Education and the American Founding —Part 1
by Ellis Sandoz
Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.
While virtually everyone has agreed that the American founding and the generation that achieved it were extraordinary, of towering significance and formative importance in modern history, what besides blind good luck and raw talent in able men somehow disposed to collaborate and to act at a propitious moment lay behind the achievement?
Thus, in looking for at least a few explanatory clues, I propose to approach this large subject by raising a further (no doubt preliminary) question: What spiritual and intellectual resources enabled the founding generation to achieve what it did? That question, in turn, requires a brief recollection of their achievement, the founding itself. This I would venture to summarize roughly as follows.
The founding was the rearticulation of Western civilization in its Anglo-American mode.1 It was essentially anti-modernist in resisting absolutism in the form of perceived parliamentary exercise of unlimited arbitrary or tyrannical power. It thus stands substantially in line with the great seventeenth-century struggle against the Stuart kings whose monuments are the Petition of Right and the Glorious Revolution understood as Burke understood it—as a revolution not so much made as one avoided, thus resting on an appeal to the prescriptive Ancient Constitution.
Primary characteristics of self-consciousness or identity include: constitutionalism or rule of law, consent, limited powers of government, popular sovereignty, individual dignity and liberty, metaphysical equality of all men with political consequences, a Creator-creaturely understanding of the compass of reality, the source of human law and rights in the experienced human tension toward the transcendent Ground of being as the core of human participation in reality, a historic as well as a natural jurisprudence, and a sense of being a particular community that yet embodied and served universal truth and justice under divine Providence—an exceptional, favored, perhaps chosen people (e.g., Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and Ezra Stiles).
The pertinent "education question," then, is: How did Americans get that way? The manifold of reason and experience contributed, and the question is a larger one than can adequately be answered here, but a number of elements can be noted as especially important. To begin with, there is direct instruction by tutors (often clergymen) in schools and colleges. Then, of cardinal importance, creation of the civic consciousness from a long history of independent or quasi-independent self-government, capped by a great political and existential debate during the fifteen-year struggle against tyranny leading to independence.
James Madison in old age recalled the wisdom of his countryman in seeing the hand of tyranny in the 3 pence per pound tax on tea levied by the Townshend Duties of 1767, which eventually led to the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Young Madison was at Princeton in 1770 when the Boston Massacre occurred, a founding member of the American Whig Society, and heard James Witherspoon (President John Witherspoon's son) argue the affirmative side of a debate in Latin on the thesis "Subjects are bound and obliged by the law of nature, to resist their king, ifhe treats them cruelly or ignores the law of the state, and to defend their liberty."2
The general context of religious influences, political praxis, and constitutional understanding from Mayflower Compact onward forms essential background, along with self-government flourishing during salutary neglect, thus allowing the development of independence of mind, spirit, and institutional order. The general effects of Enlightenment thought are significant, with its heightening of the sense of individual autonomy and an egalitarianism corrosive of social hierarchy.
Of substantial importance is the general character of the American community itself as delineated by John Jay, who found that "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side through a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each other."3 In addition, the fact of the relative homogeneity of American elites during the period of the founding makes meaningful generalization plausible: "The Founding Fathers were so similar to the broader elite of Revolutionary executive officeholders as to be indistinguishable from them."4
In sum: The principal educational sources may be identified as the Bible and Protestant Christianity as the fundamental matrix of the society; a schooling in the Latin and Greek classics as the foundation of all education; a political and constitutional preoccupation that tended to dominate public discourse from the 1760s on as nurtured especially by Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and later Blackstone; and an enlightened sense of individual capacity and responsibility under God as created imago dei and accountable for stewardship, for serving truth and justice, and for resisting by every means corruption and evil. The latter factors were nurtured by a range of influences generally to form American civic consciousness.
The strategy to be followed herein is one of illustrative analysis with more and less famous examples taken from the lives of representative personalities to include James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Joseph Story, James Kent, Noah Webster, and David Ramsay. Illustrations will bear mainly on the Bible and Christianity, the classics, and legal and political education. Some repetition of material cited in the foregoing chapters will be unavoidable if the analysis here is to stand solidly on the most pertinent sources.
In staking out the ground to be covered, one scholar wrote: "Both historians and the general reader have agreed that the classical heritage of Greece and Rome played a large part in the ideas and activities of Colonial America, with a climax of interest at the end of the eighteenth century. The evidence is so convincing that the case may be stated rather than defended. Careful investigation has proved that the classical tradition was, next to the Bible and the Common Law, a vital factor in provincial life and thought."5
The Bible and Christianity
If the Moral Majority, the so-called Christian Right, and evangelicals can be major forces in contemporary American politics, why should it be to anyone's surprise that religion was a major factor in the period of the founding? From a variety of motives, dogmatic rejection seems to be a principal part of the answer. The fact of the matter is that the best recent scholarship supports the proposition that the Christian perspective was alive, well, and flourishing in the period and that it was central to many of its major events.
