Almost two thousand years after the historical Cato sought refuge from Caesar on the coast of Tunisia, Washington likewise attempted to make clear to the men under his command that the suffering their countrymen had asked them to endure was grounded upon an essential, irrefutable, and righteous purpose. As published on the 27th of August, 1776, the missive in question explained to the soldiers of the Continental Army that,
The time is now near at hand which
must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether
they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and
farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of
wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of
unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this
army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave
resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to
conquer or die.
The context, granted,
was not quite the same as that of Cato’s cited exclamation. Addison’s hero was
trying to remind his wavering followers why it was they were all suffering out
there in the desert. Washington was trying to put a little steel into the
spines of a group of fighting men who had but recently been farmers and
laborers. Nevertheless, their core intentions would seem to align fairly
closely. Both men were attempting to allay suffering by appealing to the moral
sensibilities of the men under their command. Cato’s followers had already
suffered, and seemed to need reminding that they were fighting to uphold
something more important than they own comfort. And the soldiers under
Washington’s command were about to suffer, and seemed to need to be told that
what they were about to endure paled in comparison to what they hoped to achieve.
In either case, the essential message was the same: suffer knowingly. Suffer
righteously.
The quality of self-abnegation
implicit in such a request also seemed to be an impulse which Cato and
Washington shared. Both of them, it would seem fair to say, were perhaps a
little callous in the extent to which they asked the men under their respective
commands to gladly endure tremendous hardship, but they also both appeared to
hold themselves to a similar standard of personal behavior. On this subject in
particularly, Cato is admirably succinct. Having been informed, in Act 4, Scene
II, of the death of his younger son, Marcus, at the hands of the treacherous
Syphax, and having expressed a certain amount of envy at the idea that the
young man has died for his country, Addison’s hero then turns to his surviving
son, Portius, and delivers a very simple – if profound – maxim. “Behold thy
brother,” he says, “And remember, / Thy
life is not thy own when Rome demands it.” This, as much as anything else he
says across the length of Addison’s drama, would seem to sum up Cato’s personal
philosophy. Whatever his particular preferences might be, or the hopes he yet
harbors for his family, Cato is first and foremost a servant of Rome. Personal
glory does not figure into his thinking, nor professional success, nor even a
desire for private contentment. Indeed, he will willingly sacrifice all of
these things if he feels it is required. And while, at long last, he comes
around to recommending that his surviving son seek out a life of rural
obscurity in the event that Caesar ultimately triumphs – a life, one is given to
imagine, Cato might have hoped would be his own – Addison’s hero remains
steadfast to the very end in his dedication to self-sacrifice. “Lose not a
thought on me [,]” he thus assures his assembled followers, “I’m out of danger:
/ Heaven will not leave me in the victor’s hand. / Caesar shall never say, he
conquer’d Cato.” Even if he cannot rob the conqueror of his final victory, Cato
the Younger pledges to rob him of the chance to pardon an inveterate opponent.
It is a small thing, perhaps, in the face of the loss of Rome to tyranny. But
it is all that Cato has left to give, and he gives it willingly.
George Washington, it
is true, was never driven to contemplate suicide by way of rendering service to
the United States of America. As mentioned previously, this simply was not
something gentlemen in the late 18th century Anglo-American world
were expected to do. That being said, the sense of self-sacrifice displayed by
the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army – what he might have more
plainly referred to as his duty – appears very Cato-esque in the degree to
which it compelled the man to trade personal comfort for professional
obligation. Consider, for example, the opening passage of his First Inaugural
Address, delivered on the 30th of April, 1789. Washington, by this
time, was six years out from having resigned his commission as the commanding officer
of the Continental Army. The intervening period, to be sure, had not been an
unmitigated success. Crop yields at Mount Vernon were poor, a number of the
projects that Washington took on – mainly having to do with speculation in land
– proved unprofitable, and by the late 1780s he found himself saddled with
significant personal debt and a host of creditors who insisted on paying him in
increasingly depreciated wartime bills. All the same, he was reportedly quite
content to have returned to his homestead and was quite adamant in his hope
that he would never leave it again. To that end, while he was very sympathetic
to the aims of those who sought to organize a convention in Philadelphia in the
late spring of 1787 for the ostensible purpose of modifying the Articles of
Confederation, he initially turned down his appointment as a member of the
Virginia delegation. Indeed, it was only at the behest of friends and
colleagues like James Madison (1751-1836) and Henry Knox (1750-1806) that
Washington did ultimately agree to attend, and even then he made a point of
informing Virginia’s governor Edmund Randolph (1753-1813) that his acceptance
was given with the utmost reluctance. He knew – had been told – that his
presence would lend the gathering a degree of dignity and prestige and was
willing enough to sanction the efforts of its organizers. But he would have
preferred, as ever, to remain in Mount Vernon, and fully intended to do so once
the business of the convention was concluded.
