Nathan Hitchen’s most recent piece speaks of America as the heir to the British Empire. Hitchen gives great depth in a work that dispels common myths about the relationship between the founding and monarchy. To even better understand the vision of our republic held by its framers, one may look beyond the British politics of the era to the history that inspired it.
Not only did the Founders recover an older British conception of government, they built a nation in line with forgotten classical traditions of political thought. The American Revolution was understood by J.G.A. Pocock as “not the first act of the revolutionary Enlightenment but the last great act of the Renaissance.” The role of the Renaissance in early America extends beyond its revival of Greco-Roman thought, to its revival of the traditions of those antiquity regarded as barbarians.
From Twelve Tribes to Thirteen Colonies
The 2nd-century Christian writer Tatian the Assyrian famously ascribed his conversion to his chance exposure to “certain barbaric writings.” Though their profound influence on our civilization augurs a reluctance to admit it, the Israelites were one of many “barbarians” to the Greeks. Thus, Tatian proudly proclaimed himself “a disciple of Barbarian philosophy” while he denounced Greco-Roman thought as the foundations for the exploitative practices of the day. As the Renaissance brought forth a renewal in interest in classical philosophy, it also invigorated a return to the study of Masoretic Hebrew in the Old Testament.
In doing this, Renaissance thinkers revived a tradition that is distinctly barbarian in the classical sense of the word, coming from outside of the “great” Greek and Roman civilizations of antiquity. This tradition was more than religious. It came to inspire the idea of Hebraic Republicanism, which sought to defend the emerging liberty of the age in terms of divine right drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Thinkers in this vein include James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and, most conspicuously, John Milton. Decades later, in the 1849 novel White-Jacket, Herman Melville described adolescent America in these terms as “the Israel of our time,” one that bears “the ark of the liberties of the world.” What if this is more than just a religious declaration, but one with real bearings on secular political philosophy?
While Christian scripture speaks firstly of a kingdom “not of this world,” the Hebrew Bible is a deeply political text. The Twelve Tribes emerge from a slave regime to form a proto-republic before turning to monarchy in the Book of Samuel. Some are political tales before any secondary religious purpose. The Book of Esther carries little divinity and much intrigue in the courts of Achaemenid Persia. Yet, many are loath to discuss it as a political text for fear of invoking a religion they may not subscribe to. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks addresses this perplexity in The Home We Build Together, arguing that the Hebrew Bible can be read beyond its religion as surely as Plato’s work can be read without Hellenic Paganism. This view would have been commonplace in the America of 1776, where scripture was divine, but also deeply political. Even the avowed anti-ecclesiastical Thomas Paine dedicated over a quarter of his pro-independence Common Sense to the Book of Samuel’s transition to monarchy.
The original, divinely ordained form of government was understood by many in the American colonies of the 18th-century to be a republic. In seeking to build their own republic, they turned to their scriptures as history books, not theological works. Harvard president Samuel Langdon, a participant in the founding in his own right, told audiences that “[T]he Jewish government, according to the original constitution which was divinely established. . . was a perfect Republic.” Thus, “the civil Polity of Israel is doubtless an excellent general model” for the coming republic to be built on American soil. Meanwhile, John Adams drew comparisons from that government “instituted by God, had a judge, the great Sanhedrin, and general assemblies of the people” to the government he and his comrades were building in the United States. It is true that this echoed past rhetoric of the Puritan fathers of New England. However, the Hebraic Republican tradition centers on the Israelites as political models and does not necessitate the hard Calvinist notions of election or the latent apocalypticism that had fueled the Puritans more than a century earlier.
The frontiersman had not read Plato, but they carried the King James Bible and knew, at least in the rudimentary form of stories, much of the history of England. King George and King David shall always yield more to analyzing the revolution practically than any Athenian Philosopher-King. Both the views of America as a continuance of the British Empire and as a state modeled on Biblical Israel are prescient in capturing visions of the masses. In his original piece, Nathan Hitchen described America as a “union of realms sharing history, a strong constitution, and the will to reform.” The description is apt for old Israel, where history and constitution are merged into covenantal memory. The covenant, renewed by public celebration, becomes the centerpiece of reform, rooting all progress forward in the grand ideals of national founding. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders gave their new nation its own covenant to celebrate and cite moving forward.
When the Founders transitioned from monarchy to republicanism, the religious milieu of the day would have recognized in the Founders’ actions the undoing of Israelite folly in the Book of Samuel. In the framing of our new covenant, they would have recognized an echoing of the old. Israel had twelve distinct tribes that could govern themselves and maintain their own identities, yet remain as one. In times of crisis, these distinctions would bow before united nationhood. The American thirteen colonies were seen much the same way, united in their covenant yet able to fulfill its promises through the states. From Asher to Zebulun, the Founders envisioned a model that could manifest in their nation as what Justice Louis Brandeis described nearly two centuries later as “laboratories of democracy.”
This would have held particular resonance in the American frontier, where nothing was certain about the borders of their new nation but that they would expand. The Israelites are given the laws of Moses before they reach the Promised Land; they are bound as a people by memory of this covenant rather than any particular patch of soil. With Lincoln, this principle would be made concrete, defining America providentially and covenantly with a people and a heritage that transcended blood and soil. This allowed America to be, in the words of Adams quoting the 17th-century English republican James Harrington, “an empire of laws and not of men.” Importantly for the American self-conception was the notion that our republic had a particular importance in the world, that the American Revolution was a beacon to all the nations, just as Israel had its duty to serve as a light to their non-monotheistic neighbors. Thus, the bringing of American laws had ramifications for all people in a way no other national enshrinement of law had since Moses.
