The classical influence on the framers of the American constitution
Toby Redington It is frequently thought that the American Constitution primarily drew its principles from the English constitution and English philosophers such as John Locke. In fact the fundamental principles and ideas formulated by the framers of the American constitution, who were the men who put forward their ideas in numbers debates on how best to write an American constitution, can be traced back to classical systems of government and authors such as Cicero and Polybius. Many of the framers would have received a classical education and have established themselves through published work as skilled classicists. We can constantly see in debate and discussion how they drew from their knowledge of classics when constructing the constitution. Moreover we are able to tell that they acknowledged the ideas of Montesquieu, also a talented classicist whose ideas of government owe to the likes of Polybius and Cicero. The American colonial grammar schools, in particular those associated with the handful of universities, provided students with a strict classical education. The Greek concept of a well-rounded education, ‘paideia’, was virtually non-existent in early America. This style of education stretched throughout the whole of the colonies, since only the very poorest areas could not maintain a grammar school. For nearly the entirety of a grammar school education, which began at the age of 8 and continued up for 7 years, students were absorbed by Latin and Ancient Greek. Noah Webster observed, ‘The minds of the youth are perpetually led to the history of Greek and Rome or to Great Britain; boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.’ Teaching Classics was often severely enforced: a faulty translation of a passage, a single mistake in the declension of a Latin word or failure to respond properly to a locution in class would result in a beating by the teacher. Writers such as Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding would recall the pain suffered in school at the hands of their teachers. Yet it is important to note that many schoolmasters were not well taught in the subjects themselves. The approach to teaching in the period was primarily reciting and recalling works by ancient writers. Little was done to enable students to analyse and interpret for themselves what they had memorized. For this reason, many students took their teachings at face value. This resulted in the entire framing generation having classics deeply engrained into the way they thought. The framers themselves were by no means exempt from this strict classical education. Out of the fifty- six members of the 1775 Second Continental Congress which deliberated the Declaration of Independence, twenty-seven had college backgrounds including eight Harvard degrees. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, twenty-three of the thirty-nine signers had baccalaureates. Any sort of college education would have required students to be extremely capable in both Latin and Attic Greek. For example, Yale’s requirements from 1745 and Columbia’s ordinances from 1755 demanded unprepared reading ability of works from Cicero, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Greek Testament. In fact, classicism permeated many layers of colonial and early republic society. Even Americans not educated in school or college cultivated classical learning. Thomas Jefferson once humorously noted, ‘ American farmers are the only farmers who can read Homer.’ We are able to observe the influence of classicism on specific founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790), for example, was self-taught in Latin and famously grumbled throughout the whole Constitutional Convention about the misuse of ancient references, yet he would himself be partial to classical allusion himself. He had published a variant of a Socratic dialogue in his younger days as a writer.
87
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker