But it was Madison, more than any other, who combined the highest abstractions of political theory with the practical skills of a political leader. History, and particularly the history of Greek democracy, was his indispensable guide in that effort. “Experience,” he wrote, “is the oracle of truth.”47 The experience of the Greeks, and especially of Athens, taught Madison important lessons—lessons about the failures of previous democracies—lessons about what not to do if the new nation was to prove true to the principles of freedom on which it was based. “I most earnestly pray,” he told Virginians when urging them to adopt the Constitution, that America would “have sufficient wisdom” to learn from the mistakes of the past “and that she may escape a similar fate.”48 It is, of course, always up to us whether we choose to take advantage of that wisdom.

39 3

The Two Freedoms

he American Revolutionary patriots were growing old toward the end of Tthe 18th century. George Washington died in December 1799. The last signer of the Declaration of Independence died in 1832. And by then, the intellectual world had changed dramatically, both in America and in Greece. The early decades of the 19th century witnessed the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, the Greek war for independence, and the first steps toward the Civil War in the United States. The Age of Enlightenment was fading away, and a new philosophical outlook called Romanticism was on the rise. Romanticism did not mark a clean break with the Enlightenment. Rather, the Enlightenment blended into, and in some ways gave rise to, the Romantic movement. So it is not possible to draw a precise line between the two. But between 1800 and 1850, the intellectual compass swung away from the values of reason, science, and universal human rights, which were the basis of the Enlightenment, and toward unchecked passions and mysticism, as well as nationalistic, collectivistic, and even racist ideologies. One important signpost on this journey came in 1819, the same year Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. That year, in Paris, a French intellectual named Benjamin Constant presented a paper titled “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.”1 Constant contrasted two visions of what it means to be free: First, there was what he called the ancient conception of freedom, which meant the ability of the citizen to take part in public affairs—the right to vote, or to speak one’s mind about political issues—essentially, the right to participate in and contribute to an independent society. This notion of the community’s collective right to govern itself without foreign interference, and to preserve and perpetuate its traditions, was highly valued in the ancient world. The second, modern conception of freedom, on the other hand, was individualistic. It regarded freedom as a form of individual autonomy. It included individuals’ rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, economic liberty, the right to travel, and the right not to be imprisoned

The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers • 40 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms or punished except by a lawful authority. The notion of theprivate — that is, the value of personal independence—was the modern conception of freedom. These two conceptions of liberty—the ancient one, centered on the public or collective; and the modern one, centered on the private or individual—have always been in tension, as they are today. The modern conception requires the overthrow of long-standing community traditions that violate individual rights; the ancient conception resists such change. This collision between the idea that the individual has inalienable rights and the idea that the community has supreme authority to govern itself as the collective wills would play a critical role in the transformation from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. The clearest example of the ancient conception of freedom is the Athenian democracy, which the historian Herodotus celebrated when he wrote about the Greek victory over the Persian empire. Freedom, Herodotus wrote, had proven itself “beneficial . . . in every way,” because when Athenians were subject to the Persian dictator, they “were no better . . . than any of the peoples living around them,” but when they became free, “they became by far the best of all.”2 Athenian soldiers, he observed, ran toward battle while the Persian soldiers marched reluctantly, whipped from behind by their generals.3 But Herodotus was not praising democracy, let alone individual liberty. The Spartans considered themselves free, but they lived under a government that today we would call fascist. Instead, Herodotus was referring to the ancient version of freedom: the city’s ability to make collective decisions without foreign interference. As Benjamin Constant put it, “the ancients had no notion of individual rights. Men were, so to speak, nothing but machines whose gears and cog-wheels were regulated by the law.” People only enjoyed personal freedoms that the society chose to give them. Citizenship was a source of pride in the ancient world, something to be earned or even purchased. The Bible tells us that when Paul was arrested and whipped, he objected that he had a right to a trial because he was a Roman citizen.

The commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?”

“Yes, I am,” he answered.

Then the commander said, “I had to pay a lot of money for my citizenship.”

“But I was born a citizen,” Paul replied.

41 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms

Those who were about to interrogate him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains.4

To be born a citizen meant to have special privileges that noncitizens did not enjoy and few could afford to buy. On the other hand, the modern conception of freedom, born during the Enlightenment, pertained to rights that individuals have prior to citizenship. Thinkers such as John Locke argued that there are standards of justice that apply even before we enter a political context: that is, universal human rights that do not depend on our membership in a community or society. “The promises and bargains . . . between . . . two men in [a] desert island,” he wrote, “are binding . . . though they are perfectly in a state of nature,” because “truth and keeping of faith belongs to men, as men, and not as members of society.”5 And because all people “are created equal, with certain inalienable rights,” governments are obliged to respect and secure those rights. On this view, people are born free and then create government to protect them from force. Government is their servant, not their master. This was the opposite of the ancient conception of freedom, according to which people were members of a political society first and only had rights as a consequence of that. Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and, later, the American Founders, believed there was a way to reconcile the ancient and modern conceptions of freedom. As long as a community respects people’s basic natural rights, that community deserves respect, and the people may decide collectively how to govern themselves. But individual freedom must take priority over democratic decisions. In Constant’s terminology, modern liberty must take precedence over ancient liberty. That is why the Declaration of Independence says that if government becomes destructive of our rights, we have the right to alter or abolish it. On this conception of freedom, the fact that the majority of people vote for something does not make it right. “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. “[T]hough the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable. . . . [T]he minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate [them] would be oppression.”6 But whereas Enlightenment thinkers saw the rights of the individual as paramount, the new era of Romanticism would challenge that idea and once again elevate the liberty of the collective over that of the individual.