Bible reading was ubiquitous in America throughout the period formally identified as "the founding," which benefited from the Great Awakening's revitalization of faith and coincided with the onset of the Second Great Awakening that carried well into the nineteenth century. Perry Miller remarked a generation ago, as previously noticed, that a cool rationalism such as Jefferson's might have declared the independence of such folk but could never have persuaded them to fight for it. Edmund Burke, speaking in the Commons on the eve of the Revolution (1775), stressed that the Americans' love of liberty on English principles was powerfully informed by their faith as Christians (mainly in dissenting traditions), which is fundamental to their perspective.
David Ramsay, in his contemporary (1789) History of the American Revolution, echoed Burke by writing:
The religion of the colonists also nurtured a love for liberty. They were chiefly Protestants, and all Protestantism is founded on a strong claim to natural liberty, and the right of private judgment. A majority of them were of that class of men, who, in England, are called Dissenters. Their tenets, being the Protestantism of theprotestant religion, are hostile to all interference of authority, in matters of opinion, and predispose to a jealousy for civil liberty. They who belonged to the Church of England were for the most part independents, as far as church government and hierarchy, were concerned. They used the liturgy of that church, but were without Bishops, and were strangers to those systems, which make religion an engine of state. That policy, which unites the lowest curate with the greatest metropolitan, and connects both with the sovereign, was unknown among the colonists. Their religion was their own, and neither imposed by authority, nor made subservient to political purposes. Though there was a variety of sects, they all agreed in the communion of liberty, and all reprobated the courtly doctrines of passive obedience, and non-resistance.6
One modern scholar has turned empirical analysis to good use in discovering that a full one-third of all citations in the enormous pamphlet literature of the period were to texts in the Bible, far more than to any other single source.7 George Trevelyan comments that "the effect of the continual domestic study of the [Bible] upon the national character, imagination, and intelligence for three centuries—was greater than that of any literary movement in the annals, or any religious movement since St. Augustine."8
Everybody's favorite authority, Alexis de Tocqueville (writing in 1835, the year of John Marshall's death and the year before that of James Madison, last of the Founding Fathers), elaborately stressed the centrality of Christianity in America. For example he wrote: "For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other." "The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States." And he described the frontiersman of the 1830s as "a very civilized man prepared for a time to face life in the forest, plunging into the wildernesses of the New World with his Bible, ax, and newspapers."9
In the second volume of his famous work, Tocqueville had not changed his mind and wrote in 1840, in chapter one: "It was religion that gave birth to the English colonies in America. One must never forget that. In the United States religion is mingled with all the national customs and all those feelings which the word fatherland evokes . . . . Christianity has kept a strong hold over the minds of Americans . . . [I]ts power is . . . that of a religion believed in without discussion . . . . Christianity itself is an established and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or to defend. Since the Americans have accepted the main dogmas of the Christian religion without examination, they are bound to receive in like manner a great number of moral truths derived therefrom and attached thereto."10
But we somehow manage to forget or explain it away with an ease reminiscent of the oblivion hole of Orwell's Ingsoc.11 Facts and truth are pesky, inconvenient things for those whose agendas cannot stand the light of day.
John Adams writing to Thomas Jefferson in their old age found the heart of the revolutionary American community to lie in the universally accepted "'general principles of Christianity" shared by all, by which he chiefly meant the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and in the "general principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young men united [who fought the Revolution], and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence. Now I will avow [Adams continued], that I then believed, and "now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the Existence and attributes of God; and those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system."12 Jefferson elsewhere explained that the latter were set forth in the Declaration of Independence, upon which all Whigs at the time had agreed.
When some inkling of Jefferson's deep if heterodox religious convictions leaked out with discovery of his work on the New Testament (The Philosophy of Jesus and The Life and Morals of Jesus, in which he excerpted and studied the Gospels in the various ancient and modern languages),13 his resolute study of the Bible, biblical scholarship, church fathers, and other theological literature in Greek, Latin, French, and English, he was urged to make his convictions known to the public, to publish his religious sentiments. In 1824 (two years before his death), Jefferson declined in a letter to George Thatcher and wrote: "But have they not the Gospel? If they hear not that, and the charities it teacheth, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead."14
Stoutly upholding liberty of conscience and separation of church and state did not and does not equate with lack of religious faith. James Madison apparently considered the ministry as a young man and decided against it partly because of his poor speaking voice.15 But he stayed on an extra half-year at the College of New Jersey in Princeton to study moral philosophy and Hebrew with his great mentor, President John Witherspoon, a Scottish Presbyterian and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. When time came to select theology books for the library at the University of Virginia that he and Jefferson founded in their old age and served as the first two rectors, it was to Madison that Jefferson turned because of his expertise in the field.16 In his retirement years at Montpellier after his presidency, James Madison and his wife, Dolly, regularly drove the four miles on Sundays to attend services "at the quaint old brick church in the center of Orange Court House."17
