From Rome to Philadelphia: Protecting a Nation from the Fate of Lucretia

During the summer of 1787, the member states of the United States of America sent delegates to Philadelphia, hoping that in this new convention, they could right the errors made in the construction of the Articles of Confederation. The nation was in an economic depression that had not ended with the peace signed in 1783, as many had expected. On the contrary, our currency was worthless, our borders were porous, our cargo was in jeopardy on the high seas, and our veterans were destitute at home. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention were tasked with fixing the mess.

There was no question that at least some improvement upon the Articles of Confederation would be needed, enough at least to render our borders secure, our currency stable, our credit respected, and our treasury capable of paying its debts to its employees, its current and former servicemen, and its creditors.

Of the 70 delegates authorized to go to Philadelphia, only 57 actually made it and stayed long enough to impact the final document. With consideration balanced between contemporary politics and the lessons of history, they discussed and debated for months. They designed a better legislature (one that would balance the desires of the states with the mood of the individual voters)… they limited the powers of government (enumerating specific powers with the instruction that no future government could exceed those powers without an amendment)… they did everything they could think of to ensure that this new government existed to secure the rights of the people, and to ensure that it would never be the instrument of abuse itself.

Primary among these challenges was how to create the new office of President. All present knew that we would need one, but all knew too that this office held the greatest danger. If abuse would come, it would likely emanate from this office.

Technically, the United States already had a presidency; we’d had one all along. The Continental Congress had elected a president, and the Articles retained the same structure. Fine, thoughtful patriots, from Peyton Randolph and John Hancock through Arthur St Clair and Cyrus Griffin, fourteen in all, had held the title since 1774, but all delegates knew that this was more of a committee chairman, less of a head of state, than the nation really needed.

But how far to veer toward one side or the other, that was the question. Could a republic survive with a true head of state? Or would it eventually cease to be a republic? Could our nation empower the office with enough authority to be effective, while binding it tightly enough to keep it from growing imperial in demeanor and tyrannical in practice?

We had already tried erring on the side of weakness, after all, and we got a permanent economic depression as a result. The delegates knew that the nation needed a new office, but were terrified of going too far.

Gouverneur Morris of New York (though representing Pennsylvania that year), warned that if they got it wrong, the president could become “the despot of America,” and put it this way:

“It is the most difficult of all rightly to balance the executive. Make him too weak: the legislature will usurp his powers. Make him too strong: he will usurp on the legislature.”

The delegates had a recent (heck, a current!) example, a visual aid to show the importance of limiting the office. The Britain they had recently fled was ostensibly a constitutional monarchy, a republic with a heavily limited hereditary king for its head of state. How well had that worked out for them?

There had been a Magna Carta in place for five and a half centuries, and plenty of additional declarations of rights since then. Parliament was bicameral, suffrage was carefully limited, and the prime minister held the power of the purse. And yet… the delegates had seen how an ambitious king could simply utilize corruption to win over enough members of Parliament to give the king virtual control of Parliament. In the days of the third Hanoverian, King George III, Parliament was usually little more than his own personal rubber stamp. The delegates at Philadelphia were committed to eliminate any risk of that!

Fortunately, the delegates had historians among them… thoughtful men like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson. They had done their homework, and as they debated, they pondered how every prior republic had dealt with the question, analyzed it, and tried to find why those societies had failed to adequately control their heads of state.

Switzerland, Holland, England, the city-states of Italy and Germany… whether one admitted it or not, whether the king proclaimed himself unlimited (as in France), or limited (as in England), the fact seemed to be that kings are only limited by their own willingness to be limited, not by any document or oath sworn before God and man at the coronation. If a king wanted to be absolute, he always seemed to be able to find a way to get there. And this is what the Framers needed to guard against.

They looked back to the Roman empire. Why did the caesars refuse to be called “king” when that’s what they were in all but name? Why was the Roman Republic’s philosophical hatred of kings so great that even an utterly unlimited military dictator feared being called a king? Perhaps there would be a lesson here, one that the Framers could study and weave into the fabric of the new government.

2300 years back they reached, to the first great nation with a ban on hereditary monarchy. 23 centuries and more, to the year 510 BC, and the day when the people of Rome threw off the rule of the Etruscan kings once and for all.

While all of us today are familiar with the great Roman Republic and with the Roman Empire that followed, modern history classes don’t tend to spend more than a moment on the early days of Rome, but the Framers knew its history, a history that informed them of the risks of monarchy better even than their own recent experience with England.

Dionysius, Ovid, and others told the tale, but the most important telling was in Livy’s history. It was the best known story about early Rome (with the possible exception of the legend of Romulus and Remus being nursed by a wolf… but that was only a legend)… and it inspired countless paintings during the Renaissance and later, not to mention a memorable telling by William Shakespeare. Suffice to say that when the Framers thought about the history of republics, the tale of Lucretia was sure to be on their mind.

