s reported by the New York Daily News in 2010, the estate of George Washington at last returned to the New York Society Library a copy of a book checked out by the father of our country, 221 years prior. Checked out on October 5th, 1789, the volume (sadly, not the original, but a contemporaneous copy valued at $12,000) of Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations would have incurred (adjusting for inflation) around $300,000 in late fees.
Around 235 years earlier, Vattel’s treatise on international law had also found its way into the library of Benjamin Franklin, who thanked the donor by saying, “it came to us in good season, when the circumstances of a rising State make it necessary to frequently consult the Law of Nations.”
That was in 1775. Those circumstances were, in less formal terms, the birth of the nation of America, whose founding stood apart from earlier revolutions and establishments of states in the fact that men fought not for gold or empire, but for the realization of a political ideal. They rallied not under the banner of a king, but around the principles and assertions of a common worldview. The American Revolution was first and foremost a philosophical movement— a war of ideas. And so the question is of some import: what did the Founding Fathers read? What words informed their philosophies, shaped their opinions, and inspired their actions?
The idea for this essay came about through a discussion with a friend over coffee about this magazine. My friend knew I’d read a lot about the Founders, but what did they read? We take it almost for granted that our earliest presidents were intellectuals, men of letters. We understand, after a fashion, that America was founded on an idea rather than through annexation or conquest. We hold these truths, so to speak, to be self-evident. But before they were self-evident to us, they were debated by men who had within their own time come to some profound conclusions. In addition to historical curiosity, this article is meant as a ‘first cause’ in justifying the creation of a literary magazine on the internet in the 21st century by friends who value the art of the literary.
I. LITERACY & THE ENLIGHTENMENT
n the first century of the pre-Revolutionary colonial period, the thirteen colonies established by England existed as British satellite states bound economically, culturally, socially, and legally to the British empire. Monarchy was the accepted form of government, steeped in centuries of tradition, bearing Biblical imprimatur. The American war for independence was not initially fought for political independence, but civil redress of serious issues in the administration of an existing colony. The conflict was never meant to be military in nature. At the outset this was a war waged with words, not gunpowder. Colonists saw themselves at the outset not as ‘Americans’, but aggrieved subjects of the British crown. The sea change in colonial attitudes— the shift from their self-perception as ‘offended subject’ to ‘independent citizen’— was a change not in practical strategy, but philosophical identity— a shift in worldview.
The intellectual and philosophical cast of the Revolutionary War was aided in large part by the fact that the settlers of the New World were by and large highly literate people. America was, from the first, a nation of readers. Indeed, a major impetus for some of the earliest European immigration to the area was the desire for a new society in which the written word, especially the Bible, could be freely reproduced and read by common people. In the days before the Revolution more than one cleric attempted to quell rebellion amongst their flocks by appealing to scripture, reminding their congregants that Israel had also clamored for a king, with less than happy results.
The Bible, however, was merely the most important theological text among myriad books informing the political and social issues of the day. By the outset of the Revolution, nine significantly-sized college libraries were in operation, as well as sixty general libraries. Libraries in America began as religious institutions, dedicated to the preservation of religious texts and the propagation of church doctrine. More generalized collections soon followed, in order to keep up with the demands of a rapidly growing reading public. Census records, notes historian Gordon S. Wood in The Idea of America, reveals a steadily-increasing national average literacy rate, rising from 85% from the years 1758-1762, and a further uptick to 90% between 1787-1795, coming close to 100% by century’s end. There were disparities region to region— rural areas lagged behind urban centers, and the typical omission of women and slaves from census records must be always taken into account, but allowing for this, literacy rates were high. According to a study by F.W. Grubb, professor of economics at the University of Delaware, New England between 1650-70 boasted a literacy rate of 50%, while the literacy during the century (1600-1699) in Virginia was an average of 57%, based on extant documents such as jury lists, deeds, and depositions.
Subscription libraries (the first one was founded in 1713 by Benjamin Franklin) were unaffordable to the majority of private citizens, but newspaper circulation was high and privately owned books were almost always circulated among the community. The study of reading culture in early American history is made all the more useful by the fact that before the modern era made printing houses ubiquitous, everyone in the colonies generally read the same books. There was very little difference in what the ordinary citizen was reading and what the most learned statesman was reading. Every private home had a Bible and elementary schooling consisted primarily, in the colonies as in Britain, of lessons from Scripture; if not copying verses verbatim, children read and copied simple rhymes retelling biblical stories and precepts.
