Education and the American Founding —Part 3
by Ellis Sandoz
Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.
The Classics (concluded)
A further illustration of the centrality of classics to the American mind can be seen in James Kent (1763-1847), chancellor of the State of New York and author of the celebrated work of jurisprudence entitled Kent's Commentaries on American Law, which appeared in four volumes (1824-1830). Based on his lectures as professor of law at Columbia, the Commentaries went through a number of editions. In his review of it, George Bancroft stated: "Now we know what American law is."45
Young James began his education at age five and the study of Latin at age nine, then with the Reverend Ebenezer Baldwin, the distinguished preacher at Danbury. By age thirteen Kent had read Eutropius, Justin, Cornelius Nepos, and Virgil. He entered the New Haven College (Yale) of Ezra Stiles at fourteen, received the bachelor of arts degree in 1781 and the master's in 1784. The classics provided the backbone of instruction with Virgil, Cicero, and Horace in Latin and the New Testament, Homer, and Xenophon in Greek.
This, however, was only the beginning. Kent continued his reading of the classics throughout his life of eighty-four years. As he later wrote in his Diary:
At the June circuit, in 1786,1 saw Edward Livingston (afterwards the codifier for Louisiana), and he had a pocket Horace and read some passages to me, and pointed out their beauties, assuming that I well understood Horace. I said nothing, but was stung with shame and mortification. I purchased immediately Horace and Virgil, a dictionary and grammar, and a Greek lexicon and grammar, and the Testament, and formed my resolution, promptly and decidedly, to recover the lost languages. I studied in my little cottage mornings, and devoted an hour to Greek and another to Latin daily. I soon increased it to two for each tongue in the twenty-four hours. My acquaintance with the languages increased rapidly. After I had read Horace and Virgil, I ventured upon Livy for the first time in my life; and, after I had construed the Greek Testament, I took up the Iliad, and I can hardly describe at this day [1839] the enthusiasm with which I perseveringly read and studied, in the originals, Livy and the Iliad. It gave me inspira- tion. I purchased a French dictionary and grammar, and began French, and gave an hour to that language daily. I appropriated the business part of the day to law, and read Coke on Littleton and made copious notes. I devoted evenings to English literature in company with my wife.
Kent was appointed to the New York Supreme Court at age thirty-five by Governor John Jay and became chief justice six years later (1804), but his reading continued. As he wrote to his brother, Moss Kent, in 1799:
It is only by becoming thoroughly master of Greek and Roman learning—
Of all the ancient sages thought,
The ancient bards sublimely taught,
—and also a profound acquaintance with English classics and with the sages of the law, that a man can attain to distinction and dignity and impart to the mind all its energies and all its grandeur.
A Washington-Hamilton Federalist who disliked John Adams's supposed tendency to elevate monarchy and detested Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for their perceived Jacobinism, Kent wrote this estimate of the first president: "The patriotism, firmness, wisdom, prudence, enterprise, and matchless simplicity, integrity, and industry of General Washington . . . are beyond precedent. The United States is indebted for its independence to him, more than to all Congress united."49
In sum, with respect to the founders and the classics, "so skillfully were the classical, Whig and American traditions interwoven that the founders considered them one and the same: 'the tradition of Liberty.'" For his part John Adams wrote: "Whig principles were the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke."50
Legal Education
In the famous final letter by Jefferson to Madison (February 17, 1826) that concludes with "Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections," the primary concern is with legal education and selection of a law professor for the University of Virginia. Eager to allow diversity of religious beliefs, Jefferson and Madison saw no anomaly in fostering orthodoxy of political belief, if that could be managed. Their university was to be an engine designed for the very purpose. Thus Jefferson wrote:
In the selection of our Law Professor, we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles. You will recollect that before the Revolution, Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of law students, and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties. You remember also that our lawyers were then all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the students' hornbook, from that moment, that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into Toryism, and nearly all of the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. They suppose themselves, indeed, to be Whigs, because they no longer know what Whigism or republicanism means. It is in our seminary that this vestal flame is to be kept alive; it is thence it is to spread anew over our own and the sister States. If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within a dozen or twenty years a majority of our own legislature will be from one school, and many disciples will have carried its doctrines home with them to their several States, and will have leavened thus the whole mass.
