Abstract
The pervasive Latinity of America’s revolutionary imagery reflected the conscious decisions of political actors who thought that appeals to antiquity would advance their programme. This implies an audience who knew and cared about Roman history. Such an audience existed in the class of educated Americans who had attended grammar schools, or sought to mimic the accomplishments of those who had. This group would include nearly everyone at the Constitutional Convention, and the state ratifying conventions that ratified the Constitution. The people who led the revolution and designed its institutions exploited a republican ideology they knew well, and strongly approved. Their ability to do so depended on the American system of education.
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Notes
For example, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); Wood; Pocock. Some lawyers have recently echoed the interests and findings of the American historians, for instance, Cass Sunstein, ‘Interest Groups in American Public Law’, Stanford Law Review 38 (1985):29; Suzanna Sherry, ‘Civic Virtue and the Feminine Voice in Constitutional Adjudication’, Virginia Law Review 76 (1986):543; Yale Symposium.
On American classicism, see Richard Gummere, ‘The Classical Ancestry of the United States Constitution’, American Quarterly 14 (1962):3–18; Gummere; George Kennedy, ‘Classical Influences of the Federalist’, in Classical Traditions 119; William Gribbin, ‘Rollin’s Histories and American Republicanism’, WMQ 29 (1972):611–22; Reinhold, Classica’, idem, The Classick Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, Pa., 1975); Eadie; Charles F. Mullett, “Classical Influences on the American Revolution’, Classical Journal 35 (1939-40):92–104; Robert Middlekauf, ‘A Persistent Tradition: The Classical Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century New England’, WMQ 18 (1961):54–67; Edwin A. Miles, ‘The Young American Nation and the Classical World’, JHI 35 (1974):270; Howard Mumford Jones, ‘The Appeal of Antiquity’, in Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); Linda K. Kerber, ‘Salvaging the Classical Tradition’, in The Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, NY, 1970); Colbourn; Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (New York, 1984); William L. Vance, America’s Rome (New Haven, Conn., 1989); Louis B. Wright, The Cultural Life of the American Colonies, 1607–1673 (New York, 1957).
See, e.g., Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 25–6.
Ibid., 27.
On eighteenth-century neoclassicism, see Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford, England, 1949); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1966); James W. Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967); Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicism (Harmondsworth, England, 1968); Palmer.
See Robert Middlekauf, Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, Conn., 1963), 75–91.
Meyer Reinhold, The Classick Pages: Classical Reading of Eighteenth-Century Americans (University Park, Penn., 1975).
See C. H. Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics (New Haven, Conn., 1927).
Modern epitomes of Classical History were also widely available, e.g., Count de Constantin François de Chassebeuf Volney, Les Ruines ou Méditations sur les révolutions des Empires (1791); Charles Rollin, Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians, 13 vols (Paris, 1730– 38); Charles Rollin, Roman History from the Foundation of Rome to the Battle of Actium, 7 vols (Paris, 1738–41); Moyle; Baron de Charles L. de Secondât Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, trans. D. L. Lowenthal (New York, 1965); Conyers Middleton, History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (London, 1741); idem, A Treatise on the Roman Senate (London, 1747); Edward Wortley Montagu, Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republics adapted to the present state of Great Britain (London, 1759).
On eighteenth-century education, see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York, 1970); Edwin C. Broome, A Historical and Critical Discussion of College Admission Requirements (New York, 1903); Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960); R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin, A History of Education in American Culture, Part I. Colonial (New York, 1953); Sheldon S. Cohen, A History of Colonial Education, 1607– 1776 (New York, 1974); Richard M. Gummere, ‘The Classical Ancestry of the United States Constitution’, American Quarterly 14 (1962):3–18; Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983); Robert Middlekauf, Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth Century New England (New Haven, Conn., 1963); Idem, ‘A Persistent Tradition: The Classical Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century New England’, WMQ 18 (1961):54–67; Colyer Meriwether, Our Colonial Curriculum, 1607–1776 (Washington, DC, 1907); Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of American Undergraduate Course since 1636 (San Francisco, 1977); James J. Walsh, Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic Scholasticism in the Colonial Colleges (New York, 1935); David S. Wiesen, ‘Ancient History in Early American Education’, in The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Susan Ford Wiltshire (University Park, Pa., 1977); Susan Ford Wiltshire (ed.), The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century (University Park, Penn., 1976).
Rexine, ‘The Boston Latin School Curriculum in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Classical Journal 12 (1977):261, 265; Reinhold, Classica 26; Robert Middlekauf, ‘A Persistent Tradition: The Classical Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century New England’, WMQ 18 (1961):54–67.
Reinhold, Classica, 28; Richard Hofstadter and William Smith (eds), American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago, 1961), 1:54, 117; Edwin C. Broome, A Historical and Critical Discussion of College Admission Requirements (New York, 1903), 17–39.
Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of American Undergraduate Course since 1636 (San Francisco, 1977), 30–7; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge, Mass., 1936).
Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 135–6.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), in Jefferson, Writings, ‘Query XV.
Winton U. Solberg (ed.), The Federal Convention and the Formation of the Union of the American States (New York, 1958), 387. Cf. R. A. Ames and H. C. Montgomery, ‘The Influence of Rome on the American Constitution’, Classical Journal 30 (1934-35):19, 20.
Peters, A Sermon on Education ... (Philadelphia, 1751) as quoted in James McLachlan, ‘Classical Names, American Identities: Some Notes on College Students and the Classical Tradition in the 1770s’, in Eadie,
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Sellers, M.N.S. (1994). North American Classicism. In: American Republicanism. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_4
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