42 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms • How could this regression happen? How could post-Enlightenment thinkers with access to the individualistic idea of modern liberty revert back into the fundamentally anti-individualistic notion of ancient liberty? It was a circuitous development. The Enlightenment had placed a high value on reason and discovery. It was natural, then, for people to celebrate inventors, creators, individual geniuses. Benjamin Franklin, for example, was a quintessential Enlightenment figure—a man of reason, science, hard work, creativity. And in France he became a celebrity. Paintings and drawings of him were sold in the stores. He became so popular that the king of France, in a sort of jealous joke, even had his picture painted on the bottom of a bedpan. This celebration of the individual genius gradually morphed into a cult of celebrity—a celebration of the isolated, unsung hero or misunderstood misfit—and, eventually, even the insane (see postmodernist philosophy). Individual geniuses often went unrecognized in their own time, ignored or spurned, only later to be recognized for their greatness. In light of this, people began to idolize the suffering artist, the penniless poet, the bohemian, the outcast. Whereas Enlightenment heroes struggled against the oppression of kings and tyrants, the new outcast heroes of Romanticism struggled against the limits of nature itself. For the Romantics, the important fight was against the bonds of civilization and even of reason. The perfect symbol of this is what we now call the Byronic hero—the man of greatness who proves his self- determination even at the price of self-destruction, and who demonstrates his individuality through suicide. A major step in this direction came in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Born in Switzerland in 1712, Rousseau was almost entirely self-taught. He came to admire Plato and to reject the ideas that formed the heart of the Enlightenment: reason, individualism, and private property. He argued that these things alienated man from nature and separated humanity from the proper order of the universe. Human consciousness itself, he claimed, had been so deeply warped by these modern ideas that few people realized how oppressed they truly were. They imagined themselves free; they thought they were pursuing their own individual goals; but, in fact, they were just blind tools of artificial forces that were stifling their potential. Rousseau argued that prehistoric man had lived at peace and harmony with nature. Humanity was then perfectly happy, in a state of thoughtless bliss.

43 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms

No “savage . . . [ever] complain[ed] of life,” because each was “a free being, whose heart is at ease and whose body is in health.”7 But in today’s world, there is “hardly a creature . . . who does not lament his existence: we even see many deprive themselves of as much of it as they can, and laws human and divine together can hardly put a stop to the disorder.”8 What caused man to fall from this Garden of Eden? Rousseau’s hostility to private property is so well known that one might think the answer is “property,” but Rousseau’s critique of modern life goes deeper. To him, the true origin of human evil—the apple in this new Adam and Eve story he was creating—was language. Yet by language, what Rousseau really meant was the capacity for conceptual thinking—the use of reason. It was the advent of language, Rousseau argued, that enabled humans “to take the difference between objects into account, and to make comparisons.” This led to jealousy, competition, and inequality. It was from this that private property arose, and the noble savages who previously had “lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives” now struggled to improve their lot. They built homes, established cities, learned agriculture, and established civilization—all of which, according to Rousseau, made them miserable. “Vast forests became . . . fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.”9 Philosophers such as Aristotle had once seen language as representing the one quality that made man special—reason.10 In their view, civilization is the great human invention that protects us from nature. But to Rousseau, man’s ability to think was a great curse, and civilization alienates us from nature. But, Rousseau argued, there was hope. Although it would be impossible to eliminate language, proper education and training could establish a new world, one without competition, inequality, or selfishness—a world that would come as close as possible to our original, natural state of bliss. Among other things, this required the abolition of individualism. Like Plato, Rousseau argued that human beings could grasp genuine happiness, not as single individuals, isolated from their fellows, but only by being fused into one collective entity. Each person would aim toward what Rousseau called “The General Will.” This would be the true collective will, cleansed of selfishness; the Will of the People, the Volkgeist, into which everyone would be subsumed, and made into a better and freer and fuller person—whether he liked it or not. Rousseau essentially offered up Plato’s totalitarian Republic as a model for the new age.11 And this emphasis on the will of the people naturally brought with it the ideas of national and ethnic identity.

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Enlightenment thinkers, with their emphasis on individualism, had little regard for such notions. But Romantics believed that nations themselves had souls, which arose from the linguistic and cultural bonds of the people. In 1806, the German Romantic philosopher Johann Fichte wrote in his Address to the German People: Only when each [nation], left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be. . . . [T]hat law . . . is the highest law in the spiritual world!12 Put simply, the Romantic era came to focus on the strength of the will rather than reason: to cherish the bold, striving hero—or the heroic nation— that struggles even against the limits of nature to prove its collective freedom. This was a wholesale abandonment of the Enlightenment conceptions of individualism and modern liberty. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke had tried to build social systems on the basis of reason, private property, and the needs of the individual, Romantics such as Rousseau and Fichte regarded the Enlightenment as a manifestation of petty, bourgeois values. They spurned cold, calculating reason as being deaf to the passionate impulses of the heart and the need for social cohesion and stability. To achieve true freedom, said the Romantics, we must break through the limits of reason. Decades later, Fyodor Dostoyevsky brilliantly parodied this view through a character who says that the idea two plus two equals four is just “a piece of insolence” that merely “bar[s] your path.” “If we are to give everything its due,” he declares, “twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”13 This was the Romanticist attitude: The rules of reason and logic that Enlightenment thinkers sought to uphold—including those of natural law, science, and economics—were pieces of insolence barring the path to the new world of spirituality, passion, and unreason. After Rousseau, the second great Romantic intellectual was Edmund Burke, a member of the British Parliament, who in 1790 published a pamphlet called Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke denounced the French Revolution for its “rationality” and instead advocated a political philosophy rooted in feeling, tradition, and hierarchy. Like Rousseau, he was reactionary and nostalgic. But whereas Rousseau longed to return to a primitive Garden of Eden, Burke yearned for the medieval age of chivalry, during which people

45 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms believed in “loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.”14 He bemoaned that the golden age of “submission,” “obedience,” and “servitude” had given way to a modern era of “sophisters, economists and calculators.”15 As a result, “the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal” in the Middle Ages had been replaced by a “mechanic philosophy” of “light and reason,” which regarded kings and queens merely as men and women, political institutions only as ways to serve the people, and laws as justified solely by the “concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations.”16 Burke’s disgust for “economists and calculators” is telling. The very idea of “political economy,” or what we today call economics, was a new thing at the time, and the idea of cost-benefit analysis scandalized Burke. Government, he thought, was a mystical entity that needed an air of superstition and glamour. If people instead used reason to weigh matters for themselves, they would soon overthrow time-honored traditions, and chaos would ensue. Now, recall Benjamin Constant’s distinction between ancient and modern liberty. Rousseau and Burke were rejecting the modern, individualistic conception of liberty, and were exalting the ancient form—that is, the freedom of the community to act in accordance with the collective will. Burke rejected the very idea of thinking in principles—what he called “metaphysical abstraction[s]”17—and embraced instead “positive, recorded, hereditary” rules, the “patrimony derived from [our] forefathers,”18 which formed “the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.”19 Nationalism and ethnic identity were a crucial part of Burkean mysticism. A people’s traditions, culture, religion, and so forth were precisely what Burke most valued. He therefore supported the American Revolution, not because he believed in the principles of inalienable human rights, but because he believed in the independence of a mature and well-ordered ethnic nation. He supported the ancient liberty of community self-government, not the modern liberty of personal freedom. He had little interest in or concern for the sufferings of common people. His great adversary Thomas Paine noted that he could find in Burke’s writing “not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection” for “those who lingered out the most wretched of lives” under monarchy. Burke, he said, wrote eloquently about the beautiful feathers while ignoring the dying bird.20 He was right. Burke viewed such considerations as petty and vulgar. The Enlightenment ideas of modern liberty that Paine cherished were cheap in Burke’s eyes. They robbed government of its transcendent spiritual grandeur.