From the days of Romulus (yes, there was indeed a historical Romulus, however fictional some of the legends may be) until the 6th century B.C., Rome was a kingdom. Somewhere along the way, the defeated Etruscans managed to regain the crown, and by the 500s B.C. there was a string of Etruscan kings known as the Tarquins. They weren’t all bad, but the last one certainly was.

When the corrupt Tarquinius Superbus was king of the Romans, his son Sextus Tarquinius gained entrance to the home of Lucretia, an honorable noblewoman, to commit rape. When she refused to submit willingly, he told her that if she fought, he would kill her afterward and leave her body alongside that of a slave so that all would think she had dishonored her family with an affair with a servant. Weighing the choices, being concerned first and foremost for the honor of her family rather than her own life, she submitted…

…and then in the morning, she summoned her family together, told them what happened, made them promise to avenge her honor… and quickly drew a dagger and killed herself!

Her relatives swore an oath on the bloody dagger, brought her body to the Forum for a public funeral, and immediately stirred up the people of Rome to respond to the corrupt royal family. The public agreed with unanimity, shouting Down With Kings, and vowed to establish a Republic then and there, never to allow a king to rule over Rome again.

If this sounds at all familiar, it certainly should. The public viewing of the fresh corpse of Julius Caesar in the Roman Forum, the speech by Marc Antony, and the rousing of the people to revolution owed a great deal to these events of five centuries before.

Why did Senators Cassius, Brutus, and the rest of the conspirators kill Julius Caesar in the first place? Because, they alleged, he was trying to be a king. How deeply ingrained it was in the Roman psyche that no man may EVER be a king over the Romans again. A military dictator, sure. A First Consul or Triumvirate with all the powers the state may command, fine. But never a king!

The events of Lucretia’s demise did not horrify the public only for her death (the suicide she considered necessary to preserve the family’s honor). It horrified them because the circumstances of the attack crystallized several other dangers of a hereditary monarch:

1) The irresponsibility of the apparatchiks: It wasn’t the king who attacked her, but his son, the prince. A king, the Romans realized, might be surrounded by cronies who shared in his power. If you get a dictator, that’s just one dictator, but if you get a king, you might get endless family and friends, geometrically multiplying the corruption and abuse.

2) The power of the king to control the message: It wasn’t just Sextus’ attack that terrified Lucretia and offended the Roman people, it was his threat that if she didn’t submit willingly, he had the power to rape her, kill her, and destroy her reputation in death! A king might command soldiers, secret police, the jails… a king might always be able to recreate the story, to control the narrative so that the public is impotent to even get the truth out.

3) The corruption of inherited power: Legend has it that the first kings were decent; only the later kings grew corrupt and abusive. Only the later kings had issue that was so drunk on their power that they would dishonor and kill their free and law-abiding subjects. The Romans attached this risk to heredity in their minds, and vowed to replace the idea of inherited titles with elected ones. Elections might not be perfect, but at least they could protect the public from having a known tyrant-to-be inheriting a crown.

The Romans did not always remember all these lessons; if they had, they might have stood up to several dictators who predated Julius Caesar in the days of the Republic. But one thing stuck with them: the rule that there must never again be a king.

In 1787, our Framers wanted to ensure that there would never be a king here either… but they also recognized the importance of controlling the highest office so that he might never become “a king in all but name” either.

The Framers knew that every republic in history had eventually run into problems. Eventually the public realizes they can vote themselves their neighbors’ wealth… eventually the political class consolidates its power and disregards the public’s rights. Eventually all nations end up with a king.

But the Framers saw their job as writing a rulebook that would postpone those eventualities as long as possible. They prayed that if they did it right, they might empower the nation to resist the descent into oligarchy by a few centuries. They built in every precaution they could.

Eligibility: While every other officeholder under the Constitution just had to be a citizen – congressmen and justices, for example, could be recently nationalized foreigners – the president must be a natural born citizen (defined in those days as being born in-country to both citizen parents), aged at least 35 years old. They did this in the hope of reducing the chance of foreign influence, the chance that a father or mother still linked to the old country might raise a future president with divided loyalties. Election: While Representatives were to be directly elected by the public, and Senators were to be selected by the state legislatures, the President was to be elected by an Electoral College, a body of state-appointed electors numbered with a weighting system that balanced small states with big states, ensuring that presidents must appeal to all regions and all constituencies, in order to win election. In this age of rampant vote fraud, we have even discovered a previously unnoticed benefit of the Electoral College: no matter how many votes a corrupt party steals, one state’s vote fraud cannot spill over to have an effect on another state. (if the Electoral College were ever eliminated, the large Democrat states could win every presidential election by inflating the popular vote – hence their current effort to do just that). Restrictions: The Framers wanted there to be “energy in the Executive” – to use Publius’ term. They wanted the President to have the power to act decisively on behalf of the nation, in matters where a head of state must. But still they knew that this freedom would be the greatest risk to our liberty, so they put this freedom in a box, or, in many little boxes. Freedom to appoint ambassadors and department heads, but only with the advice and consent of the Senate. Freedom to enforce the laws, but only with staff paid for with money allocated by Congress. Freedom to manage foreign policy, but unable to declare war without Congress. Article Two was written as a set of boundaries, allowing the President (hopefully) enough authority to do his job, while restraining expansion of that authority by a system of checks and balances. Impeachment: The Framers knew that a President had the potential to be the most independent of the rest of government. Once elected, and especially once a lame duck, a President could conceivably push his limits. The soldiers reported to him. The port officials and sailors reported to him. They had to make him fear removal somehow, and impeachment – the British system for Parliamentary removal of corrupt ministers – seemed the way to go. Sadly, impeachment was politicized too much during the Jefferson administration, so it never really became the necessary instrument of restraint that it was meant to be. But still remember, this was the Framers’ plan: that a President who went too far would be impeached and removed by Congress. The Presidency Today

