From The Founding Fathers & the Classics.

by Dr. Joe Wolverton II

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”
~Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

Patrick Henry’s view of the value of history was not unique. The men who framed our constitutional republic agreed with French author Charles Pinot Duclos, who observed:

“We see on the theater of the world a certain number of scenes which succeed each other in endless repetition: where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first, we might have avoided the others. The past should enlighten us on the future: knowledge of history is no more than an anticipated experience.”

All of the founding fathers believed that history was a precursor of the future. In the annals of history, particularly that of the Roman and Greek republics of antiquity, they believed they could find the key to inoculating America against the diseases that infected and destroyed past societies. Indeed, it has been said that the Founders were coroners examining the lifeless bodies of the republics and democracies of the past, in order to avoid sccumbing to the maladies that shortened their lives.

The Founders learned very early in life to venerate the illuminating stories of ancient Greece and Rome. They learned these stories, not from secondary sources, but from the classics themselves. And from these stories they drew knowledge and inspiration that helped them found a republic far greater than anything created in antiquity.

Classical training usually began at age eight, whether in a school or at home under the guidance of a private tutor. One remarkable teacher who inculcated his studients with a love of the classics was Scotsman Donald Robertson. Many future luminaries were enrolled in his school: James Madison, John Taylor of Caroline, John Tyler and George Rogers Clark, among others. Robertson and teachers like him nourished their charges with a healthy diet of Greek and Latin, and required that they learn to master Virgil, Horace, Justinian, Tacitus, Herodotus, Lucretius and Thucydides. Further along in their education, students were required to translate Cicero’s Orations and Virgil’s Aeneid. They were expected to translate Latin and Greek passages aloud, write out the translations in English, and then re-translate the passages back into the original language, using a different tense.

The standards were no less rigorous for those taught at home. George Wythe, the renowned Viriginian who would come to be known as the “Teacher of Liberty”, was himself taught to appreciate the writings of the ancients at home by his mother. Tragically, Wythe’s mother died when he was very young, but she lived long enough to anchor her son’s education on very firm moorings. Before she died, she taught Wythe to read and translate both the fundamental languages of antiquity, Greek and Latin. According to one early biographer, Wythe “had a perfect knowledge of the Greek language taught to him by his mother in the backwoods.”

Whether at home or in a schoolhouse, the goal of education in the early days of our nation was to instill virtue in the students. The Founders were taught that free societies were sustained by a virtuous populace, and that, if a society were to abandon a study of the classics, that same society would eventually abandon the virtues championed by the classical authors.

There was a more pragmatic side to the Founders’ classical education as well. Twenty-seven signers of the Declaration of Independence were college-educated. Moreover, of the 53 delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1987, 30 were college graduates. That is an impressive feat, given the challenging entrance requirements of the 18th-century universities. Fortunately for the young Founding Fathers, the teachers of the day exercised their students in Greek and Latin, so that their pupils could meet the rigorous entrance requirements of colonial colleges. Those colleges stipulated that entering freshmen be able to read, translate and expoud the Greco-Roman classical works.

Such requirements were nearly universal in America and remained unchanged for generations. Teachers concentrated their lessons on the works of those classical authors on which students would be tested prior to admission to college. A brief survey of the entrance requirements for colonial colleges will testify to the enlightenment of our Founding Fathers–as well as the astounding decline in the educational standards of today.

In 1750, Harvard demanded that applicants be able to extemporaneously “read, construe, and parse Tully (Cicero), Virgil, or such like classical authors and to write Latin in prose, and to be skilled in making Latin verse, or at least know the rules of Prosodia, and to read, construe, and parse ordinary Greek as in the New Testatement of the Bible, Isocrates, or such like and decline the paradigms of Greek nouns and verbs. Of note is the fact that John Tumbull, the illustrious artist, passed Harvard’s exacting entrance exam at only 12 years of age.

Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater, King’s College (now Columbia), had similarly stringent prerequisites for prospective students. Applicants were required to “give a rational account of the Greek and Latin grammars, read three orations of Cicero and three books of Virgil’s Aeneid, and translate the first 10 chapters of John from Greek into Latin.”

James Madison had it no easier when he applied for entrance to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1769. Madison and his fellow applicants were obliged to demonstrate “the ability to write Latin prose, translate Virgil, Cicero, and the Greek gospels and a commensurate knowledge of Latin and Greek grammar.”

College lessons were as demanding as the entrance exams. American colonial curricula was based on the Latin “trivium” of rhetoric, logic and grammar, as well as the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Unlike modern universities, where elective courses are innumerable and often inane, the colleges attended by our Founding Fathers offered very few elective courses and coursework focused chiefly on the study of classical works. And those works were in the languages in which they were written!

Students were taught lessons in virtue and liberty from the works of Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus and Polybius. Thomas Jefferson’s classmates recall that he studied at least 15 hours a day and carried his Greek grammar book with him wherever he went.

Even the commencement ceremonies were dedicated to classical learning. They featured contests of Greek and Latin translation or extemporaneous debates in those languages.

Because of this formidable classical curricula at colonial colleges, the classics became a well from which the Founders drank deeply. In the classics, the Founding Fathers found their heroes and villains, and they also detected warning signs along the road of statecraft on which they would tread.

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