What Made Our Founders Different

Plutarch's Men Don't Form from Nothing

[AUDIO] What Made Our Founders Different

The 250th is here, and it is a time to reflect upon just how near-miraculous the American story is: a revolution against an established empire led not to the disastrous politics of envy and crackup in the name of a great levelling, but to a remarkably stable nation that was ruled by the same sort of gentlemen the Founders were.

For those interested, these remain my two favorite shows I have done on the subject

The First and Forgotten Founding Father: Richard Henry Lee's Creation of America

The Golden Age: How the Virginia Gentry Cultivated the Founding Generation

That is different than most other revolutions. Marat, Robespierre, and Danton are looked back upon with the horror that is their due. Russia first got the abominable Bolshevik Revolution—the leaders of which are damned, and rightly so—then later on got a “democratic” revolution and had a drunken buffoon installed as president while the oligarchs pillaged the country. Eventually Putin took over in a counter-revolution, as Napoleon once had, though neither of those men voluntarily gave up power as George Washington did and can’t be remembered in the same way. The “Arab Spring” revolutions have only brought wretchedness. The Haitian Revolution was as awful as can be imagined and remains a case study in how bad things can get; most of decolonization consisted of various communist-aligned groups doing their best to top it.

With the exception of Napoleon, none of those men are remembered as “Plutarch’s men” in the way that numerous of our Founders were. George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and a smattering of others were men cut from a different cloth than the rest of humanity and were recognized as such in their day as well as ours.

Is there anyone now who could live up to such a name? No. But numerous of them did,¹ and their sense of public-spirited virtue allowed America to navigate the Scylla and Charabdis of Revolution without an envy-based implosion.

It need not have been that way. In fact, it almost wasn’t.

This is a fantastic point that author Pauline Maier makes in the great book The Old Revolutionaries, which is about the set of revolutionaries who largely preceded the “Founding Fathers” as we think of them (with the exception of Richard Henry Lee, who was both a revolutionary and a Founder).

As Maier notes, many of the revolutionaries of importance in the 1760s were egalitarians rather than gentlemen, wanted to get more out of revolution than it got out of them,² and had far fewer compunctions about burning society down to get the much more radical political change they wanted.³ They were distasteful radicals, to put it bluntly.

Samuel Adams has (mostly incorrectly) come to symbolize this. In the popular mind, he is a manifestation of the sort of egalitarian Jacobinism that almost triumphed during the Revolution, and the tactics he deployed mean his image and legend approach that of a Gilded Age ethnic mob boss. As the descendants of those who waged and won the American Revolution generally abhor both Jacobinism and Boss Tweed-style politics, the sort of early Revolutionary Samuel Adams has come to represent is often abhorred as well.⁴

In the case of Samuel Adams, that is unfair, as he was not the leftist radical he has since been framed as. However, there is a glimmer of truth in the characterization of those “Old Revolutionaries” he represents in the public mind: other than he and Richard Henry Lee, they were largely proto-Jacobins and wanted to send America down a path much closer to what France eventually got than what we had.

Had the other sorts Maier profiles in The Old Revolutionaries, men like Dr. Thomas Young and Isaac Sears, been allowed to control the outcome of things, America would be very different. Indeed, it might not even exist.

But the American Revolution turned out differently because a different sort of man soon asserted himself: the Founding Fathers.

American patricians like George Washington⁵ and the Lees of Virginia. Men who were aristocrats committed to the well-being of the people, and saw it as their duty to fight for those people while also leading them toward flourishing rather than implosion. Describing such men through the lens of Richard Henry Lee—the first of the Founding Fathers—in the Lee Chronicle, Cazenove Gardner Lee notes:

"Richard Henry Lee lived in the day when all educated men had the incentive and felt the obligation to take part in politics. This sense of responsibility produced a type of citizen in Virginia which today has almost disappeared from the national scene, but in those days the ablest men held public office and molded public opinion."

