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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."
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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