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Burke portrayed himself as a voice of calm reason. But Reflections on the Revolution in France is a prototypical romantic poem, albeit in prose; one that denounces reason and exalts an imaginary golden age of chivalry, with noble knights and their ladies fair. Through Rousseau and Burke, Romanticism was reviving the ancient conception of liberty to overthrow the modern, Enlightenment conception. • This revival of ancient liberty appealed to many people at a time when countless nations were dominated by massive foreign empires. The Russian, French, Austrian, and British Empires had tried to stamp out the languages and subcultures of many of their subject peoples. Now, the success of the American and French Revolutions inspired Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, and others to rebel against their imperial rulers and to seek national self- determination. Foremost among these were the Greeks. Greece had been dominated by the Ottoman Empire for three and a half centuries. The Turks had ruled Athens since 1458; they transformed the Parthenon into a mosque, forbade non-Muslims to ride horses, and imposed burdensome taxes on the Greeks, including the jizya (i.e., the tribute that non-Muslims are traditionally forced to pay to Muslim rulers) and the even more hated paidomazoma(“tribute of children”) whereby Greek villages were forced to hand over one out of every five children to be raised as a Muslim and employed in the Turkish military. The Turks brutally punished Greeks who resisted. Still, over the centuries, the Greeks rebelled periodically, and the rise of the new Romantic movement helped to spur further revolts. It was natural that the Romantics would embrace the cause of Greece. Greek history, its poetry and drama, its philosophy, are the foundations of Western civilization, and the magnificent intellectual and artistic achievements of the Greeks thrilled the poets, architects, sculptors, and painters of the Romantic era. Take a look, for instance, at the paintings of Jacques Louis David, the greatest French painter of the era. David, a thoroughgoing supporter of the French Revolution and an admirer of Napoleon, painted the iconic portrait of the conqueror. His art glorified nationalism and patriotic self-sacrifice. His 1787 painting The Death of Socrates captures the moment when the heroic spokesman for truth willingly takes the cup of poison, becoming a martyr to his race. David portrays Socrates as a Romantic hero, a misunderstood, unappreciated genius, persecuted by his own people, who gives up his life

47 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms rather than compromise his integrity, but who is ultimately a benefactor to the world. A dozen years later, the Greek poet Rigas Feraios would play that role all too literally. Rigas was from Thessaly, and, inspired by the French Revolution, he began to question why Greece should be ruled by the Turks. He embraced the cause of Greek revolution and appealed to the legacy of ancient Greece and to the ideas of ancient liberty, according to which each citizen is expected to discharge his duty of defending the city.21 Brave and adventurous men, Rigas argued, could prove themselves worthy of Hellenic citizenship by fighting the oppressive Turks. The intensity of his romantic nationalism is expressed in his poetry, particularly “Greek War Song,” which was translated into English by Lord Byron:

Sons of the Greeks, arise! The glorious hour’s gone forth, And, worthy of such ties, Display who gave us birth . . . Let your country see you rising, And all her chains are broke. Brave shades of chiefs and sages, Behold the coming strife! Hellénes of past ages, Oh, start again to life!22

In 1797, Rigas went on a mission to Paris to enlist Napoleon’s support for an effort to liberate Greece. But when he stopped in Trieste, Rigas’s revolutionary pamphlets were discovered by agents of the Austrian emperor. He was arrested, and the Austrians handed him over to the Turks. On June 24, 1798, his jailers strangled him to death and threw his body into the Sava River. “This is how brave men die,” Rigas said shortly before his execution. “I have sown; soon will come the hour when my nation will gather the ripe fruit.”23 Rigas’s admirer and translator, Byron, would play a crucial role in realizing that prophecy. He visited Greece in 1809 at the age of twenty-one and was swept away by the people and their plight. When he returned to England, he began writing a long narrative poem, titled Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which was published to wild acclaim in several parts between 1812 and 1818. It told of the travels of a young aristocratic hero, modeled on Byron himself, and it is liberally annotated with footnotes that make the poem something of a travel documentary. This was the first appearance of the Byronic hero: the

48 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms handsome loner, the brooding idealist, the brash rebel, the James Dean figure of the 19th century. In the section on Greece, Byron called for Greek liberation.

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great! Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth, And long accustomed bondage uncreate . . . ? He exhorted the Greeks not to expect help from overseas:

For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh, Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage, Or tear their name defiled from Slavery’s mournful page. Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!

Only when the Greeks themselves resolved to be free and overthrew their oppressors could their nation hope for freedom. “Lurk there no hearts that throb with secret pain[?]” Byron asked. “This must he feel, the true-born son of Greece.” Only “When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men, / Then mayst thou be restored; but not till then.”24 It turned out that Greek mothers were already giving birth to men. Admirers of the martyred Rigas founded a secret society called the Filiki Eteria, devoted to encouraging rebellion against the Turks. In 1821, its leader, Alexander Ypsilantis, led a group of soldiers into Moldova to spark the uprising. His forces were defeated, but the rebellion spread in a disorganized but determined way. The war for Greek independence had begun. Ironically, although he had warned the Greeks not to expect foreign aid, Lord Byron himself would quickly rally to their side. He sailed to Kefalonia in 1823, where he spent £4,000 to help build ships for the Greek military. He planned to lead an attack on Turkish forces at the Bay of Corinth but fell ill and died in Missolonghi the following April. He remains a national hero to the Greeks to this day. It is said (perhaps apocryphally) that when his body was returned to England for burial, friends removed his heart and buried it in Greece. Americans applauded the Greek Revolution, but from a distance. About the same time that Byron was traveling to Greece, one prominent expatriate, Adamantios Korais, wrote to the elderly Thomas Jefferson, asking for support