Jefferson then movingly alludes to the philosophy of government he and Madison have devoted their lives to and which he hopes to see nurtured by the university:
The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources of constant happiness to me through that long period . . . . It has . . . been a great solace to me, to believe that you are engaged in vindicating to posterity the course we have pursued for preserving to them, in all their purity, the blessings of self-government, which we had assisted too in acquiring for them. If ever the earth has beheld a system of administration conducted with a single and steadfast eye to the general interest and happiness of those committed to it, one which protected by truth, can never know reproach, it is that to which our lives have been devoted. To myself you have been a pillar of support through life.51
The great constitutional debate that preceded the Revolution continued in transformed terms as the marriage of liberty and law that was consummated by the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in later decades. The founding was conducted in significant part by lawyers. As the aged Jefferson implied, if Lord Coke had saved English liberties and constitutionalism for the world once in the seventeenth century, it is hardly too much to say that he did it twice with the success of the American cause after independence in the eighteenth century. Coke's four volumes of Institutes and eleven volumes of Reports were the cornerstone and much of the edifice of legal education in eighteeenth-century America. The publication of Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (in four volumes, 1765-1769) and eager reception in America were not altogether unmixed blessings, as at least Jefferson thought.
There were few books of law available to the colonial student.52 Only thirty-three law books were printed in America prior to 1776, and eight of those were different editions of the same work. A number of these, however, bore on jury trial, individual liberties, and constitutional questions back to Magna Carta. But there was no American reprint of Coke prior to 1776 or of any standard English law writer except Blackstone; nor were any English law reports reprinted. Editions of colonial laws were scarce or unobtainable. What existed were to be found mostly in the libraries of richer lawyers. Many of these were Tories, and they took their books with them when they fled the country at the outbreak of war. There were no college law lectures before 1780 and no law schools before 1784.
The situation faced by James Kent when he was appointed to the New York Supreme Court as its youngest member in 1798 may be taken as typical for the time of circuit-riding justice in America:
I never dreamed of volumes of reports and written opinions. Such things were not then thought of . . . . When I came to the Bench there were no reports or State precedents. The opinions from the Bench were delivered ore tenus [by word of mouth]. We had no law of our own, and nobody knew what it was. I first introduced a thorough examination of cases and written opinions . . . . This was the commencement of a new plan, and then was laid the first stone in the subsequently erected temple of our jurisprudence.53
Law was learned either through private study (Patrick Henry followed this route, being admitted to the bar after six weeks in solitude with Coke on Littleton in 1760), while clerking or serving as a copyist for some court and reading whatever books one could borrow (principally Coke on Littleton, the first volume of Coke's Institutes), or apprenticeship in a law office, for which the student paid a fee that ranged from $100 to $500. Bushrod Washington was so apprenticed to James Wilson in 1782, and uncle George Washington signed the note for his nephew in the amount of 100 guineas as fee.
When John Adams began the study of law in the offices of Jeremiah Gridley in Boston he was told: "A lawyer in this country must study common law and civil law and natural law and admiralty law and must do the duty of a counsellor, a lawyer, an attorney, a solicitor and even of a scrivener; so that the difficulties of the profession are much greater here than in England."54 John Adams read Coke, Bracton, Britton, Fleta, Glanville, Fortescue, Justinian's Institutes, St. Germain's Doctor and Student, and a number of other titles after two years, but, he wrote,
Wood's Institutes of Common Law I never read but once, and my Lord Coke's Commentary on Littleton I never read but once. These two authors I must get and read over and over again. And I will get them and break through, as Mr. Gridley expresses it, all obstructions. Besides, I am but a novice in natural law. There are multitudes of excellent authors on natural law that I have never read; and indeed I never read any part of the best authors Puffendorf and Grotius.55
Young Adams promised himself to do better during the next two years. When James Kent undertook the study of law with Attorney General Egbert Benson in 1781 in Poughkeepsie he was, by his own account, the most modest, steady, industrious student that such a place ever saw. I read, the following winter, Grotius and Puffendorf, in huge folios, and made copious extracts . . . . I was free from all dissipations; I had never danced, played cards, or sported with a gun, or drunk anything but water. In 1782 I read Smollett's History of England, and procured at a farmers house where I boarded, Rapin's History [of England], and read it through; and I found during the course of the last summer, among my papers, my MS. abridgment of Rapin's dissertation on the laws and customs of the Anglo-Saxons. I abridged Hales "History of the Common Laws," and the old Books of Practice, and read parts of Blackstone again and again. The same year I procured Hume's History, and his profound reflections and admirable eloquence struck most deeply on my youthful mind. I extracted the most admired parts, and made several volumes of MSS.56
