Abstract
The popularity of Gordon’s Discourses on Tacitus and Sallust was foreshadowed by the immensely successful series of Cato’s Letters, which Gordon wrote with John Trenchard for the London Journal, beginning in 1720. They published their series in four bound volumes in 1724.1 Americans quoted ‘Cato’ frequently throughout the revolutionary period, and particularly during the constitutional debate.2 Cato’s great concern was liberty, the essential attribute of a republic, particularly the freedom of the press, and his letters were also known as the ‘Essays on Liberty’.3
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Notes
See Cato; David Louis Jacobson, The English Libertarian Heritage, from the writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters (Indianapolis, 1965). For a bibliography of John Trenchard, see J. A. R. Seguin, A Bibliography of John Trenchard (1662-1723) (Jersey City, NJ, 1965).
See Donald Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge, La., 1988), at 143. ‘No one can spend any time in the newspapers, library inventories, and pamphlets of colonial America without realizing that Cato’s Letters... was the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period.’ Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (New York, 1954), 141.
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© 1994 M. N. S. Sellers
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Sellers, M.N.S. (1994). ‘Cato’ and Virtue. In: American Republicanism. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_20
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