18
The Constitution’s Deep Roots
rived from the Latin constitutio, meaning a collection of laws or ordinances made by a Roman emperor. Among other terms, president and
federalism have roots in Roman history; and the Roman term Senate was
applied by the Framers of the American Constitution to the more select
house of the legislative branch of their federal government, although the
method of selecting senators in America was to be very different from
what it had been in Rome. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, the authors of
The Federalist, wrote in the name of Publius, a reference to Publius Valerius Publicola, the ancient Roman famous for his defense of the Roman
Republic.
Three important political concepts drawn by the Americans from the
Roman experience were the doctrines of republicanism, political virtue,
and checks and balances. Though theoretically a republic would be any
form of government other than a monarchy, it was generally understood
by Americans to mean a government in which the people were sovereign. In a small New England town they might rule directly, but on a
larger scale the people would have to rule indirectly, through their freely
chosen representatives. Advocacy of this form of government in the eighteenth century was a radical idea, and many European thinkers, having
grown accustomed to monarchy, looked upon republicanism as a foolish
and unworkable relic of the past. Republics might be suitable for a Greek
city-state or Swiss canton, but they were too unstable for governing
anything larger. The internal collapse of the Roman Republic under the
weight of corruption and disorder, resulting in tyranny and the eventual
destruction of the nation, seemed to prove the point. In fact, corruption
had subverted and toppled almost every republic that had ever existed.
American leaders nevertheless believed that republicanism offered the
only hope for preserving liberty, and that republicanism could successfully be revived if the mistakes of the past were understood and not repeated. This goal was within reach, they thought, if a republic could be
designed which encouraged public virtue, the animating principle of republican government, and discouraged corruption, the characteristic republican disease. Many of the books that Americans read—Charles Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Grandeur of the Romans and Their Decline,
James Harrington’s Oceana (an imaginary commonwealth), the writings
of Algernon Sidney, Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters and his translations