49 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms for the uprising. “Help us, fortunate Americans,” he pleaded.25 Jefferson politely turned him down. Although “no people sympathize more feelingly than ours with the sufferings of your countrymen,” the “fundamental principle of our government” was “never to entangle us with the broils of Europe.”26 Still, he applauded the Hellenes. “Possessing ourselves the combined blessings of liberty and order, we wish the same to other countries and to none more than yours, which [is an] . . . example of what men should be.” About the same time, Greek envoy Andreas Luriottis wrote to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. He received a similar answer. “Greece, old Greece, the seat of early civilization and freedom, stretches out her hands imploringly,” Luriottis pleaded.27 But Adams answered that although Americans sympathized with “the cause of freedom and independence wherever its standard is unfurled,” and particularly admired “the display of Grecian energy in defence of Grecian liberties, and the association of heroic exertions, at the present time, with the proudest glories of former ages,” the United States could not become engaged in a foreign war.28 American support for Greek independence was sincere. Senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay spoke movingly of their approval. President James Monroe announced his support. Newspaper readers devoured accounts of the battles, and Greek rebels became celebrities in the United States. Michigan even named a city, Ypsilanti, for one of them. Committees raised money to send to Greece, and many Americans volunteered to fight, including Jonathan Miller, who distinguished himself in battle and whose adopted son, Loukas, became the first Greek American elected to Congress; and Samuel Gridley Howe, who served for six years as a surgeon in the Greek army.29 Howe’s wife, Julia, later wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” • But there was one glaring problem for Americans who supported the Greek uprising: slavery. The hypocrisy of free Americans supporting Greek rebellion while keeping millions of Africans and their children enslaved was obvious. So, too, was the parallel between the Greek revolt against tyranny and slave rebellions in the United States. Between 1800 and 1850, there were at least ten major slave uprisings in America, not to mention the revolution in Haiti that overthrew slavery and established the first black republic only seven hundred miles from Florida. In 1829, a black man named David Walker published a pamphlet advocating slave rebellion. White Americans, he said, thought “the Greeks . . . the

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Irish . . . the Jews,” and “all the inhabitants of the earth, (except however, the sons of Africa) are . . . men, and of course . . . ought to be free. But we, (coloured people) and our children are brutes!! and of course are, and ought to be Slaves . . . forever!!”30 “Do you think that our blood is hidden from the Lord,” he demanded of whites, “by your charitable deeds to the Greeks?”31 The correspondence between the Turks’ oppression of Greeks and the Americans’ enslavement of blacks was on many people’s minds. Probably the most eloquent statement came in 1844, when the sculptor Hiram Powers displayed the first American nude female sculpture, titled The Greek Slave. It is a masterpiece, a life-size marble depiction of a beautiful woman in chains. Powers toured the United States with it, and although audiences were somewhat scandalized by its nudity, they were even more shocked when abolitionists adopted it as a symbol of the antislavery cause. Poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning32 and John Greenleaf Whitter composed poems about it. “Oh, shame! the Moslem thrall,” wrote Whittier,

Who, with his master, to the Prophet kneels, While turning to the sacred Kebla feels His fetters break and fall . . . But our poor slave in vain Turns to the Christian shrine his aching eyes; Its rites will only swell his market price, And rivet on his chain. 33 Some southern whites agreed that it was impossible to cheer on the Greek revolution while keeping black Americans enslaved. In 1826, when a southern woman spoke in support of the Greeks in the presence of Virginia Congressman John Randolph, he pointed to two nearby slaves and cried, “Madam, the Greeks are at your door!”34 But other southern leaders found no inconsistency in supporting Greek freedom while denying freedom to black Americans. They regarded the argument for abolishing slavery as essentially an Enlightenment idea, based on individualism and the natural freedom of each person—in other words, modern liberty. But they viewed the Greek cause as a matter of ancient liberty, of ethnicity and cultural identity. They thought it perfectly consistent to believe that the Greek nation deserved to be free, but that individuals have no fundamental right to freedom. Edmund Burke had denounced the ideas of “economists and calculators” who argued for modern liberty—and simultaneously had written movingly in support of ancient liberty: applauding the hierarchical, traditional society, with its “proud submission,” “dignified

51 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms obedience,” and “subordination of the heart.” Southerners could easily embrace the idea that the United States—or the southern states, anyway— made up a white nation that deserved independence but owed no respect to black people. One of the most important figures in the rise of southern Romanticism was the novelist Sir Walter Scott, whose novel Ivanhoe was published in 1820. It glorified the age of chivalry and became one of the great masterpieces of Romantic literature. Scott exalted spiritual values and time-honored traditions over modern innovation and vulgar materialism. The novel was furiously successful, especially in the South. For slave owners on plantations, the medieval romance held a particular charm. They pictured themselves as lordly aristocrats, masters of their small fiefdoms, benignly condescending to their human property, who played the role of serfs. In fact, Mark Twain later blamed the Civil War on Walter Scott. Modern progress, he wrote, had been making headway against tyranny and superstition, overthrowing monarchy and the dogma, until Walter Scott came along, “and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” Scott’s novels, Twain argued, “created rank and caste” in the South, by encouraging Southerners to throw off the modern liberty of the Enlightenment and embrace the ancient liberty of Romanticism.35 This may seem an exaggeration on Twain’s part, but he was not alone in seeing it this way. Scott’s effect on the pre-Civil War South was so profound that Virginia’s official state historian said a half century after the war that “the South of 1860 might not be inaptly nicknamed Sir Walter Scottland.”36 An even clearer example of how the Romantic South elevated ancient liberty over modern liberty can be seen in the works of Virginia writer George Fitzhugh. With a frankness that is disgusting today, his 1854 book, Sociology for the South: or, The Failure of Free Society, argued in favor of slavery by a direct assault on Enlightenment thought. He chose his title carefully, explicitly contrasting sociology with economics. The latter, as he put it, was “the science of a free society”37 and was concerned with the “system of universal liberty and equality of rights”38—which in Fitzhugh’s mind boiled down to “‘every man for himself, and Devil take the hindmost.’”39 The new sociology of slavery, by contrast, was rooted in the ancient altruistic doctrine of self-sacrifice for the sake of society.

