Education and the American Founding —Part 2
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.
The Bible and Christianity (concluded)
Noah Webster is famed for his blue-backed speller, The American Spelling Book (1783: more than 100 million sold by the twentieth century), and as a great lexicographer whose American Dictionary of the American Language (1828) rested on an unprecedented philological apparatus involving more than twenty languages and was the most monumental work produced in America up until that time. In fact, Webster was the most prolific American author of the age, and his published bibliography runs more than six hundred pages. Having proposed a revision of the general government in May 1785 in Sketches of Public Policy, which he gave to Washington, he and Alexander Hamilton were among the first persons to anticipate the need for something like the Federal Convention of 1787.23
Webster agreed with [Benjamin] Rush on the centrality of the Holy Bible for education, regarding it as the source of all true wisdom.24 He revised the King James Version (1611) and published an American edition of the Bible (1833). In its preface Webster wrote: "The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity." Webster believed that duty to God was superior to any earthly obligation and toward the end of his life adopted the jeremiad style traditional with preachers throughout the Revolutionary period in judging America flawed, sinful, and depraved. "We are an erring nation ... we deserve all our public evils." "We have forsaken God, and he has forsaken us," he wrote in 1838.25
George Washington regularly attended church and was a vestryman in the Episcopal Church. He gave great stress to religion in his Farewell Address (1796), calling "religion and morality" indispensable to political prosperity and patriotism and writing: "Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. "David Ramsay had anticipated the judgment in 1789. He summed up the lessons of the Revolutionary experience with these words: "Remember that there can be no political happiness without liberty; that there can be no liberty without morality; and that there can be no morality without religion."26
To stress that these religious convictions were no monopoly of New Englanders (a hangover from their original Puritanism), a summary of the political aspects of religious convictions of the time may be cited. Alice Baldwin writes: "Southern Presbyterian ministers based their political concepts upon the Bible. The idea of a fundamental constitution based on law, of inalienable rights which were God-given and therefore natural, of government as a binding compact made between rulers and peoples, of the right of the people to hold their rulers to account and to defend their rights against all oppression, these seem to have been doctrines taught by them all . . . [I]n the South as in New England, the clergy helped in making familiar to the common people the basic principles on which the revolution was fought, our constitutional conventions held, our Bills of Rights written and our state and national constitutions founded."
Confronted with this and the mountain of related evidence, one modern scholar exclaims of the Americans of 1776: "Who can deny that for them the very core of existence was their relation to God?"28 A great many people of various motivations deny it, of course, one of whom (a fellow historian) serenely writes that while "Jefferson and Madison along with George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and nearly all of the Founding Fathers claimed to be Christians hardly any of them was."29 Presumably all politicians are pathological liars or don't know their own minds, even including founding Fathers.
A final word on this subject can be given to the great jurist and legal philosopher Joseph Story (1779-1845), a member of the United States Supreme Court of John Marshall and Roger B. Taney, and longtime Dane Professor of Law at Harvard whose great work entitled Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States was first published in three volumes in Boston in 1833. Story therein states the following:
Now there will probably be found few persons in this or any other Christian country, who would deliberately contend that it was unreasonable, or unjust to foster and encourage the Christian religion generally, as a matter of sound policy, as well as of revealed truth. . . . Indeed, in a republic, there would seem to be a peculiar propriety in viewing the Christian religion as the great basis, on which it must rest for its support and permanence, if it be what it has ever been deemed by its truest friends to be, the religion of liberty. Montesquieu has remarked, that the Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. . . . Probably at the adoption of the constitution, and of the [First] amendment to it,. . . the general, if not the universal sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation if not universal indignation.