Washington’s election
as the first President of the United States naturally disrupted these plans, as
his first address after having assumed said office very much makes note. It
opens, accordingly, with a declaration on the part of the first man to have
assumed what is now considered one of the most significant stations in the
history of the world that, “Among the vicissitudes
incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that
of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the
14th day of the present month.” In the hurly-burly of the 21st
century, when ego would seem to be a core aspect of the political mindset, this
would surely appear to be a deeply confusing – nay, worrying – statement. The Chief
Executive, with the power to veto federal legislation, issue pardons, and
command the armed forces is anxious that he has just been granted these powers?
Bizarre as this kind of attitude might now appear, it was nevertheless very
much in keeping with the late 18th century ideal conception of political
leadership, as well as with Washington’s personal brand as a leader. He does
not seek power, nor is he supposed to. But he grasps it as it is thrust into
his hands, and he reflects, with mixed emotions, upon the circumstances which
brought him to this place. “On the one hand,” Washington accordingly notes,
I was summoned by my Country, whose
voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had
chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an
immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years--a retreat which was
rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of
habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual
waste committed on it by time.
With this first
sentence, the newly inaugurated president is essentially doing two things.
First, by saying, “I was summoned by my country,” he is drawing attention to
the fact that he did, indeed, feel compelled to accept his election as President.
He was nominated, he won, and he was sworn in, and now he is giving this
address. In the end, obviously, his sense of duty won out.
But then Washington goes on to explain that this is not what he would have preferred. After many years of service in Virginia’s colonial militia and the Continental Army, he had come to look very fondly on the notion of being permitted to retire. The degree to which Washington feels suitably fatigued by his experiences is made clear when he notes that his planned retreat to Mount Vernon, “Was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time.” By his own admission, it would seem that the years spent on campaign have taken their toll. Having been nearly killed on any number of occasions, suffered through cold and starvation at Valley Forge, and spent many days in the saddle on half-rations during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, Washington is quite simply very tired, and would like nothing more than to be allowed to spend the rest of his days in peace. His presence in New York City in April of 1789 was the plainest evidence imaginable that he was willing to put off this desire if called upon by his countrymen. But not, it would seem, without some minor degree of reluctance.
There was more to Washington’s sense of anxiety than just disappointment, however. As it turned out, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army was also more than a little insecure as to his credentials for the office of President. “On the other hand,” he thus explained,
The magnitude and difficulty of the
trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in
the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his
qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting
inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil
administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.
It would now seem a
terribly charming thing for a leader so widely acclaimed by their countrymen to
protest being appointed to a position of leadership by claiming that they were
possessed of “inferior endowments.” But such was Washington’s character, though
he had already led the Continental Army to victory in the late Revolutionary
War. Not only had this feat entailed defeating one of the most well-trained and
battled-hardened armies in the 18th century world, but it had also
required the Commander-in-Chief to engage in constant wrangling with Congress
and the various states in order to secure much-needed supplies and recruits.
Could Washington have been playing up his supposed inadequacies so as to make
himself appear humble? Possibly, though his demeanor, as recorded, almost
always tended towards sincerity. More likely – contrary evidence notwithstanding
– the man simply did not think much of either his abilities or his
accomplishments. He had suffered a number of memorable defeats in the opening
stages of the Revolutionary War, after all. And he had nearly been replaced as
Commander-in-Chief when the American cause seemed very nearly lost. He knew the
taste of failure, in short, and was doubtless acutely aware that the stakes he
was being asked to accept were as high as any he had ever personally
encountered. What if he failed to do justice to the office of President? What
if he was unable to make good on the trust that others kept insisting that they
invest in his leadership? Anyone might be forgiven for turning down such an
offer. And yet, though he thought himself acutely deficient, Washington did
not. He wrung his hands, and gave voice to his doubts, and all but told his
countrymen that they had made a mistake. But he did all of this in the context
of accepting the duty that had been thrust upon him yet again. Cato, he surely
told himself, would have done nothing less.
The sense of duty with which both
Cato and Washington took on their respective responsibilities, it should be
noted, was distinctly lacking in personal ambition. Indeed, Cato makes a point
of explicitly impugning the very concept in Act 4, Scene II. Having been driven
to something very near despair upon the death of his son, Marcus, Addison’s
hero thus bitterly observes, “The Roman Empire, fall’n! Oh, cursed ambition! /
Fall’n into Caesar’s hands! Our great forefathers / Had left him nought to
conquer but his country.” Not only, it seems, is Cato disgusted by the covetous
impulse which has seemingly driven Caesar to slaughter so many of his
countrymen, but he appears also to place some degree of blame upon previous
generations of Roman statesman and generals whose constant conquests created a
class of rapacious solider-politicians for whom military glory was an end in
itself. As for Cato, one is given to imagine that his ideal reward for services
rendered to the state conforms rather closely to the lifestyle he urges Portius
to pursue in the aforementioned scene. “Retire betimes [,]” he exhorts his son,
To thy paternal seat, the Sabine
field;
[…]
In
humble virtues, and a rural life;
There
live retired, pray for the peace of Rome;
Content thyself to be obscurely good.
When vice
prevails, and impious men bear sway,
The post
of honour is a private station.
Cato cannot embrace this life himself, of course. Caesar’s actions have
made such an escape impossible. But the readiness with which he offers the
cited description to Portius seems to suggest that this does represent his
ideal form of retirement. As the fabled Cincinnatus (519-430 BC) relinquished
the dictatorial power thrust into his hands in a moment of crisis and returned
to a life of rural toil, so, too, does Addison’s hero believe it proper to
forgo ambition once service to the state had been rendered and embrace the
peaceful anonymity of the countryside.
George Washington, of
course, had been compared to the aforementioned Roman statesman Cincinnatus by
certain of his countrymen from almost the moment he resigned his commission as
Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. Not only did it appear as though
the most powerful and most popular man in all of America has no personal
interest in either power or popularity, but his responses thereafter to the petitions
of his fellow citizens that he once more play a role in national affairs also
made it abundantly clear that a quiet life in the country was really all that
he desired. He made this claim, as aforementioned, when he was invited to
participate in the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. He made it again, in 1789,
by way of the preamble to his First Inaugural Address as President. And in
1796, after having served two terms in office and being very much in a position
to serve as many more as he liked – despite the marked turmoil of the second –
he announced his long-awaited retirement in just the same terms. “I anticipate,” he said, as part of his closing remarks on the
occasion in question,
With pleasing expectation that
retreat, in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment
of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good
laws under a free government, the ever favorite object of my heart [.]
Not only was the act itself of tremendous significance for the nascent American republic, but the manner in which Washington chose to express himself set a powerful precedent for those who would follow in his stead.
There was to be no emeritus position for the first President of the United States upon retirement, no sinecure from which he would continue to exercise an influence over domestic affairs. Washington was going to leave office, go home to Virginia, and live out the rest of his life amidst his “fellow-citizens,” drawing no more advantage from his actions while in office than anyone might derive from the “good laws” and “free government” which he had endeavored to promote and preserve. This was all that the former Commander-in-Chief wanted or expected, and all that his successors should have desired for themselves in turn. Practically speaking, of course, it wasn’t exactly an ascetic life that Washington sought. Between his plantation at Mount Vernon and his speculation in land, he was personally one of the richest men in the whole of the American republic. And lest it be forgotten, ancient Roman Senators, like Cato the Younger, were uniformly men of wealth and privilege who tended to possess large ancestral estates in the Italian countryside. Neither man, in short, would have to face poverty upon handing over the powers of their office. But asceticism was never the point. Their wealth, such as it was, was their own. Maybe – read, absolutely – they owed it in large part to inheritance or slave labor, but they absolutely did not derive it from political advantage. There was the duty they owed to their fellow citizens to make use of their talents for the good of the community as a whole, and there was the duty they owed to themselves to see to their own personal good in their own personal time. The two were not supposed to meet. Indeed, they were supposed to be kept as far away as possible. This, in essence, is what Cato attempted to sell to Portius, and what Washington embraced as his guiding intention.