Similarly, Oliver Perry Chitwood, in his Richard Henry Lee, Statesman of the Revolution, notes:

"The wealthy planters of colonial Virginia, especially those of the eighteenth century, seemed to feel that their position carried with it the duty to take the lead in securing for their fellow countrymen a wise and just political system. And few of the Virginia patriciate of that day were influenced more by a sense of noblesse oblige than was Richard Henry Lee."

That is a very different sort of man from the sort of general early revolutionary Maier describes, a proto-Jacobin obsessed with equality and reeking of disorder.

The Founders were different. From their understanding of Liberty⁶ to the estates they owned that enabled them to serve, they desired and respected hierarchy. They despised the Jacobinism that soon rose in France,⁷ had trained themselves in the habit of command from birth, and were obsessed not with personal gain but with personal virtue and doing as they ought despite the lack of financial inducement.⁸

Unlike the Old Revolutionaries, a somewhat scoundrel-adjacent lot, these men were men of a genius that was displayed through their character,⁹ the ripest fruit their flowering civilization ever produced in its Golden Age.

And what they created in America was something that reflected their understanding of liberty, one that regarded only those who could be masters of themselves as fit to truly be full citizens possessed of sacred Liberty,¹⁰ knowledge that to be not just a proper leader but civilized meant to relentlessly cultivate oneself toward virtue,¹¹ and that such virtue was the only thing that could keep a republic from imploding.¹²

The Founders, in contrast to the Old Revolutionaries, believed in a natural aristocracy and its right to rule. They didn’t believe in a hereditary aristocracy, which was shocking for the time. But they did believe the best men should govern and that those men needed tireless study, cultivation, and practice to do so well.¹³

Much as racehorses are bred and trained to be the best that is possible, the Founders—the Virginians in particular—came from a world where they were expected to cultivate themselves so that they could lead the nation. And they succeeded. As Chitwood notes, the First Continental Congress, that great gathering of all the men who became Founders, was “exceptionally capable”. The cultivation had worked. He says:

The first Congress was an exceptionally capable body. Most of the members were among the leading men in their respective colonies, especially in the cases of the Virginia and Massachusetts delegations. John Adams said that the gentlemen from Virginia appeared "to be the most spirited and consistent of any." The fact that Virginia had so strongly supported Massachusetts in her opposition to British policy may have influenced Adams in forming such a high opinion of the delegation from the Old Dominion.

Such were the men who created America, and did so well. They succeeded wildly because of their personal and group excellence, and did so at immense personal cost and sacrifice because it was right and what was expected of them as leaders.

Indeed, they cared so much for the cause of liberty that they largely bankrupted themselves fighting for it. Far from profiting from the cause of liberty, as the Old Revolutionaries aimed to do and largely did, the planters who led the War for Independence and painstakingly built the early republic did so at immense personal cost.

They suffered financially and personally—as well as risking their lives in war and in a “treasonous” government for years on end—because they thought doing so to be what virtue and duty demanded of them. And so they lost much, as Clifford Dowdey notes in The Great Plantation:

Washington’s Mount Vernon suffered similarly, and Jefferson at Monticello became so poor in his old age that public subscriptions provided for his subsistence. To repeat, running a plantation was a full-time job, and in the struggle for the democracy which Americans accept so casually as heritage many aristocrats impoverished themselves.

In the traditional revolution, the aristocrat was destroyed by the people; in the American Revolution the Virginia aristocrat destroyed himself, and the people, with little of the liberty-love attributed to them later, profited by it. Yet, in the current timidity about admitting any flaws in the leveling of democracy, the “people” have to be made the heroes of everything. This has resulted in confusions regarding the case history of the composite American--especially in regard to America’s original colony, and the Southern states that derived from or were influenced by it.

Jefferson had once said, "in a virtuous government...public offices are what they should be, burthens to those appointed to them, which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor, and great private loss." Such is as it was.

As a result of that financial catastrophe, their world was only around in America for a brief flicker, only lasting through the presidency of James Monroe, the last Founder to be president and the last member of the Virginia Dynasty to serve as president.