It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape. The future experience of Christendom, and chiefly of the American states, must settle this problem, as yet anew in the history of the world.30
The Classics
Because for nearly two hundred years in America the Greek and Latin classics formed the foundation of education, the thought of antiquity was second nature to Americans of the founding era. That was the golden era of the classics, as Meyer Reinhold has said, and especially Cicero was central—a happy circumstance, since Cicero digested and transmitted the substance of Greek political philosophy from the perspective of a great lawyer.31 Reinhold writes:
The Founding Fathers, with a common core of knowledge from the obligatory traditional classical curriculum and from omnivorous adult reading, venerated the ancient commonwealths, statesmen, and the classical virtues as models of republicanism. In Revolutionary America love of liberty and political expertise were associated with classical learning. . . . There is perhaps no better epitome of the Revolutionary generation's commitment to classical learning than John Adams' exhortation to his son John Quincy in 1781: "In Company with Sallust, Cicero, Tacitus and Livy you will learn Wisdom and Virtue. . . . You will ever remember that all the End of Study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen."32
As hinted, the entering college student came to one of the nine pre-Revolutionary colleges with a standardized preparation in which the Greek and Latin languages were the passwords for admission and progress toward the bachelor's degree. Preparation was arduous and typically began at age eight, whether in private tutorials or in grammar schools. Pupils commonly studied classics from eight until eleven every morning and from one until dark in the afternoon. There was widespread prohibition against using English translations. The experience was not always a happy one. Discipline was strict and sometimes severe, as with the perhaps unusually stern Master Sawney at the Boston Latin School who found student Bangs unprepared. Rufus Dawes recounts the episode from 1811 :
"Well!" continues Sawney, switching the air with his cane, "well, muttonhead, what does an active verb express?"
After a little delay—"I'll tell you what it expresses," he resumes, bringing the stick down upon the boy's haunches with decided emphasis, "it expresses an action and necessarily supposes an agent (flourishing the cane, which descends again as before) and an object acted upon, as [in] castigo te, I chastise thee; do you understand?"
"Yes, sir! Yes, sir!" replies the boy, doing his best to get out of the way of the rattan. But Sawney is not disposed to let him off so.
"Now tell me when an active verb is transitive."
"I don't know, sir," drawls Bangs doggedly.
"Don't you?" follows Sawney. "Then I'll inform you. An active verb is called transitive when the action passeth over (whack, whack) to the object. You (whack) are the object. I am (whack) the agent. Now take care how you go home and say that I never taught you anything. Do you hear? (whack)"33
While whipping was common, there were many schoolmasters of exceptional skill and ability. For example, Donald Robertson's boarding school at Dunkirk, Virginia, in the 1760s had such students as James Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, John Tyler (father of the president),and George Rogers Clark. He provided them with a rigorous classical education, teaching Greek, Latin, and French in a Scottish brogue. Madison at age eleven entered and over a four-year period read selections from Virgil, Horace, Justinian's Institutes, Cornelius Nepos, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, Lucretius, Eutropius, Phaedrus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato before returning home in 1767 for another two years of study with Reverend Thomas Martin. Carl Richard writes that "Madison's early training was so thorough that although he arrived at the College of New Jersey in 1769 only two weeks before final examinations in Greek, Latin, the New Testament, English, and mathematics, he passed them all."34
When John Jay applied to King's College (Columbia) in 1760 he was required to give a rational account of Greek and Latin grammar, demonstrate ability to read three orations of Cicero and three books from the Aeneid, and convert the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John into Latin, and to be proficient in mathematics as far as the Rule of Reduction. Requirements a half century later at Brown were similar, and under the examination by the president and tutors the candidate had to read, explain, and parse Cicero, the Greek Testament, and Virgil, write true Latin prose, know the rules of prosody and "vulgar arithmetic," and submit evidence of a blameless life and conversation. Similarly when Jefferson was planning the entrance requirements forthe University of Virginia after 1818, he agreed with Dr. Thomas Cooper's statement:
It should be scrupulously insisted on that no youth can be admitted to the university unless he can read with facility Virgil, Horace, Xenophon, and Homer: unless he is able to convert a page of English at sight into Latin: unless he can demonstrate any proposition at sight in the first six books of Euclid, and show an acquaintance with cubic and quadratic equations.