Naturally, given his status as a
tragic hero, Cato is not destined to live out his final days in rural repose.
On the contrary, his life comes to an end before the final lines of the drama
in question are spoken. Desirous of robbing Caesar of the privilege of
pardoning his enemy, and having assured himself – with the help of Plato – that
his immortal soul has nothing to fear from the death his physical body, Cato
plunges a sword into his own breast and delivers a few parting assurances to
his gathered family and friends before finally succumbing at the very end of
Act 5, Scene I. Among these, it bears noting, is an expression of humility that
is made all the more touching by the context in which it is delivered. Cato is
dying, the life ebbing from his body with every second that passes. His
surviving children are near at hand. His friend and confidante, Lucius, is
present. There is nothing more that can be done, nothing more to say that will
alter the effect that the life of Cato has exerted upon the world. And yet, as
the light fades from his eyes, Addison’s hero finds it in himself to remark, “Oh, ye powers, that search / The heart of
man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, / If I have done amiss, impute it not— /
The best may err [.]” Broadly speaking, this is not a particularly uncommon
sentiment to hear from someone who is literally on their deathbed. Imminent
demise often seems to have a clarifying effect on one’s perspective, drawing
into focus the errors that in life had been obscured by ego and pretense. But
Cato would seem to have very little about which he should be sorry. Addison
never depicts him as anything less than superhumanly virtuous. Indeed, he is
regularly spoken of as an object of adoration amongst his children and his
colleagues. And yet, like a pious Calvinist, he remains resistant to pride to
the very moment of his death, utterly dismisses the notion that he has lived
well and may rest well, and uses the very last jot of energy left in his body
to beg forgiveness for any errors he might have unknowingly committed. What
more can be asked of anyone? By what surer means could Addison’s hero have
demonstrated that he truly was the best of men?
George Washington most
assuredly would not have made it his life’s ambition to be thought of by kin
and countrymen as the better of them all. Constitutionally speaking, he was too
humble to imagine himself capable of summiting such a peak. Chalk it up to
personality, manners, or some combination of both. All the same, he certainly
seemed inclined to live in a Cato-like fashion. That is to say, he always
seemed inclined to try to be as virtuous as he could manage, and as humble, and
as devoted to the service of his country. To that end, as he closed out the
address intended to announce his pending retirement at the end of his second
term as President, Washington evinced a typically Cato-esque attitude. “Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration,” he wrote,
I am unconscious of intentional
error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable
that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently
beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I
shall also carry with me the hope, that my Country will never cease to view
them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to
its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be
consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.
Though Washington
was not dying as he penned these words, his demise was little more than three
years in the future. This was the last time he would speak to the American
people in any official capacity, and he seemed appropriately motivated to beg
their indulgence. Ostensibly speaking, this would seem an entirely unnecessary
gesture. Notwithstanding the tumult which accompanied the debate on the Jay
Treaty (1795), his countrymen never seemed to feel less than an ardent sense of
devotion towards the man who they believed had given his all to secure their
collective liberty. In spite of his consistent popularity, however, Washington
evidently remained convinced that, owing to, “The faults of incompetent
abilities[,]” he had quite probably erred in some manner or other over the
course of his term in office.
