The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

the colonists (anticipating Henry James) subscribed to a notion of American innocence versus European experience. Like George Mason,⁹ they may have admired the British constitution but detested British corruption, and that was an argument for Americans to have a different kind of government.¹⁰ They would build a republic of virtue.

Republican Virtue

      In the eighteenth century there was a special understanding of disinterested republican virtue, the virtue of patriots who scorned corruption and championed the general good. In Britain it was represented by a “Country party,” whose members detested Walpole and were avid readers of Cato’s Letters and of Bolingbroke, and who stood in opposition to a “Court party” that was more comfortable with corruption. In France, republican virtue found its most striking expression in the paintings of Jefferson’s friend Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), where it reached repellant heights.

      Jefferson and David belonged to the same radical-chic set, the seedbed of revolution in a Paris where the line between art and politics was thin.¹¹ Just a few years after Jefferson returned from France, David would sign the death order for Louis XVI and would become a close political ally of the sea-green incorruptible Robespierre. Jefferson greatly admired The Oath of the Horatii when he was in Paris. “I do not feel an interest in any pencil but that of David,” he wrote.¹² It wasn’t simply the stunning tableaux that drew him to the artist, for both men shared Robespierre’s belief that “immorality is the basis of despotism, as virtue is the essence of a republic.”¹³ Both yearned for a reign of virtue clothed in classical republican garb, as seen in the painter’s subversive The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons.

      David took his inspiration from Livy’s account of how Lucius Junius Brutus established a Roman Republic by expelling the last king in 509 BC. The king, Tarquin the Proud, had outraged his subjects but was nevertheless supported by a class of courtiers who knew that “as long as there was a king, there was a person from whom they could get what they wanted, whether lawful or not.”¹⁴ That didn’t save him, however. After the revolt had succeeded and Brutus became the first leader of the Republic, he provided the supreme example of self-sacrifice and republican virtue by having two of his own sons executed for conspiring to restore the monarchy. David’s painting portrays the moment when the bodies are brought home. Brutus sits in the shadows, his back to his sons, his face stern and grim, the picture of republican self-sacrifice and a reproach to the weeping women of the family on his left. If the symbol of the frivolous ancien régime was the feminine salon, republican virtue was a distinctly masculine trait.

      The Country party and the ideal of republican virtue were well represented at the Philadelphia Convention, in delegates such as Roger Sherman and George Mason.¹⁵ These were the people to whom Gouverneur Morris appealed in his speeches on corruption. But Morris privately belonged to a Court party that scoffed at the idea of a special kind of republican virtue. Hamilton might also be counted a member of the Court party. So too can Madison, who in “Vices of the Political System of the United States” had argued that self-interest would blind voters to the common good: “Place three individuals in a situation wherein the interest of each depends on the voice of the others, and give to two of them an interest opposed to the rights of the third? Will the latter be secure?”¹⁶ Later, in Federalist 51, he famously expanded on the limits of republican virtue. Men are not angels, he said, but seekers of private gain, and government should channel self-interest in such a way that it serves the public good. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” so that the overweening pursuit of advantage by one group is checked by other groups in the competition for power.

      While the Country party had a stronger aversion to government corruption than did the Court party, all the Framers shared Madison’s skepticism about the innate goodness of the people. None would have agreed with Robespierre, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that social ills never stem from le peuple freely pursuing their own interest. “To be good, people have only to prefer their interests to that which is not in their interest,” wrote Robespierre. “To be good, the magistrate has only to sacrifice himself (s’immoler) to the people.”¹⁷ No one in Philadelphia would have spoken like that—not Madison, certainly not Hamilton or Morris, and not the Country party members either. As Hamilton observed, “the members most tenacious of republicanism . . . were as loud as any in declaiming against the vices of democracy.”¹⁸ Robespierre defended the jacquerie that burned down castles in the French Revolution, but the Framers took a different view. They had witnessed mob violence at home, with Shay’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts still a fresh memory, and they wanted none of it. Jefferson might perhaps have agreed with Robespierre about the innate goodness of the people, but happily he was in Paris and did not attend the Constitutional Convention.