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Modern liberty, Fitzhugh wrote, was based on the pursuit of one’s “own selfish welfare unfettered and unrestricted by legal regulations, or governmental prohibitions.”40 In enunciating the doctrines of modern liberty and the right to rebel against oppressive government, the Declaration of Independence had revealed an “unphilosophical,” “presumptuous,” and “infidel philosophy.”41 But “as civilization advances, liberty recedes: and it is fortunate for man that he loses his love of liberty just as fast as he becomes more moral and intellectual.”42 The benevolent institution of slavery was superior, in this view, because it was based on the idea that man is not an independent being but is “born a member of society . . . as in the cases of bees and ants.”43 Society is “the being,” and the individual is “one of the members of that being,” who has “no rights whatever, as opposed to the interests of society. . . . Whatever rights he has are subordinate to the good of the whole; and he has never ceded rights to it, for he was born its slave, and had no rights to cede.”44 This is a good thing, Fitzhugh continued, because slaves are essentially like children, who “cannot be governed by mere law; first, because they do not understand it, and secondly, because they are so much under the influence of impulse, passion and appetite, that they want sufficient self-control.” Slavery “relieves our slaves” of the awful burden of having to “support [a] family . . . find a home . . . procur[e] employment, and attend to all domestic wants and concerns.”45 In other words, slavery represented ancient liberty. It inculcated a “consciousness of security” on the slave’s part, along with “a full comprehension of his position, and a confidence in that position, and the absence of all corroding cares and anxieties,” which make the slave “easy and self-assured in his address, cheerful, happy and contented, free from jealousy, malignity, and envy, and at peace with all around him.”46 This stuff is so repulsive that today it sounds like a parody, but Fitzhugh was in earnest. As the historian Rollin Osterweis put it, American slavery was a tripod: one leg was the cotton and plantation system, the second leg was slavery, and the third leg was the “cult” of southern chivalry, a manifestation of Romanticism, which emphasized honor, militarism, and social hierarchy.47 This is made clearest in the writings of the most ingenious and diabolical of slavery’s supporters: John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was a South Carolinian who served as vice president and secretary of war before entering the Senate. He was bold, even iconoclastic, in denouncing modern liberty. In 1837, he declared that slavery “is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.”48 He rejected the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Jefferson, who thought human beings are born free and create government to protect their rights. On the contrary, Calhoun

53 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms argued, government “is not even a matter of choice. . . . Like breathing, it is not permitted to depend on our volition.”49 There was, he said, “not a word of truth” in the Declaration of Independence. It “asserts that ‘all men are created equal.’ [This is] erroneous. All men are not created. According to the Bible, only two, a man and a woman, ever were, and of these one was pronounced subordinate to the other. All others have come into the world by being born, and in no sense . . . either free or equal.”50 Freedom, Calhoun believed, is given to people by the government. “It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty,” he wrote. Freedom “is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike;—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving;—and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.”51 Bestowed by whom? By society. Calhoun was a staunch advocate of ancient, as opposed to modern liberty. In his view, society came first, and the individual second. Southern intellectuals such as Calhoun and Fitzhugh were formulating an ideology of slavery that rejected the Enlightenment principle of rational, modern liberty in favor of the Romantic ideals of traditional, authoritarian society rooted in status and hierarchy. Burke had lamented in 1790 that the age of chivalry was gone, but these intellectuals were bent on reviving it. They would form a new nation and declare themselves independent of the United States. When, in 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, the South was proclaiming itself “free”—while denying freedom to its people. The Civil War that followed was a direct clash between the ancient and the modern conceptions of liberty. On the southern side stood the ideology of Romanticism, with its celebration of slavery’s historical pedigree and its conception of “states rights,” under which state governments are fundamentally sovereign, and individual freedom derives from that sovereignty. On the other side stood modern liberty: the idea that every person has a basic right to freedom, and that in vindicating that right, we should overthrow institutions that violate it—even those as old as slavery. This conflict between the values of the Enlightenment and the values of Romanticism was made clearest by Abraham Lincoln. “We all declare for liberty,” he said in a speech during the war, “but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the

54 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms same name. . . . Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.”52 • The rise of Romanticism and its displacement of Enlightenment ideas made possible what Benjamin Constant regarded as impossible: revival of the ancient conception of liberty, with its emphasis on the collective instead of the individual. In resurrecting this idea, Romanticism lent credence to and supported the continuation of the vile practice of slavery, and did so at a time when Enlightenment ideas could have swiftly eradicated it. Southern political leaders embraced this ticket to collectivism and elevated the will of the Southern people—whites, anyway—over the individual rights of enslaved Americans. Fortunately, the modern conception of liberty was not lost entirely. In 1818—the year Byron published the final volume of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—only a few months before Constant gave his speech on the two kinds of liberty, and just three years before the Greek revolution began—a baby boy was born to an enslaved mother in Talbot County, Maryland. She named him Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but she never got to know him well. Nor was he ever sure who his father was. He was raised mostly by his aunt and grandmother. In 1826, Frederick was carted to Baltimore, where, although enslaved, he secretly learned to read. Literacy opened a new world for him as he learned to give voice to the injustice of slavery. Eventually he escaped on the Underground Railroad, ending up in Massachusetts in 1838. Now a free man, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass (after a hero in one of Walter Scott’s poems)53 and, in time, became a famous abolitionist orator. Many know Douglass as a leading intellectual in the abolitionist movement. But few know that the story of his life is a striking representation of the various ideas and accomplishments of those who struggled toward the realization and implementation of the modern conception of freedom that we understand and substantially enjoy today. As indicated above, it is impossible to denounce the immorality of slavery from the premises of ancient liberty. Slavery is among the oldest of human institutions. It was pervasive in the ancient world, and, tragically, it still exists today. To see why it is wrong, one must grasp the modernconception of liberty—the individual’s moral right to freedom. Though the ancient Greeks originated many of the crucial ideas of philosophy and politics, opposition to slavery was virtually unknown to

55 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms them.54 Plato and Aristotle condoned slavery; and Epicurus, who allowed slaves to join his school, nevertheless owned one. The ancients could understand freedom fora citizenry or a city-state, or a people, but not for individuals as such. Nothing in ancient Greek literature is akin to the pronouncement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Ancient Greek poetry and drama have no great liberation story like that of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. The idea of universal human equality and natural law was born in Rome and only came to the forefront through the Enlightenment, whose thinkers gave us modern liberty. But the modern idea of liberty is so radical that some antislavery activists thought it incompatible with government as such. A number of radical abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner, were therefore drawn to anarchism, arguing that politics itself is morally corrupting. They had no patience for legislative processes or gradual emancipation. Garrison even burned copies of the U.S. Constitution at Fourth of July speeches, denouncing it as a “pact with hell.”55 Frederick Douglass rejected that view. Like America’s founding fathers, he upheld the values of both freedom and government, independence and citizenship. He saw the U.S. Constitution as fundamentally opposed to slavery and called it a “glorious liberty document” that protected the rights of life, liberty, and property—rights that slavery violated.56 He pointed out that radical abolitionists such as Garrison were agreeing with advocates of slavery when they said the Constitution was a pro-slavery document that could offer nothing to black Americans. Instead, Douglass argued for a new vision of national citizenship, based on the protection of freedom and political equality for allAmericans, of whatever race. Properly understood and applied, Douglass argued, the Constitution protected the rights of black Americans as well as white—and blacks were just as entitled as whites to the title of “American.” They had been here as long as white Europeans had. They had built much of the country’s wealth and infrastructure. They were part of the “We the People” referenced in the Constitution. And they were more loyal to the principles of America than were the white traitors who led the Confederacy. If President Lincoln would arm them, Douglass argued, they would prove themselves on the battlefield; and if the nation would enfranchise them, they would prove themselves as citizens, too. In other words, Douglass found in the Constitution a way to combine the ancient and modern conceptions of liberty—by recognizing the more fundamental nature of the modern conception. Black Americans had

