First Principles summary

One of the most popular dramatic works in pre-Revolutionary America was a play called Cato. Today, the drama reads as stiff, plodding, and barely readable. Eighteenth-century audiences, though, enjoyed the lengthy speeches and quotable one-liners. 

Cato was notable for another reason: it was George Washington’s favorite play. Its lead character⁠ was everything Washington strove to be. Cato was a paragon of virtue who rejected the luxuries afforded by his upper-class birth and spent his political life fighting against government corruption.

Most Americans today know Washington as something of a military genius. But at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Washington still hadn’t figured out how to defeat the British. In fact, his early strategies failed completely.

First, Washington attempted to engage the British head-on. Thanks to the superior wealth, training, and numbers of the British army, this strategy was doomed from the start. After a year and a half of defeats, Washington heeded the advice of one of his best generals, Nathaniel Greene, and switched to a war of posts strategy. This is a defensive approach where an army retreats into a fortress and fights from there. This, too, was unsuccessful and resulted in expensive setbacks when thousands of troops surrendered to the British.

The Roman orator Cicero was born in 106 BC to parents of unremarkable birth. Though he began life as a plebian –⁠ a commoner –⁠ he eventually rose to become what Romans called a “new man”: someone who attained nobility by holding high office.

The height of Cicero’s career came in 63 BC when he was appointed one of Rome’s two consuls –⁠ the top political position in the empire. It was in this role that he confronted the Catiline conspiracy, a plot devised by the populist senator Catiline to overthrow the consulship of Rome. Through a series of powerful, grippingly emotional speeches, Cicero exposed the Catiline plot and eventually caused the senator to flee Rome.

Thomas Jefferson was different from the other founding fathers in many respects. He was esthetically minded: he played music, read widely, and designed architecture. And though the Romantic movement, which valued emotion over reason, hadn’t yet begun, we can easily view Jefferson as one of its forebears. He was passionate, emotional, and even illogical at times.

The Romantic movement was influenced greatly by the ancient Greeks. And so was Thomas Jefferson. He was the only founder who was arguably more Greek than Roman.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the northwestern European nation of Scotland was experiencing an intellectual revolution. 

The movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment occurred just as its neighbor, England, was going through a period of intellectual stagnation. Some estimates suggest that 75 percent of Scots could read in 1750, compared to just 53 percent of English people. At the time, English universities like Oxford were in decline, while those in Edinburgh and Glasgow modernized and flourished.

There is a term we use today: loyal opposition. It describes the practice of questioning and criticizing those in power while still remaining loyal to the nation’s government. 

The problem for America’s founders was that this term had not yet been invented. They had no political vocabulary to describe the potential for healthy political competition or partisanship. So they continued to view it in Roman terms. The Federalists, foremost among them John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, described their opponents –⁠ the anti-Federalists –⁠ as “Catilines”: traitors to the state.