Happy Constitution Day 2024! It made it another year- here is a brief excursus in honor of the day.
When was the first Constitution Day? September 17, 1787 was when our Constitution was completed in Philadelphia. The framers of the document celebrated immediately after it was finished. Note: not all Founders (eg. Thomas Jefferson) are Framers, but all Framers (eg. James Madison) are Founders.
When did they first start calling the American Founders “Founders”? According to Jim Ceasar’s excellent article on the subject:
The credit for reintroducing this language [of “Founders”] belongs to the authors of the Federalist Papers, and above all to Madison. It was Madison who explicitly took up the theme of the lawgiver and began comparing America's Constitution writers to the seminal lawgivers of antiquity.
The longest comparison between the lawgivers of antiquity and the lawgivers in Philadelphia comes in Federalist 38:
To the People of the State of New York:
IT IS not a little remarkable that in every case reported by ancient history, in which government has been established with deliberation and consent, the task of framing it has not been committed to an assembly of men, but has been performed by some individual citizen of preeminent wisdom and approved integrity.
Minos, we learn, was the primitive founder of the government of Crete, as Zaleucus was of that of the Locrians. Theseus first, and after him Draco and Solon, instituted the government of Athens. Lycurgus was the lawgiver of Sparta. The foundation of the original government of Rome was laid by Romulus, and the work completed by two of his elective successors, Numa and Tullius Hostilius. On the abolition of royalty the consular administration was substituted by Brutus, who stepped forward with a project for such a reform, which, he alleged, had been prepared by Tullius Hostilius, and to which his address obtained the assent and ratification of the senate and people…
Read Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans to learn those references.
Whence could it have proceeded, that a people, jealous as the Greeks were of their liberty, should so far abandon the rules of caution as to place their destiny in the hands of a single citizen? Whence could it have proceeded, that the Athenians, a people who would not suffer an army to be commanded by fewer than ten generals, and who required no other proof of danger to their liberties than the illustrious merit of a fellow-citizen, should consider one illustrious citizen as a more eligible depositary of the fortunes of themselves and their posterity, than a select body of citizens, from whose common deliberations more wisdom, as well as more safety, might have been expected? These questions cannot be fully answered, without supposing that the fears of discord and disunion among a number of counsellors exceeded the apprehension of treachery or incapacity in a single individual…
James Madison’s main point is that America was blessed and fortunate to have had MANY “Founders,” not just ONE as the ancient governments did- presumably because there was not to great a fear of the Union breaking up. The “reflection and choice” just happens in one person’s head, rather than in a conversation involving many people’s heads. The Americans had enough strength in its union to pull this off, even during the articles of confederation era. This then, should be considered another one of the “improvements” in the science of politics over ancient political science discussed in Federalist 9.
How unique was America’s achievement; is Madison right that America was the first regime to have multiple “Founders” and not just one “Founder?” Here I will add a contribution of my own which I do not know has been commented on before.
Not to spoil Madison’s point, but Cicero in his Republic, writing around 51 BC, also claimed that ROME was the first regime to have multiple “Founders” and not just one “Founder” (Pierre Manent notes the Cicero claim but not the Federalist connection in Metamorphoses of the City). Cicero writes that:
[Cato] was wont to say, that the condition of our country was pre-eminent above all others for this cause. That among other people, individuals generally had respectively constituted the government by their laws and by their institutes, as Minos in Crete, Lycurgus in Lacedemon. At Athens, where the changes were frequent, at first Theseus, then Draco, then Solon, then Clisthenes; afterwards many others. Finally exhausted and prostrated, it had been upheld by that learned man Demetrius, of Phalera. But that the constitution of our republic was not the work of one, but of many; and had not been established in the life of one man, but during several generations and ages. For he said so powerful a mind had never existed; from which nothing had escaped; nor that all minds collected into one, could foresee so much at one time, as to comprehend all things without the aid of practice and time.
Note that James Madison in Federalist 38 denies that Rome had multiple founders. He admits that there were multiple founders in Rome- but they all happened ONE AT A TIME in a series: Romulus, Numa, Tullius Hostillius, then finally Brutus.
Madison steals something good from Cicero: the argument that multiple Founders has the advantage of common wisdom and the buildup of generations of tradition. Which Madison will take up again in Federalist 49- our friend Jim Ceasar’s favorite Federalist Paper.
So- Hail Columbia!
Interesting evidence of Madison being influenced by Cicero! If you ever pursue that, you'd have to establish that he had that part of the text--if memory serves, the (still lacuna-plagued) text of De Republica we have today wasn't available until the 1830s. Someone discovered it on the back of an Augustine manuscript.
No. 38 is one of the most fascinating numbers, but this is a place (the key instance is his novel "oppositional distinction" b/t "democracy" and "republic" in 14) where Madison's mixing of immediate rhetorical purpose with not-quite-fully-digested classical history results in a little myth about ancient politics. For both Athens and Rome had a mix of "multiple-heads"-founding and singular leaders in their earliest history, even if Athens oscillated more from one principle to the other. To put it another way, Athens had more moments where nearly all seemed to rest on a single individual--Solon, Cleisthenes, maybe Draco, and more in its middle period, Pericles--but the many-heads input was always in strong operation. Rome had these moments also, but made them more constitutionalized by occasional use of the office of dictator.
All of this is clear-enough to the attentive reader of Plutarch, who of course emphasizes individual impact by the very design of his Lives, but among the more contemporary books that establish it with respect to Athens is the rich (but also annoying and problematic) Democracy: A Life, by Paul Cartledge. It also can be deduced from Herodotus and Aristotle's Constitution of Athens.
The best discussions of the differences between Athens' and Rome's foundings, which I'm saying are not quite ones of many v. few founders, are probably to be found in the Pierre Manent Metamorphoses book you mention, and Plutarch's Politics by Hugh Liebert. The main thing is that Rome's pre-Republican development seems to have been out-of-step with that of almost all ancient cities, and that might have been the secret source of it being the one city capable of really stretching out its citizenship, i.e., of doing extended-republic stuff.