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In the face of current perplexity and debate about the nature of the republican tradition, this chapter recalls and more fully recovers the republican aspects of Cicero’s political philosophy. The creators of the American Republic, especially John Adams, and many others including contemporary scholars, have looked to Cicero as a major figure, if not the founder, of the republican tradition. Analysis of Cicero’s definition of res publica provides the basis for an interpretation that at its core is consent, not necessarily formal and explicit, implying liberty. To be fully human is to be free, and to be free is to be a consenting partner in a political community that is just and at liberty to set its own course. A dynamism toward equality coupled with the necessary wisdom and virtue and their implication of inequality are also essential to Cicero’s republicanism. These essentials are to inform institutions and practices. The practical wisdom in institutions includes the rule of law, indirect rather than direct popular government, and mixed government. Roman (and thus Ciceronian) republicanism can be differentiated in some respects from that very self-conscious and much-heralded form of republicanism that developed in the America of John Adams.
This chapter investigates the deaths of the South's greatest revolutionary-era leaders: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. While other men worked alongside these three Virginians, none played a longer or greater shaping role in the creation of the American Republic. As presidents, these three men led the federal government for twenty-four of its first twenty-eight years. They were not only revolutionary leaders; they were planter-patriarchs, too. Their deaths occurred in this distinctive national/regional/gentry context, which indelibly marked the stories recounted by witnesses to their last days. And those death narratives, in the telling and retelling, helped cement the historic reputation of these revolutionaries as southern gentlemen and American heroes. Despite nineteenth-century changes to the scripts of their deaths, it is clear that the resurrection these men desired was decidedly secular: to serve a political and historical purpose.
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