Although biblical teachings still exerted considerable influence over the general worldview of the Founders, according to Wood, the language of social and political discourse was evolving to reflect the shift among the political class— if not in society at large— away from Christianity to deism. The prevailing sentiment among this class was that humanity was subject to moral principles in the exact same way the natural world was subject to principles of physics. The events of history were attributed now to ‘Providence’, rather than God the Father or the Trinity. Although some of the Founders were devout Christians, they were the numerical minority. Intermingling with the Judeo-Christian assumptions of society at large was a new form of civic religion. Classical Christian virtues began to give way to new secular-civic morals based in the Enlightenment: self-determination and devotion to country, tempered by concern for the community or society of which one was a part.
II. ROMANS & THE BARD
espite its ubiquity among private citizens, the Bible did not provide much political or ideological fuel for the public men behind the Revolution. That was to be provided by other, less sacred, texts. The Founders were, by and large, intellectuals: doctors, lawyers, politicians and philosophers, whether or not they had prior political experience (which many did not). As they had once accepted monarchism because of its perceived Biblical sanction, now they turned to a different source. The Revolution, so it seemed to the Founders, was the culmination of a philosophical debate, rather than a scripturally precedented overthrow of an oppressive government; they looked to the rise of Roman democracy— a republic— rather than the exodus of Israel as their ancient pattern.
Rome: that empire’s rise, fall and rebirth seemed too apt a metaphor, too perfect a model, for the revolutionaries to ignore. It is difficult to overstate the colonials’ fascination with Rome. A minor tributary of the Potomac was named the Tiber. Joseph Warren, the prominent Boston physician who enlisted Paul Revere for his famous ride, decked himself out in a toga to deliver his oration commemorating the Boston Massacre. The words of the ancient Romans, or at least the dialogue given them by colonial playwrights, echoed in the political dialogue of the day: Cato’s “What a pity is it/ That we can die but once to serve our country” presaged Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country”, and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” was taken from Cato’s “Gods, can a Roman senate long debate/ Which of the two to choose/ Slavery or death?”
Most readers of the day preferred popular translations of Cato and the other classical Roman authors, or popular histories of that era: Thomas Gordon’s Sullust and Tacitus, Oliver Goldsmith’s Dr Goldsmith’s History of Rome, Basil Kenneth’s Roman Antiquities, Edward Wortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republicks. The underlying theme of these volumes is the former glory of a republic under withering attack from a corrupt and corrupting aristocracy. To colonial American readers, the general outline of the story of Rome’s rise and fall seemed instructive to a people chafing under the overbearing rule of a distant and domineering ruling class. More contemporary histories, such as the Viscount Bolingbroke’s Remarks on the History of England, David Hume’s six-volume History of England, and Paul de Rapin-Thoyras’ five-volume History of England were also popular. In general, histories of England were ubiquitous, both in academic circles and among commoners. Historical studies were so popular that the literary fad of the period among novelists was to cast their works of fiction as histories.
As with almost every halfway-educated person of the time, nearly all the Founders were familiar with the greatest literary figure of the country they had separated from. Shakespeare remained as popular in the colonies as he did in his home country, being performed in the New World as early as 1730. While box office records were nonexistent, George Washington’s journals note the purchase of a few tickets to a New York production of Hamlet in May of 1773 and an opera adaptation of The Tempest in 1787. His enthusiasm ran beyond spectatorship: sometime later, probably in the winter of 1790, he hosted an amateur production of Julius Caesar, starring his adopted son, Washington Custis, in the title role and assistant Secretary of the Treasury, William Duer, as Brutus.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had visited England the previous year, touring the Bard’s childhood home at Stratford, and were apparently unimpressed. Adams sniffily remarked in his journal that the tourist attraction appeared “small and mean”, while Jefferson merely records the entrance fee. Both men followed the trend of the day by cutting chips from a chair in which Shakespeare supposedly sat. Jefferson would later display this souvenir at Monticello with a handwritten note that this was a “chip cut from an armed chair in the chimney corner in Shakespeare’s house at Stratford on Avon said to be the identical chair in which he usually sat. If true, like the relics of the saints, it must miraculously reproduce itself.”