Blackstone was no sooner published than he was reprinted (and sold at $2 per volume) in Philadelphia in 1771-1772. Edmund Burke remarked on the preoccupation of Americans with law and constitutional questions in his great Conciliation speech in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775:
In no country, perhaps, in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful, and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those of the law exported to the plantations. The colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage . . . states that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law—and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitutions . . . . This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.57
Charles Warren concludes that the very meagerness of Americans' legal education in the period of the founding was in fact its strength. He finds truth in the reply of a great lawyer who, when asked how the lawyers who framed the United States Constitution had such a mastery of legal principles, replied—"Why they had so few books." Daniel Webster remarked that many other students read much more than he did, but that "so much as I read, I made my own." And Chancellor James Kent offers a similar explanation out of the fact that, studying during the Revolution, he had only one book—"Blackstone's Commentaries, but that one book he mastered." Warren concludes that this "sums up very concisely the cause of the greatness of many an early American jurist."58
Conclusion
The centrality of education—broadly conceived as in antiquity as character formation—to the success of free government was a conviction of the founders, and some of the key sources have been mentioned. It is not much knowing but deep knowing harmonized by devotion to truth and justice that makes all the difference. We denizens of the information overload era are very far from understanding this critical point. Burke understood it and even conceded John Adams's hyperbolic claim of a decade earlier:
A native of America [stated Adams] who cannot read and write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake. It has been observed that we are all of us lawyers, divines, politicians, and philosophers . . . . [A]ll candid foreigners who have passed through this country, and conversed freely with all sorts of people here, will allow, that they have never seen so much knowledge and civility among the common people in any part of the world . . . . Be it remembered . . . that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understanding, and a desire to know.59
Alexis de Tocqueville later spoke of "habits of the heart." And it is heart knowledge as well as head knowledge that Adams speaks of, what he and Jefferson termed "the principles of reason and pure Americanism."60
The spirit of the founding displays significant kinship with the ancient and medieval principle that it is part of the purpose of political order to conduce to habitual virtue, to lay foundations for a life lived according to justice and truth, i.e., the inculcation of rudimentary righteousness through the imposed legal and institutional order of society. Only on such a foundation of habit can highest public and personal good be pursued and preserved—individual and social happiness as the prize of liberty. The political order is conceived as harmonizing with the "laws of nature and nature's God" in America as it comes from the hands of the founders, if we rightly remember it today.
Once again Tocqueville's keen eye saw something of this, and he expressed it in his encomium of the American jury system as "bound to have a great influence on national character."
This is because juries instill some of the habits of the judicial mind into every citizen, and just those habits are the very best way of preparing people to be free. It spreads respect for the courts' decisions and for the idea of right . . . . Juries teach men equity in practice . . . teach each individual not to shirk responsibility for his own acts, and without that manly characteristic no political virtue is possible . . . invest each citizen with a sort of magisterial office . . . . Juries are wonderfully effective in shaping a nation's judgment and increasing its natural lights . . . . [The jury] should be regarded as a free school which is always open . . . . I think the main reason for the practical intelligence and the political good sense of the Americans is their long experience with juries in civil cases . . . . The jury is both the most effective way of establishing the people's rule and the most efficient way of teaching them how to rule.61
Such views seem to complement those of the founders precisely. Jefferson thought a Bill of Rights important, among other reasons, because it stated in the authoritative text of the fundamental law principles that would then become guides especially to judicial practice in support of liberty and justice in society. Such a text would, in effect, be a veritable script for acting and living well as free men in society at large. Herein lies the harmonizing of the educational and political vision of the founders—convinced as they are that America is not a fortuitous historical accident, but that it exemplifies through its authoritative documents and founding acts principles of timeless prudential truth.