But what a beautiful flame it was when it flickered! What great men of noble character and immense dignity who represented it!

It was glorious, it was excellent, and it was what our nation needed. It built America, and made our revolution a success rather than a catastrophe. But then it was swamped by the rising tide of democracy, of egalitarianism and levelling of the sort the Old Revolutionaries would have understood and wanted,¹⁴ the false god of “public opinion” replacing the mantle of just leadership.¹⁵ This destroyed the culture that built the Founders, as Clifford Dowdey notes in The Great Plantation:

“Virginia became different because the “early adventurers” came with an Old World dream that, while realized with mutations in Tidewater, was antithetical to those migrant waves that rolled from Europe after the Revolution. The later people came fleeing the Old World in renunciation of all its castes: they wanted an “American dream” America and not a Virginia America. It would seem there had been room enough for both, but perhaps that is sentiment.

“At the end of the post-colonial period, the planters’ own twilight was gathering over the land where the gods had played, whose ghosts would haunt forever the minds of those who came after them. Since Benjamin Harrison’s death, Virginia has lived within the union for almost as long as its life before, and during that time has suffered more physical destruction and more disastrous dislocation to its economy and society than any state in the country. Yet, so deep went the roots of the plantation culture in those first two centuries that Virginia has never changed in essence from the character formed in the great age of the plantation. That character derived from an old dream that perhaps does seem quaintly archaic and even exotic in a world devoted to material progress: it was a dream that molded the environment for the individual and not the individual for the environment.”

We ought remember that original dream, and ought remember the sort of excellent men it built.

Without them, our nation would not exist as it now does. Without them we would have followed the disastrous course of most every other revolution, have crashed ashore upon the rocky shoals of envy and levelling. Instead, we have America. And it is their excellence, virtue, and leadership we have to thank. We ought all strive to be more like them. Here’s how we can learn from Washington to do so:

Embodying Aristocratic Excellence in Modernity

1. Gordon Wood notes, in Revolutionary Characters, “Washington was a thoroughly eighteenth-century figure. Like Samuel Adams, he was "one of Plutarch's men," and like Adams, he quickly became an anachronism. He belonged to the predemocratic and pre-egalitarian world of the eighteenth century, to a world very different from the one that followed. No wonder he seems to us so remote. He really is. He belonged to a world we have lost, one we were losing even while he lived.”

Similarly, Maier, in The Old Revolutionaries, notes:

THE IMPRESSION OF RICHARD HENRY LEE left by his collected writings is paradoxical. He was a fourth-generation Virginian, a member of one of the Old Dominion's first families, and so resembled those Hudson Valley land barons who provoked Thomas Young's hostility. Yet he shared Young's enthusiasm for the American cause and for New England as well. In many ways, in fact, Lee seemed to be a misplaced New Englander. The person he most admired, the man with whom he shared most fully his values and aspirations, was that latter-day Puritan Samuel Adams. Lee, like Adams, continually stressed the importance to the American cause of "virtue"; a willingness to sacrifice immediate selfinterest for the public good remained for him the "great Essential," a critical "spring" of the Americans' "great revolution."

That value shaped Lee's style much as it shaped Adams's. His letters were stifflly formal: one biographer noted that they often read as if intended for publication. They advanced an argument, or cause, and revealed only rarely "a slight human touch." Lee's widely praised speeches were similarly disciplined-short and succinct, his points clear and deliberate-and so they contrast with those of the prolix Patrick Henry, who overwhelmed listeners with grace and eloquence, but left them unsure just what he had said. Even Lee's physical appearance was appropriate to his image a classic patriot, "one of Plutarch's men" as both Lee and Adams were described. Here in fact he excelled his northern colleague, for while Adams was short and squat, Lee was tall and spare. He had red hair like his countryman at Monticello, but a visitor to Virginia's House of Burgesses in March 1773 was struck instead by the "aquiline nose and Roman profile" of a legislator he described as "the harmonious Richard Henry Lee."