Jefferson’s own reading habits were something close to miraculous in themselves. Before he sold it to the new government to form the Library of Congress, his personal collection of books numbered 6,487 volumes, along with numerous documents, maps and pamphlets. More than any other Founding Father, he exemplified the cultural values of a contemporary man of letters. His library, at that time the largest private collection in the country, is unique in that it was a working reference library rather than the fashionable display library amassed by most gentlemen of the day. His deep personal engagement with books is evident in the fact that he devised, in the charming manner of bibliophiles everywhere, a unique and idiosyncratic method of cataloguing them. The fashion of the day was to arrange libraries by author; Jefferson classified his according to “Memory, Reason and Imagination”, corresponding with history, philosophy and art. Within these broad categories we find volumes ranging from the liturgy of the Church of England to Blackstone’s law commentaries to Tobias Smollett’s picaresque romance Roderick Random, and the biting parody of British imperialism The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. Unsurprisingly, given its subject, Humphrey Clinker was also a personal favorite of George Washington.
his engagement with literature was in no way limited to the political elite or the intelligentsia. In a nation of readers, political discourse largely occurred through the medium of pamphlets. Pamphlets were the social media of the day, the 1700’s equivalent of a blog. Newspapers were the primary source of hard news and were almost universally read. But for a populace eager to have its voice heard, the medium of the pamphlet provided an outlet for public opinion. Topics included everything from farming tips, the weather, business announcements, and want ads, to opinions on the job the local British officers were doing. The Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the Townshend Acts of 1767, all elicited heated responses via pamphlet. Further democratizing the medium, pamphleteers would often waive their copyright privileges, making their works ‘open-source’ and freely reproducible.
Thomas Paine did exactly this with his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense. In the highly-literate and politically volatile climate of early America, Common Sense quickly sold over a half million copies, the era’s equivalent of going viral. Born in 1737 and meagerly educated, Paine struggled to make a living, first trying his father’s profession of corset-making, and then working as a tax officer, hunting smugglers and collecting excises on alcohol and tobacco. He was not native-born— he had immigrated from the English town of Thetford in 1774–– but would nevertheless come to play a crucial role in the struggle for American independence and become among the most widely-read authors of his day. Written after the first blood of the Revolution had been shed at Lexington and Concord, Common Sense rolled off the presses on January 10, 1776 and sold more than half a million copies within months. Common Sense was read more widely than the Super Bowl is watched today, and remains the most widely-circulated book in American history.
Paine’s arrival in the American colonies in 1774, sponsored by Benjamin Franklin, meant he was just in time for the start of the revolution. Paine’s major contribution to the thought of the Founding Fathers was his advocacy of the right of the people to overthrow their governments. Paine might even be counted among the proto-libertarians: “government in even its best state is but a necessary evil”. His conception of society mirrors precisely that of Vattel’s, that liberty can exist in a society only insofar as each individual in that society is free to pursue his interests. Government, to Paine, is properly restricted only to providing security (protections) from anti-social elements within the self-directed society. Societies rise from necessity, but governments arise from within those societies only with the rise of vices, and regulations against those vices need only the power of social stigma to make them effective.
Jefferson, notes Gordon S. Wood, believed in this self-directed society so strongly that, “he came close to denying any role for government at all.” Paine found in Jefferson one of his staunchest allies as well as an enduring personal friend, and campaigned enthusiastically for his reelection bid in 1804. Monarchism still lurked in the ideas of some of those engaged in the founding. At the constitutional convention of 1787, Alexander Hamilton had proposed the idea of an ‘elective monarch’, but was quickly overruled. Paine, more so than any other leading figure of the movement, fought for a radically democratic society, including a fully-developed social welfare system. Paine brought to the revolution a leftward counterbalance that tempered the patrician tendencies of the more conservative propertied men who made up the majority of the Founders. Paine argued fiercely that the nascent American movement be not just a protest against taxation, but a battle for independence. He attacked not just the interference of the British, but diagnosed the major flaw in the entire English system of government: the monarchy lent itself to tyranny, checked only by the House of Commons, who were themselves subject to the monarchy. Monarchies, scoffed Paine, set one man apart from and above his peers, and then expected him to be intimately familiar with the affairs of his peers. The House of Commons, representing the people, and the House of Lords, representing the king, were somehow expected to work in perfect concert. Paine reflected the popular sentiment in the colonies, which used local legislatures in arbitrating local matters, but were given no representation in the wider, national-level political process back in England. How were bewigged lords 4,000 miles away to be expected to adequately represent American interests? The demand in America was for a system of actual representation, with the closest possible connection between the representatives and the represented. Paine expressed, as his writings fomented, the popular mistrust of a distant governmental system. That mistrust directly led to the localized representative system that defined, and continues to shape, the American political system.