There is no warfare here between ancients and moderns, but an attempt to adapt and redefine abiding truth intrinsic to both in service of a newly articulated just regime. Hence the weight of Jefferson's words in his last year about the lack of novelty in the Declaration of Independence. "[I]t was intended," he wrote, "to be an expression of the American mind.... All of its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc., & c."62
The Declaration and Constitution were conceived to be the groundwork of justice and happiness for the American community undertaking its historical pilgrimage. A basic faith in American institutions and the need for its inculcation through civic education is a consensus of the leading personalities of the period. Thus James Kent, inveighing against his imagined disparagement of republicanism and adulation of monarchy by John Adams, writes:
I wish to make a firm stand against such pernicious tenets. They are as directly in the face of our institutions and manners as they are repugnant to our feelings and happiness. Besides, it is against moral fitness, no less than political duty, to be constantly instilling distrust and diffidence as to the Constitution of our country. An unshaken confidence, a reverential attachment to our established system, ought rather to be the lesson of the schools.63
His partisan spirit aside, the thrust of these convictions touches the central consideration and perennial necessity of civic education. In Kent's introductory lecture as professor at Columbia he stated the crux of the matter for aspiring law students, but not only for them:
The importance of a knowledge of our Constitutional principles as a part of the education of an American lawyer arises from the uncommon efficacy of our courts of justice in being authorized to bring the validity of a law to the test of the Constitution . . . . I consider them, the course of justice, as the proper and intended guardians of our limited Constitution against the factions and encroachments of the legislative body . . . . A lawyer in a free country . . . should be a person of irreproachable virtue and goodness. He should be well read in the whole circle of the arts and sciences. He should be fit for the administration of public affairs and to govern the Commonwealth by his councils, establish it by his laws and correct it by his example.
The people of this country are under singular obligations from the nature of their government to place the study of the law at least on a level with the pursuits of classical learning. The art of maintaining social order and promoting social prosperity is not with us a mystery for only those who may be distinguished by the adventurous advantages of birth and fortune . . . . A wide field is open to all—all may be summoned into public employment . . . . Extensive legal and political knowledge is requisite to render men competent to administer the government. A general initiation into the elementary learning of our law has a tendency to guard against mischief and at the same time to promote a keen sense of right and warm love of Freedom.64 A similar confidence in the principles and institutions of America is reflected in James Madison's attitude even at the end of his life, when the slavery question was becoming a nearly overwhelming concern. "The finest of Madison's characteristics... was his inexhaustible faith—faith that a well-founded commonwealth would be made immortal by the spirit of justice its principles instilled in the people."65
This is to suggest that the principles of our authoritative documents preeminently comprise—and were intended to comprise—a kind of syllabus for education in free government in America and, because of their universality and vision (with appropriate adaptations) for free government wherever it might have any chance of flourishing. 
[This is the third of 3 Parts. Read Part 2 ]
NOTES
45. Quoted from Bancroft's 1827 review in Charles Warren, A History of the American Bar (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911), 543.
46. Kent, Memoirs of Chancellor Kent, 1-14.
47. Ibid., 24-25.
48. Ibid., 143-44.
49. Ibid., 249.
50. Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 83.
51. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Feb. 17, 1826, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 726-28.
52. I follow here Warren, A History of the American Bar, esp. chap. 8.
53. Kent, Memoirs of Chancellor Kent, 116-17.
52. I follow here Warren, A History of the American Bar, esp. chap. 8.
53. Kent, Memoirs of Chancellor Kent, 116-17.
54. Warren, History of the American Bar, 83.
55. Quoted from ibid., 172.
56. Kent, Memoirs of Chancellor Kent, 19.
57. Edmund Burke, Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Peter J. Stanlis (Chicago: Regnery Gateway Editions, 1963), 161.
58. Warren, History of the American Bar, 187.
59. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States . . . , 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850-56), 3:456.
60. Quoted from Sandoz, GOL, 35-36.
61. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, 274-76.
62. Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Koch and Peden, 719.
63. Kent, Memoirs of Chancellor Kent, 89.
64. James Kent as quoted in Warren, A History of the American Bar, 352-53n.
65. Irving Brant, James Madison: Commander-in-Chief, 1812-1836 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 504. This is given as the account by Harriet Martineau, who visited the Madisons at Montpellier in 1834. Cf. Holmes, The Religion of the Founding Fathers, chap. 9; also Mark A. Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 10.
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