2. Maier notes:

For Sears, for McDougall and Lamb, for their followers, and in all likelihood for the merchants, artisans, and seamen elsewhere who rallied to the American cause, the revolution promised to give far more than it asked, and its rewards would be of a material as well as a spiritual sort. Liberty was good business.

3. For example, they were basically leftists who hated the Normans and wanted to reorder society and redistribute wealth. Describing this in the context of Dr. Thomas Young, Maier notes:

Danger to the body politic came above all from an “encrease of property” in the hands of men who became “haughty and imperious,” “cruel and oppressive,” considering themselves “above the law.” And so Young insisted that “people of the lower ranks” share in government. Even kings were but trustees for the people whose dependence upon their subjects could “never be too great.’ For him the central problem of government was how to limit the sway of the rich and powerful. As a result Young never shared the widespread enthusiasm for Britain’s eighteenth-century “balanced” constitution, which confirmed preserves of power for the King and lords as well as the people. Instead he looked back to the Saxons, who “considered every man alike as he came out of the hands of his maker-riches with them, constitutionally considered, gave no power or authority over the poorest person in the state.” Every householder “liable to pay his shot and bear his lot, might consent to every law that was made for his observance.” Only then, he argued, was the “English constitution in its original purity,” before the Norman invader destroyed “as many of the free customs of the people as he possibly could,” and slowly introduced “that infernal system of ruling by a few dependent favourites, who would readily agree to divide the spoils of the lower class between the supreme robber and his banditti of feudal lords.”

4. Maier notes:

The Adams myth had its roots, then, in the earliest decades of the new nation. But it appropriately took modern form during the 1880s in the hands of James Hosmer, who, like other historians of his time, regretted the division of English people that independence imposed. The sympathies of such men went to those Loyalists who found more to fear in "the breaking down of the old system" than in submission to Parliament, "honest men" who, as Shipton said, were forced to flee from "the unreasoning rage of people among whom their families had lived as friends and public servants for generations."

The rapprochement of America and England in the late nineteenth century came as increasing numbers of non-English immigrants flocked to the New World, as the political machines of first- and second-generation Americans transferred power from old elites to the supporters of more recent arrivals. Adams became a caricature of the urban boss, a man whose power extended beyond the reaches of a William Marcy Tweed or a George Washington Plunkitt, for he controlled both a city and a nation and he destroyed an empire. And in rejecting Adams, historians rejected still more: they renounced all strains in American life of what the Federalists had called "Jacobinism." Harlow asked the critical question: "How many of the vociferously 'loyal' Americans of today, those staunch enemies of twentieth century radicalism, would have looked with favor upon rebellion against established authority in 1775. The latter-day patriots profess great admiration for the 'fathers' of the Revolution, but the real test is to be found in the attitude toward the spirit of revolution today.' For all these Samuel Adams was rejected with increasing vehemence.

5. Wood notes, in Empire of Liberty:

Washington was nearly as much of an aristocrat as America ever produced — in his acceptance of social hierarchy and in his belief that some were born to command and some to obey. Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. His great strength was his realism.

6. Fischer, in Albion’s Seed, notes:

It never occurred to most Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone. It was thought to be the special birthright of free-born Englishmen―a property which set this "happy breed" apart from other mortals, and gave them a right to rule less fortunate people in the world. Even within their own society, hegemonic liberty was a hierarchical idea. One's status in Virginia was defined by the liberties that one possessed. Men of high estate were thought to have more liberties than others of lesser rank. Servants possessed few liberties, and slaves none at all. This libertarian idea had nothing to do with equality. Many years later, John Randolph of Roanoke summarized his ancestral creed in a sentence: "I am an aristocrat," he declared, "I love liberty; I hate equality."