56 The Greeks and America’s Founding Fathers The Two Freedoms inalienable rights, as do all men. Consequently they, like all Americans, deserved political freedom as U.S. citizens. But Douglass also knew that freedom is achieved, not given. Those who want it must fight to gain and keep it. His antipathy to racism and slavery, along with his instance that men must stand and fight for their right to liberty, were best expressed in a phrase that became Douglass’s personal motto. It was a couplet from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which was originally addressed to the Greeks: Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not Who would be free must themselves strike the blow?57 Douglass quoted these lines often,58 emphasizing the connection between individual rights and national self-determination. For every nation and every individual, he held, freedom is both a right and a responsibility. “A man shall provide for his own house,” he declared. “This covers the whole ground of nations as well as individuals.”59 Douglass encouraged slaves to run away, to rise against their masters, and to join the Union army. “Men may not get all they pay for in this world,” he said, “but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free . . . we must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”60 In 1857, he and Samuel Gridley Howe (the veteran of the Greek independence war) helped finance John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry.61 The failure of that effort underscored Douglass’s message: Freedom for black Americans must not be thought of as a gift from whites. Slaves must work to free themselves. After the war, Douglass carried on his work, agitating for black citizenship and the right to vote—for women as well as former slaves. His career as a reformer climaxed when he was appointed ambassador to Haiti in 1891. This man, born a slave, who never knew his parents or even his own birth date, taught himself to read, escaped his bondage, rose to the rank of a national diplomat, and became an author and orator of unmatched eloquence: one of the great thinkers in American history. And his story is richer than most know. In 1884, he shocked the world by crossing the color line and marrying a white woman, Helen Pitts. Although her family were abolitionists, they were horrified. Her parents refused to visit her. Her uncle disowned her. But Helen was steadfast. “Love came to me,” she said, “and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved because of his color.”62 In 1887, the Douglasses took a vacation, traveling to Europe, then Egypt, and finally to Greece. They were enraptured by the view from the Acropolis.

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“The plains of Attica . . . spread out at our feet,” wrote Frederick in his diary, “was a scene never to be forgotten.”63 A few days later, they visited the Areopagus, also known as Mars Hill, traditionally the site where great orators would speak to the people of Athens. Typically, trials also were held there, and it may be the place where Socrates himself was condemned.64 It was there that Saint Paul delivered his famous sermon to the Athenians, preserved in the Bible’s book of Acts. Frederick and Helen asked a friend to read Paul’s sermon to them as they stood there. It was a most profound moment in time. March 24, 1887: America’s greatest orator stands on the site where the greatest orators of the ancient world once stood. The Constitution of the United States is exactly one hundred years old. The American Civil War has been over for two decades, and slavery has been abolished in America. After its own long and bloody war, Greece has been independent for more than fifty years. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave nearing seventy, is now both a free man and a voting citizen—enjoying both modern and ancient conceptions of liberty. He is a high dignitary, a celebrated author, a friend to presidents, and a bold advocate for political equality of all races and both sexes. There he stands with his white wife on Mars Hill, at the confluence of traditions rooted in Greek antiquity and brought together in America—a tradition combining Epicurus and the Enlightenment, Plato and the Romantics, Socrates and the Constitution, ancient and modern liberty, national and personal independence, the great ideas of Greece and America—ideas as old as humanity and as new as yesterday, ideas that reach across thousands of years of history and touch us still. As Frederick and Helen look out at this ancient terrain, a voice reads the words of Saint Paul: “Ye men of Athens, God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”65

58 Endnotes

1. The Greek Frame

1. Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 133-47. 2. Norman Wentworth Dewitt, Epicurus And His Philosophy (New York: Meridian, 1967), p. 26. 3. A. E. Stallings, trans., Lucretius: The Nature of Things (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 6. Stallings’s translation is less literal than others but so much lovelier, I cannot resist using it. 4. Epicurus to Menoeceus, in Whitney J. Oates, ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Modern Library, 1940), p. 30. 5. Epicurus to Menoeceus, p. 30. 6. Stallings, p. 6. This last line, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, is Lucretius’ most famous. 7. Stallings, p. 7. 8. Principal Doctrine XII, in Oates, p. 36. 9. Letter to Menoeceus, in ibid., p. 32. 10. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Bk. 4, chs. 2 & 3, in Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 988–95. 11. Nichomachean Ethics, p. 989. 12. Nichomachean Ethics, p. 993. 13. See Dierdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 14. Epicurus, Principal Doctrines V, in Oates, p. 35. 15. Harry Jaffa, “Aristotle,” in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), p. 74, has a different view on this point. 16. Stallings, p. 178. 17. Stallings, p. 180. 18. Stallings, p. 183. 19. Stallings, p. 184. 20. Stallings, p. 184. 21. An excellent biography of Bacon that focuses heavily on his work as a legal scholar and philosopher is Daniel R. Coquillette, Francis Bacon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). 22. Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life (New York: Holt, 1993), p. 285. 23. J. Bronowski, Magic, Science, and Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 24. Robert M. Schuler, “Francis Bacon And Scientific Poetry,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 82 (2) (1992): 34–42. 25. Francis Bacon, De Augmentis, vii. 2, in The Works of Francis Bacon (London: M. Jones, 1815), vol. 7, p. 137.

