Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America

Prologue

2 11 T he late eighteenth century in the Atlantic world has been called “the age of the democratic revolution.” It might better be called “the age of the republican revolution.” For it was republicanism and republican principles, not democracy, that brought down the ancient monarchies.1 It was an astonishing moment in Western history, and we are living with its effects still. Monarchies that had existed for centuries were suddenly overthrown and replaced by new republican governments. Since republican governments have become so natural and normal for most of the world in the early twentieth-first century, it is hard to recover the surprisingly novel and radical character of those eighteenth-century republican revolutions. In the eighteenth century, monarchy was still the standard for most people, and as events in our own time demonstrate, there is always something to be said for large and diverse countries being ruled from the top by a single authority. Monarchy had history on its side; the kings of Europe had spent centuries consolidating their authority over unruly nobles and disparate peoples. The Bible endorsed kingship. Had not the ancient Israelites proclaimed, “We will have a king over us; that we . . . may be like all the nations”?2 Since most people in the Atlantic world and elsewhere had lived with kings for all of their recorded histories, why in the late eighteenth century should these kings have been so suddenly overthrown by republican revolutions? Why, as John Adams wondered in 1776, should “Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride [be] so totally eradicated from so many minds in so short a Time”?3 If change were inevitable, why should republicanism have Prologue The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution gordon s. wood 12 Gordon S. Wood been chosen as the alternative to the ancien regime? There were political and constitutional changes short of establishing republics that could have been tried. Hereditary lines could have been shifted; new kings could have been set upon the thrones. After all, the English, in their Glorious Revolution in 1688– 89 and in their constitutional adjustment in 1714, had not abolished monarchy; they had merely found new heirs to the crown and placed some new limits on their king. Besides, during the seventeenth century, the English had already tried a brief experiment in republicanism, and it had ended in disaster and dictatorship . Why would anyone want to try such an experiment again? The tiny self-proclaimed republics that did exist in eighteenth-century Europe—the Swiss cantons, the Italian city-states, and the Dutch provinces—were in various stages of confusion and decay and were very unlikely models for the large and populous countries of the Western world. Why would any state—either the sprawling provinces of British North America or the conglomeration that constituted the ancien regime of France—want to emulate them? Amidst this monarchy-dominated culture, however, there was one republican model that did seem worth emulating—one republic that had achieved in glory and fame all that any people anywhere could ever hope for. And that republic was ancient Rome. The eighteenth century was not much interested in the past—except for antiquity. No modern era has ever invested so much in the classical past. Although all the ancient republics—Athens, Sparta, Thebes—were familiar to educated people in the eighteenth century (their names had “grown trite by repetition,” said one American), none was more familiar than that of Rome. People could not hear enough about it. “It was impossible ,” said Montesquieu, “to be tired of as agreeable a subject as ancient Rome.” There was nothing startling about Gibbon’s choice of subject for his great history. “Rome,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “is familiar to the schoolboy and the statesman.” To be educated in the eighteenth century was to know about Rome; Latin, as John Locke had said, was still regarded as “absolutely necessary to a gentleman.”4 If any one cultural source lay behind the republican revolutions of the eighteenth century, it was ancient Rome—republican Rome—and the values that flowed from its history. It was ancient Rome’s legacy that helped to make the late eighteenth century’s apparently sudden transition to republicanism possible. If the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was, as Peter Gay has called it, “the rise of modern paganism,” then classical republicanism was its creed.5 Prologue 13 In the eighteenth century, to be enlightened...