Along with increased readership and local representation came increased political participation. Would-be politicians strove to shed any pretensions to nobility, each trying to convince his constituents that he was the more salt-of-the-earth. No more were politics the domain of the leisured, wealthy classes, and no longer would the nation’s representatives be drawn solely from that class. Even before the first shot of the Boston Massacre was fired, debate in the colonies centered largely on the nature that representation was to take. The English had their conception of popular representation embodied in their House of Commons, but the Americans took the system further: these elected bodies were to be wholly subject to an overruling document— America was to be the first constitutional republic.
The idea comes directly from a seminal work, The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748 by a French jurist by the name of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, better and more briefly known as Montesquieu. A man of mordant wit and eminent practicality, as well as a few outlandish ideas, Montesquieu dabbled in several areas of philosophy and literature, producing a few works of middling quality and limited acclaim. He also dabbled in science, originating one theory in which climate is explainable for the nature of governments around the world; so, he posited, despotism flourished in Asia because the climate changes so rapidly, as the “indolent, effeminate and timorous” people of that region are brought into conflict with those “warlike, brave and active” people who inhabited the colder areas. However dubious his scientific achievements might be, Montesquieu certainly left his mark on the world of political science.
Two concepts fundamental to the American system— separation of powers and checks and balances— were first set forth in the work of the French aristocrat nearly two decades before the nation came to be. His magnum opus De L’esprit des loix, or The Spirit of the Laws, makes a case in favor of a constitutional government with separated powers. Montesquieu divides human government into three broad forms: monarchical, republican, and despotic. Generally, these three forms describe a progression of authority, according to how broadly the ruling power extends citizenship rights. In the republican form, power resides in a head of state appointed by the governed; in the monarchical form, power resides with a head of state sanctioned by the will of the governed through birthright succession; and in the despotic, power is denied the citizenry altogether. Thus the need for a constitutional system with separated powers: the constitution would enumerate specific roles and thereby prevent the government from growing too powerful. The separation would further limit and decentralize power within the government. James Madison in the Federalist Papers wrote that, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system...The oracle who is always consulted and cited on this subject is the celebrated Montesquieu.”
In the purest tradition of liberal education, though not all the Founding Fathers were educated to the same degree, the study of history— its warnings and examples, its pitfalls and principles— formed the foundation of much, if not most, of the thought informing the founding of a new state. The trend in historiography then was toward moralism. The primary lesson early Americans took from history was a warning against the loss of virtue and the propagation of ‘luxury’— a term that denoted not monetary wealth, but moral licentiousness and an effete virtue-lessness. Protection of one’s liberties and that of the nation-state, they had learned, required constant guard against foreign tyranny— a lesson the Saxons had learned from the Normans. Forced religion, especially the Norman practice of withholding land titles in order to extort military conscription, seemed to the colonists to be history repeating itself in the Quartering Act of 1765, which required that British forces be permitted to lodge in American barracks and public houses.
Apart from history, the bulk of the Founding Fathers’ reading centered on political and legal theory, especially concerning property, liberty and the preservation of man’s inviolable rights in those regards. John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government is the direct source of Jefferson’s concept of the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Locke posits a natural state of human freedom in which every individual person is free to seek his own good. This freedom, for Locke, is the fundamental freedom (positive liberty) to act on one’s free will. It was this very freedom that Jefferson enshrined in the Constitution’s famous clause. From this assertion, Locke deduces that submission to a monarchy is violation of the natural order, compelling an individual to seek not his good, but the good of an absolute ruler, or monarch. The implications of Locke’s arguments for Americans subject to an English king 4,000 miles away were obvious, and explosive.
Priming that political explosion was Vattel’s The Law of Nations, a volume almost unknown today. Emer de Vattel, born in 1714 in what is now Switzerland, was educated in the humanities at the University of Basel, later moving to Geneva to continue his studies. In 1747 he was granted a permanent ministership in Berne, which lasted a few weeks before he was returned to his hometown of Neuchatel. Disgusted with politics, and under constant financial strain, de Vattel nevertheless devoted himself to thinking and writing. He wrote a series of imagined philosophical dialogues between Marcus Aurelius and Diogenes, as well as the work that would cement his reputation as a political philosopher and historian.