Jefferson concurred that to require less than this would make the proposed university "a mere grammar school."35 Cooper had translated Justinian's Institutes and published it in Philadelphia in 1812, and he was Jefferson's choice for the position of professor of law but was rejected by the university's board. It was recalled of Jefferson as a student at William and Mary in the 1760s that "he studied 15 hours per day and carried his Greek grammar with him wherever he went." Fondness for the classics never left him, and when he died in 1826 three items lay on his reading table at Monticello: a French political pamphlet, a volume of Seneca, and Aristotle's Politics.36
Such classical background figured in those prominent in founding the country. Thus, twenty-seven college men out of fifty-six in Congress signed the Declaration of Independence (including eight from Harvard), while twenty-three out of the thirty-nine who signed the Constitution in 1787 were college men, nine from Princeton, eight of them including James Madison educated by John Witherspoon—surely the most influential professor in American history. The framers did not merely echo or superficially quote the classical sources but applied them by adapting their insights into the tasks at hand, especially those of Aristotle, Cicero, and Polybius.37 Witherspoon's name should not pass without also a mention of his key role in introducing Scottish Common Sense philosophy (especially of Thomas Reid and Francis Hutcheson) into America, a dominant intellectual force that endured into the late nineteenth century and seems to be reviving today in such works as James Q. Wilson's Moral Sense.38
The influences from the classics bore fundamentally on American prudential and political theory as embodied in the whole civic life of the country, but especially in the Constitution and constitution-making of the states. Central elements include: the theory of human nature, the conception of the mixed and balanced government, federalism, the Ciceronion and generally Stoic conception of political virtue, and the notion of the rule of law as embodying reason in contrast to the rule of men. The latter, as Aristotle and Madison teach, involve passions in inevitably distorting and self-serving ways. The rule of law of Aristotle's Politics, as reinforced by the government of laws of James Harrington's Oceana (1656), found its way into the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (in which John Adams played a large part), thence into American constitutional law in Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803).
The Virgilian farmer and classical pastoral ideal make a major and enduring appearance with the Jeffersonian republicans' yeoman farmer as the American paradigm. There is, of course, republicanism itself as well as the great Federalist and Anti-federalist debates over its true meaning. Political virtue classically understood as enlightened service to the common good was common coin of the founding; and the Roman virtues of frugality, simplicity, temperance, fortitude, selflessness, honor, and love of liberty were purposely inculcated as traits of character by George Washington and others of his age. They were not generally thought to contradict Christian virtues.39 Washington himself as "the father of the Country" received the benefits of a classical metaphor originally applied by Cato to Cicero. Then there is that wonderful ornament of American literature and of classical learning exhibited in the post-1812 correspondence between those two old Argonauts of the founding, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who still were debating the meaning of the Greek texts of Hesiod and of Theognis of Megara on aristoi, or natural aristocracy, as well as on moral sense, conscience, intuition, reason—in short, on learning ancient and modern at large throughout their twilight years in letters back and forth between Monticello and Quincy—until the end at last came for them both on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of independence.41
The special case of Benjamin Rush may again be mentioned. Typically for the time, he was educated between his eighth and fourteenth years at boarding school by the Reverend Samuel Finley, a New Side (Whitefield) Scottish Presbyterian minister, who later became president of the College of New Jersey. Young Rush studied Latin and Greek, arts and sciences, English, public address, and the Bible, and memorized the Shorter Catechism of the Church of Scotland, which was repeated every Sunday evening, when the boys also were examined over the content of the sermon heard earlier in the day. He entered Princeton at age fifteen in 1759 as a junior, being so well prepared that he graduated in the following year with the bachelor of arts degree. He received his M.D. from Edinburgh in 1768.42
After the Revolution, however, he argued against the overemphasis in the grammar schools on Greek and Latin as immoral, pagan, monkish, and for many other reasons "all wrong"—especially in a Christian republic. Decades later in 1810 and old age, he and John Adams renewed the controversy in a bantering, mock-serious way. Thus Adams writes: "I do most cordially hate you for writing against Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. I never will forgive you until you repent, retract, and reform. No never! It is impossible."
To this Rush replies:
Hate on, and call upon all the pedagogues in Massachusetts to assist you with their hatred of me, and I will after all continue to say that it is folly and madness to spend four or five years in teaching boys the Latin and Greek languages. I admit a knowledge of the Hebrew to be useful to divines, also as much of the Greek as will enable them to read the Greek testament, but the Latin is useless and even hurtful to young men in the manner in which it is now taught. . . . Were every Greek and Latin book (the New Testament excepted) consumed in a bonfire, the world would be the better for it.... "Delenda, delenda est lingua Romana" should be the voice of reason and liberty and humanity in every part of the world.
