Date of Award
8-31-2026
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
History
First Advisor
Elizabeth McCahill
Second Advisor
Vincent J. Cannato
Abstract
Gilbert Chinard’s publication of Thomas Jefferson’s legal commonplace book in 1926 and literary commonplace book in 1928 introduced a new question into the study of the American Founders: what was the relationship between the Founders and the authors of the classical world? Through the twentieth century, the historiography of that question has resolved into three separate streams represented by Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Meyer Reinhold’s Classica Americana and Carl Richard’s The Founders and the Classics. These three scholars argued respectively; that the Founders were not influenced by the classics and only used them as ornamentation for their own writings; that the Founders were minimally influenced by the classics but only in so much as they found utility in them; and that the Founders were deeply influenced by the classics which served as a foundation for their political thought. This paper takes a more practical approach to the same question. By tracing Cicero’s view of property as expressed in his On Duties and identifying the similarities in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and John Adams’ Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, a positive link is made between the three authors. This evidence of the influence of a single classical author on two of the most important Founders suggests a deeper relationship between the Founders and the classics than either Bailyn or Reinhold acknowledged.
Recommended Citation
Mattison, Adam, "As Sacred as the Laws of God: Property as the Link between Cicero, Jefferson and Adams" (2026). Graduate Masters Theses. 977.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/masters_theses/977
Included in
Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, United States History Commons
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