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26. Imannuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in An Answer to The Question: What Is Enlightenment? (H. B. Nisbet, trans., London: Penguin 2010), p. 1. 27. Jefferson to John Adams, Oct. 12, 1813, in Merrill Peterson, ed., Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1301. 28. Jefferson to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820, in ibid., pp. 1443–44. 29. Stallings, p. 89. 30. B. L. Rayner, Sketches of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of Thomas Jefferson (New York: A. Francis & W. Boardman, 1832), pp. 327–28. 31. William Short to Jefferson, Oct. 21, 1819, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/98-01-02-0834. 32. Jefferson to William Short, Oct. 21, 1819, in Jefferson: Writings, p. 1430. 33. Jefferson: Writings, p. 1432. 34. Virginia Declaration of Rights, ¶ 1 (1776). 35. Virginia Declaration of Rights, ¶ 15. 36. See also Raphael Wolf, “Pleasure And Desire,” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. by James Warren (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 158–78. 37. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Bk. 2 §51, (Kenneth P. Winkler, ed., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. 108. 38. These dinners were, of course, cooked and served by slaves. But then, so were the dinners eaten by Epicurus and his friends. Epicurus owned at least one slave, whom he freed in his will. Diskin Clay, “The Athenian Garden,” in Cambridge Companion, p. 27. 39. William Curtis, Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1901), p. 319. 40. Hayes, pp. 467–69. 41. Hayes, p. 143. 42. Voltaire, of course, parodied this savagely in Candide. 43. See, e.g., “The Anas,” in Jefferson: Writings, p. 676. 44. Adams to John Quincy Adams, Jan. 3, 1794, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Adams/04-10-02-0003. 45. Jefferson to Mrs. Church, Nov. 27, 1793, in Jefferson: Writings, p. 1013. 46. Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), makes this point, although the title wrongly suggests that Jefferson sought power for its own sake. As Meacham’s text makes clear, however, Jefferson sought to use political power to implement his vision of a just society, which, in Jefferson’s words, would “restrain men from injuring one another” and “leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” First Inaugural Address, in Jefferson: Writings, p. 494. 47. See, e.g., Letter to Randolph, op. cit. 48. Jefferson to Mme. de Tott, Apr. 5, 1787, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/01-11-02-0262. 49. M. Andrew Holowchak, Dutiful Correspondent: Philosophical Essays on Thomas Jefferson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), pp. 88–89. 50. Jefferson to John Garland Jefferson, June 11, 1790, in Jefferson: Writings, p. 966. 51. Jefferson to Hugh L. White and others, May 6, 1810, in Jefferson: Writings, p. 1223.

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52. Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos, Rot, Riot and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), p. 41. 53. Karl Lehmann, Thomas Jefferson: American Humanist (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985), p. 186. 54. Letter to White, op. cit. 55. M. Andrew Holowchak, “Jefferson’s Moral Agrarianism: Poetic Fiction or Normative Vision?,” Agriculture and Human Values, vol. 28 (2011): 497–506. 56. Jefferson to Charles Wilson Peale, Aug. 20, 1811, in Jefferson: Writings, p. 1249. 57. Bowman and Santos, p. 34. 58. Rush to John Adams, Feb. 17, 1812, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1951), vol. 2, p. 1127. 59. Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800, in Jefferson: Writings, p. 1082. 60. Jonathan Gross, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks (Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006), p. 244.

2. Learning What Not to Do

1. Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Jefferson: Writings, edited by Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1501. 2. Thomas Jefferson to Isaac Tiffany, August 26, 1816, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), vol. 15, 65–66. 3. Michael I. Meyerson, Liberty’s Blueprint (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 283, n. 218. 4. Federalist No. 55 in The Federalist, edited by Jacob Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 374. 5. Polybius, Histories Bk. 6 ¶ 9, in The Histories of Polybius, translated by Evelyn Shuckburgh (London: Macmillan, 1889), vol. 1, 465. 6. Federalist No. 10, in The Federalist, 61. 7. Will Durant, The Life of Greece (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 122. It need hardly be added that the ancient Greeks, lacking all but a rudimentary concept of individual rights, also lacked any foundation for understanding laissez- faire capitalism. 8. Federalist No. 71, in The Federalist, 482–83. 9. John Adams, “A Defence of The Constitutions of the United States,” in Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856), vol. 6, 100. 10. Bettany Hughes, The Hemlock Cup (New York: Vintage, 2010), 143–45, 260–61, 276. 11. Hughes, The Hemlock Cup, 321–23. 12. Natan Sharansky, The Case for Democracy (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), xxv. President Bush has cited Sharansky as a particular influence on his thinking. See Amanda Schnetzer, “The Side of Freedom,” George W. Bush Institute, June 11, 2015, http://www.bushcenter.org/blog/2015/06/11/side-freedom. 13. See, for example, Shadi Hamid, Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 14. Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, translated by Thomas Nugent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 9–10.

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15. Federalist No. 51, in The Federalist, 349. 16. James Madison to William Bradford, April 1, 1774, in Madison: Writings, edited by Jack Rakove (New York: Library of America, 1999), 7. 17. Plato, The Crito, 50b–51a, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 35–36. 18. See Timothy Sandefur, The Permission Society(New York: Encounter Books, 2016), 39-42. 19. Thomas Paine, Rights“ of Man,” in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, edited by Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 482. 20. Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790, in George Washington: Writings, edited by John Rhodehamel (New York: Library of America, 1997), 767. 21. Quoted in Robert S. Alley, “The Despotism of Toleration,” in James Madison on Religious Liberty, edited by Robert S. Alley (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 147 (emphasis added). 22. James Madison, “Sovereignty,” in The Writings of James Madison, edited by Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), vol. 9, 528. 23. Federalist No. 10, The Federalist, 57. 24. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788, Madison: Writings, 421. 25. Federalist No. 10, The Federalist, 61. 26. Federalist No. 51, The Federalist, 352. 27. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 24, 1787, in Madison: Writings, 152. 28. Federalist No. 10, The Federalist, 58–60. 29. Federalist No. 51, The Federalist, 351. 30. See Federalist No. 78, The Federalist, 521–30. 31. Federalist No. 51, The Federalist, 348–53. 32. Madison: Writings, 69. 33. The Mind of The Founder: Sources of The Political Thought of James Madison, edited by Marvin Meyers (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, rev. ed., 1981), 48–50. 34. Notes of Debates in The Federal Convention, edited by Adrienne Koch (New York: Norton, 1966), 256. 35. Federalist No. 18, The Federalist, 112. 36. Speech in the Virginia Ratification Convention, June 6, 1788, Madison: Writings, 362. 37. See also Federalist No. 22 (Alexander Hamilton), in The Federalist, 145: “It has not a little contributed to the infirmities of the [Articles] that [they] never had a ratification by the people,” but depend “on no better foundation than the consent of the several Legislatures.” 38. Federalist No. 18, The Federalist, 111. 39. See, for example, Answers to Questions Propounded by Monsieur de Meusnier, January 24, 1786, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 17, 121–22; Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, August 4, 1787, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, 217–18. 40. Federalist No. 15, The Federalist, 93. 41. Federalist No. 33, The Federalist, 207. 42. Speech in the Virginia Ratification Convention, June 7, 1788, Writings of James Madison, vol. 5, 139. 43. Notes on Virginia, in Jefferson: Writings, 245.

