Revolutionary contemplation through, and attempts to emulate, Rome were by no means a northern phenomenon. Indeed, one of the most celebrated revolutionary moments, Patrick Henry’s ‘give me liberty, or give me death’ oration, demonstrates the extent to which Rome captured the revolutionary imagination south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Henry’s oration was repeatedly recounted and interpreted in striking classical terms. One of the most celebrated episodes of the American Revolution, Henry’s oration took place just weeks before the commencement of war between Britain and the colonies and was enshrined in the American psyche as a glorious revolutionary moment (see Cohen 1981; McCants 1990). Much of its immediate success and influence, however, owes to the fact that Henry managed to stimulate his viewers to imagine him as a classical Roman, and more specifically, as Cato of Utica.
Henry, despite his scant education and superficial knowledge of the classics, nevertheless became in the eyes of his audiences strongly associated with Greco-Roman images throughout his career. Henry’s dramatic, transformative talent made him appear to his peers as a Plutarchian figure as early as the Stamp Act crisis, a decade before his noted speech to the Virginian Convention. In the classically saturated public sphere of the Old Dominion, Henry was arguably the most deeply classicised figure of his day, at least until Washington assumed command of the Continental Army (for the classics in Virginia, see Wright 1939). As a young and relatively unknown member of the House of Burgesses, Henry’s polemic genius was bold enough to warn the British Monarch in May 1765 against collecting taxes in America, ending his speech with the memorable catchphrase: ‘Caesar had his Brutus – Charles the First, his Cromwell – and George the Third – may profit by their example’ (McCants 1990: 121). In his own mind, and perhaps in the minds of his audience as well, Henry may well have already situated himself as the third potential tyrannicide, the epic follower of Brutus and Cromwell.
Returning from the Continental Congress in March 1775, Henry delivered his speech in a Virginian delegates’ meeting in Richmond on the 23rd. In his oration, Henry, taking his usual bold patriot’s position, advocated that the provincial convention assume the functions of government, called for the establishment of a militia and the development of a plan of defence for the colony, and unflinchingly urged resistance against Britain. Thomas Marshall, a member of the convention remarked to his son, the future Chief Justice John Marshall, that the speech was ‘one of the most bold, vehement, and animated pieces of eloquence that had ever been delivered’ (McCants 1990: 57). Imploring the delegates to support the radical resolutions he had presented, Henry elicited classical interpretations of his performance not only through his already-renowned classical rhetorical style but also by his choice of concluding words (Gustafson 2000: 142, 174). Henry’s powerful and memorable ending phrase, ‘Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!’ derived directly from Cato’s words in the Second Act of Addison’s famed tragedy: ‘My voice is still for war. Gods, can a Roman senate long debate which of the two to choose … but chains or conquest, liberty, or death’ (Litto 1966: 444–445). Once again, as in the ‘Caesar–Brutus’ speech he had delivered a decade before, Henry posed in front of his audience as a classical-republican figure. If during the Stamp Act controversy he postured as a modern-day Brutus, threatening George III with regicide, he now chose to act out an embattled Cato. The importance and omnipresence of Addison’s Cato in revolutionary America, notably its sway on Virginians lacking a college education, such as Henry and Washington, is well known (Furtwangler 1987: 64–84; see also Litto 1966). Indeed, Henry’s audience did not fail to cipher his classical cues and described him not only as a classical orator but specifically as a Cato fighting Julius Caesar.
Contemporary commentators took Henry’s cue and portrayed him in vivid classical terms. Edmund Randolph, in the contemporary The History of Virginia, described how ‘Henry moved and Richard Henry Lee seconded it. The fangs of European criticism might be challenged to spread themselves against the eloquence of that awful day. It was a proud one to a Virginian, feeling and acting with his country. Demosthenes invigorated the timid, and Cicero charmed the backward’ (see Shafer 1970). Randolph’s description, however, written for his History after the Revolution ended, paled in comparison to Judge George Tucker’s account of the same occasion. To describe the glory of the moment he had witnessed, Tucker invited his readers to immerse themselves in a classical fantasy, in one of the most remarkable classical allusions from an era steeped in such flourishes:
Imagine to yourself this speech delivered with all the calm dignity of Cato of Utica; imagine to yourself the Roman Senate assembled in the capital when it was entered by the profane Gauls, who at first were awed by their presence as if they had entered an assembly of the gods. Imagine that you had heard that Cato addressing such a Senate … and you may have some idea of the speaker, the assembly to whom he addressed himself, and the auditory… (Henry 1891, vol. 1: 264–265)
Five times in these few sentences Tucker invoked the imagination of his readers, creating a fictive classical setting to convey the essence of the historical moment, in which the American was Cato and the British played the role of the Barbarians. Tucker depicted Henry, the ‘forest-borne Demosthenes’, while paraphrasing the dramatic words of Cato (or rather Addison’s version of Cato), as a modern-day Cato in front of the Roman Senate, defying Rome’s enemies.
John Roane also described Henry as a figure from classical history, turning for the climactic centrepiece of his description to Roman annals: Henry ‘stood like a Roman Senator defying Caesar, while the unconquerable spirit of Cato of Utica flashed from every feature; and he closed the grand appeal with the solemn words “or give me death!”’ (Henry 1891, vol. 1: 270). This conclusion was a worthy ending to the string of classical allusions and metaphors that Roane employed. In Roane’s remarkable description, Henry’s stance was once again that of a ‘Roman Senator defying Caesar’. However, he could not be mistaken for Brutus or Cassius, Caesar’s notable opponents, but was clearly Cato the Younger, so well known to the revolutionary generation. This remarkable transformation of an American into a Roman, a Henry into a Cato, demonstrates not only the historical similarities which Americans found between their own and the embattled Roman Republic. It demonstrates how their historical sensibilities played out similarly and led them to perceive, even if just ‘for a moment’, their compatriots as classical reincarnations.
5.6 American Cincinnati
Marcus Porcius Cato ‘the younger’, the stern republican martyr who opposed Julius Caesar throughout the dictator’s stormy path to power, was the most popular and admired Roman hero during the war years (1775–1783). However, once the fighting ended, Cato’s uncompromising and suicidal struggle, and eventual defeat, was of little use for the hustle and bustle of post-war American realities. Once the war was over it was another Roman, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who replaced Cato as the embodiment of the ideal republican figure in America. If Cato was the perfect inspirational model in times of war, Cincinnatus symbolised demobilisation, subordination of the armed forces to civil powers and the moral superiority and virtuous simplicity of those who toil the land. This transference from favouring Cato to a preference for Cincinnatus may be seen at its clearest with regard to George Washington. After the commander of the Continental Army, who was referred to as ‘the American Cato’, emerged victorious he retired to his Potomac estate and was quickly hailed as America’s Cincinnatus.12
According to tradition, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was called from the plough and appointed dictator when the Aequi surrounded the Roman army in 458 BCE (see e.g. Livy. 3.26–29). After defeating them he laid down his office and returned to his ploughing. His voluntary acts of becoming a soldier, leaving his ideal farm to wage war, as he was called from his oxen and plough, and then divesting himself of dictatorial power in order to return to his pastoral realm, were universally admired. Cincinnatus’s actions further connoted a frugal resistance to temptation and the superiority of peasants over city dwellers, of Country over Court. It was not so much Cincinnatus’s historical importance that made him a significant symbol in American minds (he is a rather indistinct figure in ancient historiography), but rather his combination