Published in 1758, The Law of Nations is a legal treatise concerning international law. Originally written in French, Vattel lays out the nature and character of a state, which he defines as “a society of individuals who have united to procure by their combined efforts their mutual welfare.” In Vattel’s theory this society, before uniting, lived under natural freedom— as Locke had theorized. Vattel, however, asserts that we require help from each other to maintain liberty— thus the concept of a society in which we must assist each other's interests without injuring or neglecting our own interests. The crux is the innate self-determination of man. Vattel asserts that, “liberty and independence belong to man by his very nature, and that they can not be taken from him without his consent.” Arising from this innate independence, the fundamental principle of a successful society is the balancing of mutual and self interest. In this conception, any power vested in a head of state by a constitution is revocable if the general welfare is injured by that power’s self-interest. Moreover, any people governed by a monarch are at any time permitted to withdraw their allegiance and obedience. That concept, seemingly so self-evident, had cataclysmic ramifications for the centuries-old principle of divine right. The ‘Founding Readers’ were to make the very small leap in logic, apply it to King George’s overreaches, and the colonies were now primed for revolution.
IV. CONCLUSION
he only way to understand an ideological nation is to understand its ideology. The founding of America was unique in that it blended the practical and the theoretical. Its leaders and luminaries were both intellectuals and men of action: they drew from a classical, philosophical and political tradition to synthesize and formulate a broad ideological framework upon which was built the first true ‘empire of ideas’. The ideas of limited, self-constrained government were formulated and codified by the Founding Fathers, but those ideas were birthed in the minds of those men through the experiences of the Romans, the philosophies of Locke and Montesquieu and Paine. It must be counted of those felicities of history, wherein a burgeoning political movement was nourished and sustained by a confluence of a shared literary background and common philosophies. The Founding Readers beckon us, as students of history, to acquaint ourselves with the ideas and issues they struggled with— and to write our own chapter in that continuing story.
Articles
“A Founding Father’s Library” Essays, libertarianism.org, 7 Jan. 2020, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/founding-fathers-library
“Founding Father’s Library”, Founding Father's Library - Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, Inc., 16 Dec. 2019, oll.libertyfund.org/pages/founding-father-s-library
“America’s Shakespeare: Connections Between the Bard and the Founding Fathers, Shakespeare and Beyond, shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu, 19 Mar. 2020, https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2016/06/28/americas-shakespeare-founding-fathers
“Every Man Able to Read: Literacy in Early America” Colonial Williamsburg, The Colonial Willamsburg Foundation., Accessed Jan. 2020, https://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter11/literacy.cfm
Grubb, F. W. “Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research.” Social Science History, vol. 14, no. 4, 1990, pp. 451–482. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1171328. Accessed 23 Apr. 2020.
“The Law of Nations as Part of the National Law of the United States”, Edwin D. Dickinson, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 9 Jan. 2020, https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7912&context=penn_law_review
“Manuscript Catalogue of Thomas Jefferson’s Library”, World Digital Library. April 8 2020, https://www.wdl.org/en/item/3000/
“Montesquieu’s Theory of Government and the Framing of the American Constitution”, Pepperdine Law Review. The School of Law at Pepperdine., Jan. 8 2020, https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1659&context=plr
“The Pamphlet: America’s First Social Media”, Rare Book and Manuscript Library. University of Illinois Library, Jan. 9, https://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/2015/03/30/the-pamphlet-americas-first-social-media/
“A Place of Reading: the Colonial Home”, American Antiquarian Society, 16 Jan. 2020, https://www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/Reading/colonial.htm
“Reading Paine from the Left”, Sean Monahan. Jacobin Magazine., Jan. 14 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/thomas-paine-american-revolution-common-sense/
“The American Presidents and Shakespeare”, Paul F. Boller. The White House Historical Association., Mar. 5 2020, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-american-presidents-and-shakespeare.
“Thomas Paine”. Monticello. Monticello.org., Jan. 13 2020, https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/thomas-paine
“William Shakespeare: A Quintessentially American Author”. Robert McCrum. The Guardian., Mar. 20, 2020, theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/william-shakespeare-a-quintessentially-american-author.
Books
Bailyn, Bernard. To Begin the World Anew: the Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Henrietta, James A., et al. The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority and Ideology. Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
McMullen, Haynes. “The Founding of Social Libraries In America, 1731-1876.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 1965, pp. 130–152. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27770327. Accessed 20 Jan. 2020.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of Laws, translated by Thomas Nugent. Robert Clarke & Co., 1880, Cincinnati OH.
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. TheCapitol.net, 2009. Google Books. 13 January 2020. http://books.google.com
Smith, Page. A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976.
Wood, Gordon S. Empire of Liberty: a History of the Early Republic, 1780-1815. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Wood, Gordon S. The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. Penguin Press, 2011, New York.