In consequence, and very humbly
begging the pardon of his fellow citizens, Washington asked both that his
faults be looked upon as kindly as was possible, and that “the Almighty” do
whatever was in his power to lessen the ill effects which might have been
caused by the same. As with Addison’s interpretation of Cato, the degree to
which the first President of the United States appeared wholly resistant to the
concept of pride is really quite striking. Most public servants, speaking from
the perspective of the early 21st century, try to conclude their
professional careers by talking up their accomplishments as a way of shaping
public memory. Granted, some amount of humility may be necessary so as not to
seem unpardonably arrogant, but the general thrust of a parting speech is
almost always closer to, “I’m proud of what I did,” than, “Please forgive me
for not doing more.” The latter, however, more closely aligns with the mood of
Washington’s final farewell. Like Cato at the close of the drama that bears his
name, he had served his countrymen for many years and in many different capacities
and had finally come to the end of his life as a public figure. And while,
unlike Cato, he was not actually dying, he addressed himself to his fellow
citizens very much as though he was. “I know I am imperfect,” he essentially
said, “And while I always tried to do my best, I am sure that I sometimes came
up short. Please forgive me if you can and look upon me kindly in the future.”
Truly, for a man of Washington’s fame as of 1796, this was a remarkable way to
end a career. Not only was it so like the last moments of Cato to apologize for
errors which no one else seemed inclined to point out, but Washington even gave
voice to a very similar sense of peace when it came to the notion that he would
shortly be parted from the world of the living. It was his hope, he wrote,
that, “The faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as
myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.” Washington may not have had the
assistance of Plato in arriving at this attitude of equanimity, but it seems
far from unlikely that he took some solace from the example of Addison’s Cato.
He was a man of faith, of course, and had every reason to take comfort in the
idea that his soul would yet endure. But the fact that the hero of one of his
favorite plays had met death in a mood of stoic calm surely did its part to
much the same effect.
Indeed, it would seem likely that
Addison’s Cato had a similar effect on the Revolutionary Generation as a
whole to that which it arguably exerted upon the most celebrated member
thereof. Simply reading Cato did not transform the fourth son of a moderately
successful Virginia planter into George Washington, Father of His Country.
There were a great many more factors at work in shaping the man who would
become the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and the first President
of the United States – from his upbringing to his faith, his military experiences,
his relationship with his wife, his friendships, and the particulars of his
personality – than the morals and the messaging of this one play he happened to
like. Just so, while it would seem fair enough to say that Cato was a significant
piece of literature to the members of the Founding Generation, and that it may
even have served to inspire some of the members thereof to hold fast to their convictions
more firmly than they might have otherwise, it would simply not be accurate to
claim that Addison’s drama was a particularly important factor in either
shaping or instigating the revolutionary American struggle. Perhaps Washington
was inspired by Addison’s titular hero and sought to model his behavior on that
of Cato as near as he could manage. And perhaps a number of the Founders took
encouragement from the selfsame hero’s unshakable sense of resolve whenever
they found themselves contemplating the sheer magnitude of the threat that they
and their country daily faced. But inspiration and encouragement are not the
same as causation. The American Revolution was not the product of Cato’s
popularity in the Thirteen Colonies. Rather, the same factors that brought
about the Revolution doubtless inclined many of those residing in British
America to regard Addison’s most famous drama as an expression of moral reassurance.
The notion that Cato helped
to bolster the American revolutionaries in their struggle against the British Parliament
and the British Crown is made all the more fascinating when one recalls that it
was written originally with a British audience in mind. Joseph Addison never
intended his classical drama to speak to anything more than the specific political
context in which he put pen to paper in the first place. He was a Whig, he supported
the Hanoverian Succession, he feared the Tories were likely to invite the Stuarts
to retake the throne, he wrote a play which he hoped would inspire his fellow Whigs
to offer resistance. Subsequent generations, to be sure, expanded its meaning somewhat
to encapsulate a more general celebration of British constitutionalism as
defined by the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), but Cato
remained a steadfastly British thing. It was written by a British playwright,
it championed British values, and it was intended for British audiences. The
fact that many of the most prominent American members and supporters of the Continental
Congress likewise embraced Cato as something which spoke to their own
values and lent significance to their own struggles would accordingly appear to
reinforce what has long been a common affirmation in these pages since the
first of them was published some seven years ago. The membership of the
Founding Generation of the United States of America was able to identify so
closely with a piece of British political literature because they did not
consider themselves – at the Revolution’s outset, at least – to be anything
other than British at heart.