And Adams rejoins:
Hobbes calumniated the classics because they filled young men's heads with ideas of liberty and excited them to rebellion against Leviathan [chap. 21]. Suppose we should agree to study the oriental languages, especially the Arabic, instead of Greek and Latin. This would . . . gratify Hobbes much better. . . . Where can you find in any Greek or Roman writer... sentiment[s] so sublime and edifying for George and Napoleon. . . . I would put you into your own tranquilizer until I cured you of your fanaticism against Greek and Latin. . . . My friend, you will labor in vain. As the love of science and taste for the fine arts increases in the world, the admiration of Greek and Roman science and literature will increase. Both are increasing very fast. Your labors will be as useless as those of Tom Paine against the Bible, which are already fallen dead and almost forgotten.44 
[Part 3 will appear next week. Read Part 1 ]
NOTES
23. Harry R. Warfei, ed., Letters of Noah Webster (New York: Library Pubs., 1953),256, 260, 528n; Emily E. F. Skeel, ed., A Bibliography of the Writings of Noah Webster (New York: New York Public Library, 1958). On the role of Hamilton, see the personal recollections of Chancellor James Kent in William Kent, Memoirs and Letters of James Kent (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), "Appendix: Chancellor Kent's Memories of Alexander Hamilton," 279-331. Hereinafter cited as Memoirs of Chancellor Kent.
24. Richard M. Rollins, ed., The Autobiographies of Noah Webster: From the Letters and Essays, Memoir, and Diary (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989 ), 34.
25. The Webster Bible (1833; repr., Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987), v; Rollins, ed., Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 56.
26. Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, 2:667, last page. See also Michael Novak and Jane Novak, Washington's God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
27. Alice Baldwin, "Sowers of Sedition," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 5(1948): 76.
28. Carl Bridenbaugh, The Spirit of 76: The Growth of American Patriotism before Independence, 1607-1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 118.
29. John M. Murrin, "Religion and Politics in America from the First Settlements to the Civil War," in Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 19-43, at 29, 35; see also David L. Holmes, The Religion of the Founding Fathers (Charlottesville, VA: Ash Lawn-Highland, and Ann Arbor: Clements Library, University of Michigan, 2003), 131: "The Founding Fathers of the United States were remarkable, even noble men. . . . In the spirit of their times, they appeared less devout than they were—which seems a reversal from modern politics."
30. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution, ed. Edward W. Bennett, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1858), 2:662-63 (bk. 3, chap. 44, pars. 1873, 1874, 1875). For analysis, see James McClellan, Joseph Story and the American Constitution (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), chap. 3, "Christianity and the Common Law."
31. "Cicero's ideas on [the mixed constitution] run like a stream underground through colonial writings" (Richard M. Gummere, The Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963], 176). Cicero also was the mediator between ancient Greek and early Christian civilization, as Augustine suggests, and also between classical antiquity and the Renaissance. "Cicero, who was originally read above all because of his style and then was prized because of the content of his work, especially De natura deorum...plays an important role in transmitting material from antiquity" (Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985], 420n53). The statement applies also to America, where Cicero served similar functions.
32. Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 174.
33. Quoted from Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome ,and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994),15-16.
34. Ibid., 18.
35. Gummere, The Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition, 56-57; Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 34-35. On Jefferson's own education as a youth see Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 1, Jefferson the Virginian, 40-48 and chap. 4, "At the College, 1760-1762."
36. Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 22, 276n21; Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 56.
37. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, 66, 173.
38. Sandoz, GOL, 179-89. Cf. John Witherspoon, An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. Jack Scott (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), 50: "In terms of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Witherspoon's thought is neither original nor profound. Rather, his real significance is in making Princeton acitadel of Scottish realism—a citadel that, in turn, dominated philosophical thought in American higher education for many decades....Appropriately, the last great champion of Scottish realism in America was Princeton President James McCosh (1868-88), another imported Scot who arrived in America exactly one hundred years after Witherspoon." Scott also notes that, out of 469 Princeton graduates during President Witherspoon's tenure of twenty-five years (1768-94), "six were members of the Continental Congress, twenty-one were United States Senators, thirty-nine were Representatives, three were Justices of the Supreme Court, and one became President" (Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 15-16). James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense was published in New York in 1993. Cf. the discussion of "moral sense" in chap. 1, §5,herein. Cf. Scott P. Segrest, "Common Sense Philosophy and Politics in America: John Witherspoon, James McCosh, and William James" (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana StateUniversity, December 2005), 269.
39. Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 147, 184-85.
40. Ibid., 69.
41. This correspondence is collected as the second volume of Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 283-614.
42. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, 30-32, cf. 345 f.
43. Ibid., 345-46
44. John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of Joh nAdams and Benjamin Rush, 1805—1813 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1980),168-71, quoted from correspondence dated in September and October 1810.
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