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44. Writings of James Madison, vol. 5, 141. 45. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 24, 1787, Madison: Writings, 148–52. 46. Federalist No. 51, The Federalist, 351. 47. Federalist No. 20, The Federalist, 128. 48. Speech in the Virginia Ratification Convention, June 7, 1788, Writings of James Madison, vol. 5, 142.

3. The Two Freedoms

1. http://www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/cambridge/ancients.html. 2. Herodotus 5.78, 400. 3. Herodotus, Histories, 6.112, in The Landmark Herodotus, edited by Robert B. Strassler and translated by Andrea L. Purvis (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 474. See also Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: Norton, 1993), 135. 4. Acts 22:27–29. 5. John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government §14, rev. ed., edited by Peter LaslettOxford University Press, 1963), 317–18. 6. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on The State of Virginia, in Jefferson: Writings, edited by Merrill Peterson Library of America, 1984), 245; Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, in Jefferson: Writings, 492–93. 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books, 1971), 342–43. 8. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 342–43. 9. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 352. 10. For a sample of Aristotle’s thoughts on the value of language, see Politics 1253a, in Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), 1129. For example, “Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.” 11. See Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (New York: Random House, 2014), ch. 22. 12. Johann Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, translated by R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court, 1922), 232 (emphasis added). 13. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, in White Nights and Other Stories by Fyodor Doystoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett (New York: MacMillan, 1918), 75. 14. Edmund Burke, Reflections on The Revolution in France, edited by Connor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 170. 15. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 170. 16. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 171.

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17. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 90. 18. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 118. 19. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 120. Burke once claimed to despise Rousseau, but the two are intellectual brothers in their rejection of rational philosophical inquiry and their emphasis on sentiment and tradition. See William F. Byrne, “Burke’s Higher Romanticism: Politics and the Sublime,” Humanitas, vol. 19, nos. 1 and 2, 14–34. 20. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, in Paine: Collected Writings, edited by Eric Foner Library of America, 1995), 448. 21. As one historian concludes, “[French Revolutionary] influences permeated [Rigas’s] work, [but] it was the political needs of the Greeks and the idealized Ancient Greek civilization that echoed a nationalist ideology for the new state.” Stratos Myrogiannis, The Emergence of A Greek Identity (New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 119. (Needless to say, I differ with Myrogiannis’s conclusion that Rigas’s “nationalist ideology . . . was based on the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment and . . . had nothing to do with Romantic nationalist doctrines.”) 22. The Works of Lord Byron (Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Lee, 1861), 539. 23. Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821–1833 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 30. 24. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, stanzas 73–76. 25. George C. Chryssis, “American Philhellenes and the Greek War for Independence,” Krētē: Monthly Publication of the Pancretan Association of America, March 2007: 13. 26. Thomas Jefferson to Adamantios Korais (Coray), October 31, 1823, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ ampage?collId=mtj1&fileName=mtj1page054.db&recNum=59%20Recipient. See also Peter S. Onuf, “Ancients, Moderns and the Progress of Mankind: Thomas Jefferson’s Classical World,” in Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America, edited by Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas P. Cole (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 27. William Henry Seward, Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856), 128. 28. Seward, Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams, 131. 29. Chryssis, “American Philhellenes and the Greek War for Independence,” 13–14. 30. Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 9. 31. Hinks, David Walker’s Appeal, 42. 32. “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” (1850), in Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems, edited by Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor (Buffalo: Broadview, 2009), 188. 33. “The Christian Slave,” in The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1984), 359. 34. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 42–43. 35. Mark Twain, Life on The Mississippi (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), 327–28. 36. Hamilton James Eckenrode, “Sir Walter Scott and the South,” The North American Review, vol. 206, no. 743 (October 1917): 595–603, 601. Another small indicator of Scott’s immense influence on pre-Civil War American society is that “Hail to the Chief,” the anthem of the office of the presidency, is adapted from a musical

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version of a Scott poem. Abigail Tucker, “Why Do We Play ‘Hail to the Chief’ for the President?”Smithsonian, January 2017, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why- play-hail-to-chief-president-180961428/. 37. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South; or, The Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), 7. 38. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 226. 39. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 229. 40. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 11. 41. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 182. 42. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 29–30. 43. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 25. 44. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 26. 45. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 27–28. 46. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 37. 47. Rollin G. Otserweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 213. Another example: writing in 1832, the Virginian Thomas Dew argued that Southerners were proud of their freedom—and he quoted Burke to support his point—because “‘freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.’” Moreover, there was a “perfect spirit of equality . . . among the whites of all the slave holding states,” because slaves performed all the “menial and low offices,” leaving whites with no need for “distinction and separation.” Thomas Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond: T. W. White, 1832), 112. “Look to the slave holding population of our country,” Dew said, rising to the heights of Romanticism, “and you every where find them characterized by noble and elevated sentiment, by humane and virtuous feelings. We do not find among them, that cold, calculating selfishness, which withers and repels every thing around it, and lessens and destroys all the multiplied enjoyments of social intercourse. . . . [S]lavery . . . seems to awaken the laudible propensities of our nature, such as ‘frankness, sociability, benevolence, and generosity.’” Dew, Review of the Debate, 109. 48. John C. Calhoun, Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, February 1837, in Speeches of John C. Calhoun (New York: Harper & Bros., 1843), 225. 49. John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, in John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches, edited by H. Lee Cheek (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 5. 50. John C. Calhoun, Speech on the Oregon Bill, June 27, 1848, in John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings, 681. 51. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, 31. 52. Abraham Lincoln, Address at Baltimore Sanitary Fair, April 18, 1864, in The Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 421. 53. William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1978), 78. 54. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), ch. 3. 55. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 313, 445.

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56. Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (July 5, 1852), in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 204. 57. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, stanza 77. 58. See, for example, Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in Douglass: Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Library of America, 1994), 592; Speech on West India Emancipation, August 3, 1857, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 366; “Men of Color, To Arms!” March 21, 1863, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 526. 59. Speech on West India Emancipation, 366. 60. Speech on West India Emancipation, 367. 61. Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (New York: Holt, 2011), 76–77, 115. 62. Quoted in Horwitz, Midnight Rising, 693. 63. Frederick Douglass diary, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.01001/. 64. John Potter, Antiquities of Greece, edited by James Boyd (London: Thomas Gegg & Son, 1837), 109. 65. Acts 17:22–26.

66