Such may not have been Jefferson's practice in his later years, but he had regularly attended Bruton Church in Williamsburg as a student at William and Mary and afterward.18 Moreover, as president of the United States residing in the new capital of Washington he began a practice, mentioned earlier, one that endured until well after the Civil War, of holding church services regularly in the Capitol. This was done at first in the Senate chamber and, after construction was completed, in the House of Representatives' chamber. The president frequently was present, often with the cabinet as well as members of Congress and the general public in attendance. On occasion, worship services were conducted simultaneously in both chambers with overflow crowds present. To be invited to preach there was, of course, a great honor for the various ministers, such as Jefferson's fiery Baptist admirer the Elder John Leland (1802) of "mammoth Cheese" fame who (along with George Eve) had been a formidable force in James Madison's Virginia House constituency when the Bill of Rights was at issue in 1789.19
In his old age Jefferson looked forward to eternal life and to reunion with those other stalwarts of the American cause already departed. He believed he was a Christian in the only sense that Jesus would have recognized, and he sought to return to the primitive purity and simplicity of the Gospel. Basic was his unswerving commitment to the existence of God, the creator and sustainer of the world and ultimate ground of being, and he lavishly praised Jesus for making God worthy of human worship. Thus, the unity of God, the moral teachings of Jesus as the most sublime in the history of the world, and the expectation of personal immortality formed his Christianity.20
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the famous patriot scientist-physician, signatory of the Declaration of Independence, medical pioneer, and professor of Philadelphia, urged that the Bible be the primary textbook of the public schools following the Revolution and replace instruction in Latin and Greek as being more republican. Rush wrote in 1786: "The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in RELIGION. Without this, there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments . . . . The religion I mean to recommend in this place is the religion of JESUS CHRIST. . . . A Christian cannot fail of being a republican."21
Rush maintained that "Man is as necessarily a praying as he is a sociable, domestic, or religious animal. As 'no man liveth and sinneth not,' so no man liveth and prayeth not . . . . Prayer is an instinct of nature in man, as much so as his love of society." When his son James was departing for Edinburgh to follow his father's footsteps in the study of medicine, the elder Rush instructed him to "[c]ommit yourself and all that you are interested in daily to the protection of your Maker, Preserver, and bountiful Benefactor." He also urged James to follow his own practice of setting everything else aside and "[a]ttend public worship . . . on Sundays" and "[r]ead the Bible only on Sundays."22 
[Part 2 will appear next week.]
NOTES
l. The summary given here is indebted to the author's previously published work, esp. Ellis Sandoz, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding, 2nd ed. (1990; rev. ed., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 151-56 and passim; also Ellis Sandoz, ed., The Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta, Ancient Constitution, and the Anglo-American Tradition of Rule of Law (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 1-21; and Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (1991; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998); and Ellis Sandoz, The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays: The Crisis of Civic Consciousness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
2. Irving Brant, James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), 80-85, 94.
3. Federalist No. 2 as in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 9.
4. Richard D. Brown, "Founding Fathers of 1776 and 1787: A Collective View,"William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (1976): 465-80, at 466. The educational ideas of the founders and founding period are explored in many places, and especially the following may be mentioned: Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Robert Middlekauff, "A Persistent Tradition: The Classical Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century New England," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 18 (1961): 54-67; Eugene F. Miller, "On the American Founders' Defense of Liberal Education in a Republic," Review of Politics 46 (1984): 65-90; and Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993).
5. Richard M. Gummere, Seven Wise Men of Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), v. Italics added.
6. David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution [Philadelphia, 1789],ed. Lester H. Cohen, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990), 1:26-27.
7. Donald S. Lutz, "Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought," American Political Science Review 78 (1984):189-97.
8. Quoted by H. Richard Niebuhr, "The Idea of Covenant and American Democracy," Church History 22 (1954): 130.
9. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence, 2 vols, in 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), 293, 295, 303.
10. Ibid., 432.
11. Cf. George Orwell, 1984 (1949; repr., New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1961), "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak": "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible" (246).
12. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols, in 1 (1959; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster/Clarion Books, 1971), 1:339-340. Some emendation of punctuation and capitalization from the original text.
13. Collected and annotated along with all other relevant sources pertaining to Jefferson's religious views in Dixon W. Adams, ed., Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels: "The Philosophy of Jesus" and "The Life and Morals of Jesus" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
14. Quoted from Sandoz, GOL, 149.
15. Brant, James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 118 and chap. 6 passim.
16. Ibid., 120; Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison, 9 vols. (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 1900-10), 9:203-207.
17. Maud Wilder Goodwin, Dolly Madison (New York: Charles Scribner, 1896), 275-76.
18. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 1, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 52; cf. pp. 274-85.
19. Cf. Anson P. Stokes, Church and State in the United States, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1950), 1:499-507; see Helen Gripe, Thomas Jefferson and Music (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974), 24-26.
20. For sources and discussion see Sandoz, GOL, 148 and passim.
21. Benjamin Rush, A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania; to Which Are Added, Thoughts upon the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic (Philadelphia, 1786), repr. in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760-1805, ed. Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 1:675-92, at 681.
22. George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush; His "Travels Through Life," together with his Commonplace Book for 1789—1813 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 339, 280-81. In the internal quote Rush paraphrases Ecclesiastes 7:20.
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