7. As Maier notes of Richard Henry Lee, for example:

A man whose democracy was so tinctured with elitism, and who remained so prone to disillusionment, could hardly ride the crest of popular revolution as did his old friend in Boston. "The love of liberty has fled from hence to France," Lee wrote in September 1789, when he expected that the Third Estate, having gained "a complete triumph over the Nobles and the Clergy," would go on calmly "to establish a Constitution much like the English." But he soon found the French Revolution intolerable. After the execution of Louis XVI, and after the Jacobins seemed to outrage "all decency and justice" by confiscating British and Dutch trading vessels, Lee decided that France's leaders (like his own enemies in America) sought not freedom but "wealth and power." That old champion of American independence then hoped "the British Lion" would "claw these fellows hand somely for their misdoing." "I heartily wish the French as much Liberty as they can bare," he wrote in 1794, "but I do not believe that the present rulers design it for them therefore I hope that in Gods good time they will all be hanged."

8. As Wright notes in First Gentlemen of Virginia:

"From time out of mind, that had been considered part and parcel of the gentleman's life. In Virginia the leading planters assumed the obligations and duties of office, and, though the honors and emoluments were often a sufficient inducement to make officeholding attractive, many onerous and tedious duties were performed simply as civic obligations."

9. As Thomas Nelson Page writes in his The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners

The quality and temper of the life were shown to the world in men like Washington and Marshall and Madison, and later in men like Lee and Jackson. They were all men of genius; but more marked than even this genius was their character.

This was the ripest fruit of the Virginia civilization, and the Virginians know that though these might have been equalled by few in genius, in character they were not exceptions, but only types of the Virginian.

10. As Fischer notes in Albion’s Seed:

The largest possibility in this idea of hegemonic liberty lay in its conception of dominion over self. A gentleman of Virginia was trained to be, like Addison's Cato, "severely bent against himself." He was taught to believe that a truly free man must be the master of his acts and thoughts. At the same time, a gentleman was expected to be the servant of his duty. "Life is not so important as the duties of life," said John Randolph, in one of the best of his epigrams.

So exalted was this ideal of hegemony over self that every gentleman fell short. But the ideal itself was pursued for many generations. At its best, it created a true nobility of character in Virginia gentlemen such as George Washington, Robert E. Lee and George Marshall. The popular images of these men are not historical myths. The more one learns of them, the greater one's respect one becomes. Their character was the product of a cultural idea.

11. As Wood puts it in Revolutionary Characters:

man-made standards that had come to define what it meant to be truly civilized— politeness, taste, sociability, learning, compassion, and benevolence and what it meant to be good political leaders: virtue, disinterestedness, and an aversion to corruption and courtierlike behavior. Once internalized, these enlightened and classically republican ideals, values, and standards came to circumscribe and control their behavior.

12. As Wood notes in The Creation of the American Republic:

In a monarchy each man’s desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or force. In a republic however, each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrifice his private interests for the good of the community--such patriotism or love of country--the eighteenth century termed “public virtue.” A republic was such a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an extraordinary moral character in the people. Every state in which the people participated needed a degree of virtue; but a republic which rested solely on the people absolutely required it.

13. As Wood notes in The Creation of the American Republic

Most Revolutionary leaders clung tightly to the concept of a ruling elite, presumably based on merit, but an elite nonetheless-a natural aristocracy embodied in the eighteenth-century ideal of an educated and cultivated gentleman. The rising self-made man could be accepted into this natural aristocracy only if he had assimilated through education or experience its attitudes, refinements, and style.

14. As Wood notes in Empire of Liberty:

The essentially aristocratic world of the Founding Fathers in which gentry leaders stood for election was largely replaced by a very different democratic world, a recognizably modern world of competing professional politicians who ran for office under the banners of modern political parties. Indeed, Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period’s political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was devoted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy. Most important perhaps, ordinary Americans developed a keen sense of their own worth —a sense that, living in the freest nation in the world, they were anybody’s equal.

15. As Wood notes in The Creation of the American Republic

In place of individual self-sacrifice for the good of the state as the bond holding the republican fabric together, the Americans began putting an increasing emphasis on what they called "public opinion" as the basis of all governments.