This changed, of course, as the
Revolution went on. American hopes for reconciliation diminished, the strategic
significance of independence became apparent, and a sense of “Americanness” began
the process of finally and fatefully diverging from existing notions of what it
meant to be British. The accompanying loss of affinity on the part of the
American revolutionaries for British culture and British values, however, did
not necessarily spell the end of Cato’s American popularity. It was true
that by the end of the year 1776, the supporters of the Continental Congress could
no longer claim – nor indeed attempted to claim – that they were fighting simply
to assert their rights as British citizens. The Declaration of Independence had
permanently severed ties between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the nascent
American republic, and it was now entirely up to the citizens of the former to
decide from where their rights were derived and how they might best be defined
and protected by the law. This formal separation, however, did not necessarily
entail the complete upending of the existing hierarchy of American social, political,
and philosophical values. The Revolution, at its heart, was still about
asserting the primacy of a set of convictions that had largely been defined by
prior generations of British Whig statesman and theorists. Representative
government, representative taxation, limited executive authority, the right of
due process; all of these principles had been articulated and established by
and within the British parliamentary system. And while it may no longer have seemed
possible by the summer of 1776 for the sitting British government and the
supporters of the Continental Congress to use these concepts as a common ground
for reconciliation, that didn’t mean they suddenly ceased to be important to
the American revolutionaries and their struggle.
On the contrary, the values
themselves for which the supporters of Congress were fighting seemed to become
even more important once they were finally and irrevocably severed from all
association with Great Britain and its government. No longer concerned with appealing
to some shared sense of philosophical conviction as a means of repairing an unwanted
breach, the American revolutionaries instead seemed to take it upon themselves
to prove to their British counterparts that the former actually understood them
more thoroughly than the latter. “Clearly,” the supporters of Congress effectively
concluded, “We understand the rights of Englishmen better than the English.
Well, let’s just show them how much better.” This attitude, in a roundabout
way, is where the significance of something like Cato comes in again. As
written by Addison, Cato, a Tragedy was originally intended to speak to
and comment upon the political crisis then unfolding in early 18th
century Britain concerning the Act of Settlement and the pending Hanoverian
Succession. As discussed at length in this present series, however, that didn’t
mean there weren’t any number of aspects for a late 18th century
American audience to grab hold of as being particularly representative of their
own particular trials and tribulations. Indeed, there were arguably a number of
ways in which Cato seemed to align more closely with the American revolutionary
struggle of the 1770s and 1780s than it did with the Whig/Tory conflicts of the
1700s and 1710s.
The Whigs, after all, had no Cato figure
around which to rally. The Americans had Washington. And there was no foreign prince
attached to the early 18th century Whigs whose loyalty was the
product of his love and respect for Whig values and Whig philosophy. But the
Americans did have Lafayette. Even the context of the American Revolution more closely
matched that which Addison described. The Whigs and the Tories had not come to
blows in 1712 over their differing views on who should succeed to the British Crown,
and nor would they upon the death of Queen Anne in 1715. But the supporters of
Congress were at war with Parliament and the Crown. The revolutionaries were vastly
outnumbered and under-resourced, suffered betrayal in their ranks, and often
seemed to teeter on the precipice of defeat. Without making any claims as to
the supernatural or fantastical, it would indeed have seemed as though Addison had
unknowingly predicted the wrong civil war. Writing in 1712, he appeared to
believe that some manner of conflict between Whiggism and Toryism was quite
probably in the offing and was inclined to help prevent the worst outcome for
the former. But while he may have been wrong in the immediate, he was right in
the end. It may not have been the British
Whigs whose beliefs were threatened, and it may not have been the Hanoverian
Succession that served as the catalyst for a civil war, but there would,
indeed, come a time not long in the future when the values which underpinned 18th
century British constitutionalism would be threatened by the appeal of order
joined with force. And when it did come, those whose liberties were at stake
would cleave to Addison’s vision of stoic self-sacrifice as avidly as his
fellow Whigs had done some six decades prior. It may not have moved them to act
as they did on its own, but Cato, a Tragedy doubtless served as a source
of comfort and encouragement to the American revolutionaries who read it, while
also functioning as a potent reminder that theirs was a struggle whose
significance stretched far beyond their immediate circumstances.
That’s how I see it, at any rate. You?
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