The clearest example of this admiration is perhaps the original proposal for the seal of the United States. The initial recommendation, lost in bureaucracy for years, came from Benjamin Franklin and sought to depict “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharoah who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity.” This image was meant to be surrounded by the daunting national motto “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to god.” In the words of Rabbi Sacks again, this spoke to a national self-image where “England was Egypt, America the Promised Land, and the United States the fulfillment of the old-new journey to liberty.”
Hebrew Republicanism or Germanic Democracy?
Jefferson regarded the “first [best] writer in the world” to have been the Roman Senator Tacitus, who authored the Histories of Rome, portions of which survive covering until AD 70. In addition to his work on the Romans, Tacitus turned to produce the first great historical survey of those he would have considered Barbarians in De origine et situ Germanorum, better known merely as Germania. Germania presents a work both thoroughly Roman yet deeply useful to admirers of the Barbarian, but was forgotten until the Renaissance. The Tacitean view of the Germans prefaces Jefferson’s own vision of yeoman agrarian democracy, where the forest dwellers to the north seem immune to the corruption and strife of urban and imperial Rome. Jefferson’s encounters with Tacitus’s work on the Germans began with his reading the History of England by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras as a young man, a work of Whig politicking that portrayed the Anglo-Saxons as proto-democrats and put them in the tradition of the Germans of Tacitus.
Jefferson was further influenced by William Blackstone’s Commentaries. The legal classic traces the English tradition of law “to the customs of the Britons and Germans.” If Tacitus gave Jefferson a vision of Germans as the sort of citizens he hoped to have in his new nation, Blackstone and other Whigs gave a tantalizing vision of Germanic democracy, where “all matters of importance were debated…in the great councils of the realm.” Regardless of the historical accuracy of such portrayals, the idea of the Barbarians that had defeated imperial Rome as a people that governed through the consent of the governed was rooted deeply in the Jeffersonian psyche. Rather than the typical focus on inspiration from the Roman Republic, Jefferson wrote, “all Europe is beholden to the Northern Nations for introducing or retaining a constitution of government far excelling all others we know.” Biographer Gilbert Chirard went so far as to declare that “Jeffersonian democracy was born under the sign of [Anglo–Saxon conquerors] Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason.”
If many Americans might have seen the undoing of the Book of Samuel in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson may have seen an undoing of the Norman Conquest and a return to old norms of the Saxons. Here Jefferson turned, explicitly, to the figures of Hengist and Horsa. Though he agreed with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin that one side of the national seal ought to depict the Israelites, Jefferson sought to place the two Anglo-Saxons that began their conquest of England from the Celts on the other side. Jefferson described Hengist and Horsa as “the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”
In histories of the realm of Hengist and Horsa, Jefferson found practical examples of ideas he sought to put into practice as cornerstones for the colonies, such as a right to trial by jury. When Jefferson spoke of forefathers, he looked beyond the British Empire to “the Saxons [who] had…too firm a feeling of the rights derived to them from their ancestors to bow down the sovereignty of their state before such visionary pretensions.” Later in his life, Jefferson would come to write that the laws of the Anglo-Saxons, having been done away with by the Norman conquest, “were never relinquished by the will of [the] nation.”
Unlike their view of the Hebrew Bible, admiration for Anglo-Saxon history and the Whig myth of Germanic democracy was far from universal among the Founders. John Adams wrote mockingly of anti-Federalists in these terms. Where Jeffersonians saw ancient liberty, Adams saw a pathetic lot who wanted to “set up the governments of ancient Goths and modern Indians.” The admiration for Germanic tribes was nonsensical romanticism to Adams in a nation that could instead serve as “Romans among barbarians.” With the usage of “barbarians” here, Adams is, of course, referring narrowly to the Germans and not to the wider usage of the term that would include the poets and priests from Carthage to Jerusalem among that number. Certain anti-Federalists held the opposite perspective.
In the eyes of deistic libertarians at the founding, too much inspiration from ancient Israel risked the trend of apocalyptic movements and might even engender another Cromwell, with standing armies, state religion, and national centralization contrary to the idealized Germanic past. Adams shared the views of many Americans in seeing divine providence behind the comparisons of new America to old Israel. Jefferson agreed–and not necessarily positively. When citing the Anglo-Saxons in a late letter, Jefferson hailed that their history was proof that the common law foundation of America could be held without Christianity for “the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans.” Even more darkly, Jefferson saw the role that an underclass of slaves played in the free man’s world of Germania and saw in it an echo of the customs of Virginia.
The twin barbarian influences upon the American founding, those of Israel and Germany, capture in them the interplay between virtuous order and dashing liberty at the soul of the American spirit. America was given a covenant of liberty tempered by moral faith in the inspiration of the Hebrew Bible, but models of consensus and a penchant for disobedience from the Saxons. This typifies the struggle between the twin poles of virtue and freedom that has built both the American republic and the fusionist tradition.
About The Author
