a disinterested, agrarian, virtuous citizen, Cincinnatus epitomised the integrity that could sustain a republic. Frugality, agrarianism, patriotism and military fortitude, but mainly the marvellous surrender to civilian power and the lack of personal ambition, made him the perfect standard to apply to George Washington, as well as to a train of later Americans.
Even before the war had ended, juxtapositions of Washington and Cincinnatus commenced. Both military leaders were believed to have departed from the plough to save their countries from dire straits, and to have surrendered their power to civil authority, only to return to their pastoral farms. An Epistle from 1781 claimed that Washington, like Cincinnatus, rose ‘when of old, from his paternal farm/Rome bade her rigid Cincinnatus arm; Th’ illustrious peasant rushes to the field, Soon are the haughty Volsii taught to yield…His country sav’d, the solemn triumph o’er, He tills his native acres as before’ (Wharton 1781: 7). Such occasional references to the Cincinnatan image during the war were systematically elaborated once the fighting was over. After the Revolution, Washington performed multiple retirements: first in 1783 as commander of the Continental Army, followed by his return to the public eye in 1787 and his final retreat from the presidency in 1796 to Mount Vernon. These elaborate public acts were deliberate attempts on Washington’s behalf to promote this perceived relationship between his conduct and that of Cincinnatus.
Hence, contemporaries repeatedly addressed Washington as ‘like’, ‘the modern’, the ‘second’ and ‘the American’ Cincinnatus. Captain Josiah Dunham described in private correspondence how Washington ‘great, like CINCINATUS, returned to the plough’ (Schwartz 1986: 208). Characteristically, the Georgian William Pierce elaborated during the framing of the Federal Constitution, that Washington:
like Cincinnatus…returned to his farm perfectly contented with being only a plain citizen after enjoying the highest honor of the Confederacy, and now only seeks for the approbation of his country-men by being virtuous and useful. (Brookhiser 1996: 59–60)
Similarly, on his 56th birthday, the citizens of Wilmington, Delaware, drank a toast to ‘Farmer Washington – may he, like a second Cincinnatus, be called from the plow to rule a great people’ (Wright 1995: 161). Throughout Washington’s political career, the voluntary retirement, the withdrawal to rural life, the saving of one’s country and the suppression of personal wishes for the sake of the public good were represented as the shared virtues of the Roman and the American and were hailed as the noblest qualities of a republican citizen.
Washington’s Cincinnatan image became vastly popular in diverse genres, from patriotic poetry (Philip Freneau’s poem ‘Cincinnatus’, for instance, described the American general and Roman dictator as both retiring from war to their ‘sylvan shades’) to visual and plastic arts, such as paintings by Charles Wilson Peale and John Trumbull, showing Washington as Cincinnatus (unfortunately lost, although descriptions remain; see Kaminski and McCaughan, 1989: 33; Wills 1984: 13). The epitome of such artistic representations was Washington’s magisterial statue by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, now placed in the Richmond Capitol, a magnanimous example of the cultivation of the Cincinnatan symbol in America, in which the retiring president rests his arm on the Roman fasces, standing in front of his plough (Kammen 1978: 85).
A lasting effect of Washington’s enactment of a Cincinnatan role was the pattern of a formulaic posture of retirement for a whole generation of revolutionary-era leaders in which they ritualised the retreat to the countryside and their retirements into a Cincinnatan performance (Jones 1964: 246). The list of self-proclaimed Cincinnati consisted of great men, as well as of lesser figures, all but forgotten over the years (one example being Judge Henry Sanford’s retirement to his farm in New York; see Reinhold 1984: 161). Already in 1776, John Adams expressed his desire to ‘retreat like Cincinnatus … and farewell Politicks’, aware that ‘it seems the mode of becoming great is to retire’ (Richard 1994: 55; Ellis 2000: 123). Once retired, the second President was indeed compared with Cincinnatus, among other ancient figures (Richard 1994: 68). Thomas Jefferson kept idolsing ‘my family, my farms, and my books’ and never stopped furnishing and redesigning his remote Monticello retreat. In 1809, as his second presidential term came to its conclusion, he wrote, ‘never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power’ (Leuchtenburg 2000). Relieved of his duties, he spent his final years in stoic leisure at Monticello. John Jay, ‘the Cincinnatus of New York’ and the nation’s first Secretary of State, was preoccupied in his retreat with his own Roman virtue, while James Madison’s retirement to his Montpellier estate closely resembled Washington’s retreat to Mount Vernon and Jefferson’s withdrawal to Monticello (Reinhold 1984: 161). Many other lesser figures followed that Cincinnatan example.
5.7 Conclusion
Revolutionary Americans were absorbed with Rome. Throughout the Revolution they emulated Roman heroes and dreaded its villains. When the revolution was over they erected a federal city (Washington, DC) that epitomised in its architecture of white-marbled temples and in the political institutions that those edifices seated, namely Congress and Senate, a classical vision of government. Roman nomenclature went much further, however, as in the coming decades numerous cities, townships and crossroads all over the sprawling geography of the United States would resonate with names that evoked Americans’ aspirations to relive classical glory. Decades ago Bernard Bailyn believed that all these attempts amounted to ‘intellectual window dressing’, that early Americans were superficially employing their classical knowledge for rhetorical gain (Bailyn 1965: 21). In this instance, Bailyn could not have been more wrong. Revolutionaries may have not been interested in Roman political culture per se; but they were its most avid practitioners. Rome had such a powerful sway on the founding generation that we cannot properly understand the political choices and claims they made unless we realise that to them, in many ways, the world of the ancient Mediterranean was as vivid and recognisable as the world in which they were living; that classical heroes such as Cincinnatus and Cicero, and villains such as Catiline and Jugurtha, were meaningful and familiar figures. Indeed, in a world in which numerous Americans thought in terms of Roman narratives, styled themselves as toga-clad senators and acted out classical roles, it is possible to see how political actors habitually reflected upon and represented their experiences through Republican Rome. Rome was often the lens through which revolutionaries perceived the tumultuous happenings that they witnessed and provided them with a script to make sense out of their actions.
For an extended moment Republican Rome had a dazzling second life on western shores. The incarnation of a Roman-like American Republic surely had its distinct characteristics (not the least of which was the federalism that the founders incorporated). However, such modifications and alterations only underscore the vitality and adaptability of the long shadow that Rome and its political culture cast on western civilisation for millennia. Nevertheless, the decades following the Revolution witnessed the unleashing of the far-reaching democratisation and the aggressive free-for-all capitalism that would characterise nineteenth-century America. The corresponding and dramatic change in collective mores would inevitably erode the attachment to the aristocratic, slave-holding Roman Republic. The accelerating industrialisation, particularly in the north, and the rise of the ‘common man’ in the Jacksonian Age, made the once universally admired Rome seem irrelevant; other models, particularly the democracy of Athens, were now much more relevant for a growing number of Americans. This fascinating and important decline of aristocratic and hierarchical Rome and rise of democratic Athens in the American imagination is a significant theme in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century America (see especially Adams 2001; Richard 2009: 96–117). It is a story, however, for another Companion.
NOTES
1 1 Samuel Adams’s ‘Christian Sparta’ is the notable exception to this rule; see Winterer 2001: 73.
2 2 Virginia Gazette (Rind), 3 March 3 1768; For the influence of Plutarch in early America see Reinhold 1984: 250–264.
3 3