Our nation has tragically lost a great deal of the liberty bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers. Ever since the error of the 17th Amendment, which forever upset the careful balance the Framers designed, our nation’s capital has been expanding its share of the nation’s attention and power, and our Presidents have been enlarging their spheres of influence.

The President today can take the slightest authority ever granted by Congress, and stretch it into ways never dreamed by philosopher or politician. A President can make a mockery of science by claiming that the fiction of global warming poses a greater threat than a foreign army. He can make a mockery of economics by claiming that a printing press can create wealth better than private enterprise. He can make a mockery of our culture by claiming that our nation is more muslim than Christian. He can make a mockery of our very limited government, by encroaching on the curricula taught by local schools, by the foods sold in local restaurants, and the criminal justice system enforced by local police.

But even as this current Resident of the White House can violate his oath of office and the charter of his election with impunity, the history of that office, and the traditions of our great nation, must not be forgotten.

On Presidents’ Day, we can still be proud of the many who held office before it was corrupted, and be prouder still of the great legacy so thoughtfully left to us by our Founding Fathers.

Because we will have chances to undo the damage, and return to the brilliant system we were given, in presidential elections to come. Every four years we have another chance. If these past years have told us anything, it is that we must never squander that chance again.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance manager. A former minor Republican party volunteer and conservative activist, he has now been a recovering politician for seventeen years (but, like any addiction, you’re never really cured).

Just for the record, there is of course no actual “Presidents’ Day”… it’s just handy, as the Monday that falls between Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthdays. But it’s in the popular culture, so it’s worth writing about!

For further study on the nature of the presidency, I recommend the great biographies of George Washington by Richard Brookhiser, Joseph Ellis, Paul Johnson, and Willard Sterne Randall. For further study on the Constitutional Convention, I recommend “The Summer of 1787” by David O. Stewart.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo, or on his own site at www.JohnFDiLeo.com.

” But one thing stuck with them: the rule that there must never again be a king.”

Um, it didn’t really stick that great, the future dictators/Emperors just kept the trappings of the republic.

– the president must be a natural born citizen (defined in those days as being born in-country to both citizen parents),

Smart fellers, those Founding Fathers...

Constitutional Eligibility

I’d say they were brilliant. They sure had it right.

I suspect thousands of years after the U. S. has fallen, there still won’t be a nation like it.

They’ll all be worse. The world will crumble after our nation does.

Smart fellers, those Founding Fathers...

Sure were and they would be appalled at what the country is today especially when some speak about how the constitution is so outdated.

I’m afraid that we have long passed the stage where a peaceful political solution is realistic. We can slowly descend into a very dark totalitarian police state, we could have a civil war, or we could have a coup.
A military coup would be the best of several bad alternatives.

Hope you’re right. I don’t see the wide open territory and circumstances needed to bring forth another United States, one that is a global source for strength, a philanthropist of sorts, and a fairly even handed player.

I probably wouldn’t go full tilt on a Middle East replacement due to the U. S. Farmlands.

As for Australia, it may be a reasoned consideration. Again I would want to know if it had vast farmlands and the rain and climate to sustain world class food development.

We were fortunate to obtain the land we did. I think it’s quite important for self-preservation as well as to curry favor with other nations who need help.

I’m looking at the world after a technological breakthrough, the ability to cheaply produce vast quantities of cheap fresh water from saline.

A fertile Sahara, Gobi, Namib, Outback and ?.

NBC defined in these days as being “born in-country to both citizen parents” by the members of SR 511 committee to vet McCain: the usurper, Hillary, Leahy, McCaskill (who for years has wanted the requirement deleted from the requirements), Coburn, Webb and Homeland Security Chertoff to consult. Of course, by the time it got to the Senate, they conveniently left out that particular part but Leahy had “the definition” and discussion of it all on his site at one time.

I too have a thought that desalinization could change the world.

Then I look at Los Angeles, a place in dire need of fresh water and too stupid to build one plant, and I wonder about mankind.

Have we lost the will to survive? Even basic instinct would cause you to develop desalinization, and yet...

If man can get up the nerve and drive to do it, you’re absolutely right IMO.

Israel gets somewhere between 33 and 50% of their water from the Mediterranean.

I’ll bet there isn’t 5% of the world’s populace that has contemplated desert reclamation like you have. I have considered it. With everything that goes on these days, it does take a back burner position though.

Good call.

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