Resist Beginnings: The Historical Roman Maxim Behind the American Revolution
“Like a cancer”
America was built on a foundation that constitutional violations are a deadly disease.
Give government an inch – and they’ll take a few thousand miles, and never stop. And before too long, it’ll get to a place where it’s no longer a Republic, but a long slow coup. Or, as the Declaration of Independence put it, eating “out our substance.”
Our rights. Our money. And everything in between.
The solution? The ancient Roman principle behind the American Revolution.
THE DISEASE
The Revolution was built on a hard truth: If the people let government get away with even the smallest usurpation of power that sets the stage for the deadly disease of total tyranny. As John Adams wrote, it gets worse over time.
“The nature of the encroachment upon [the] American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.”
John Dickinson addressed the claim from some people that “now is not the time” to take a stand. That the usurpation is too small, or the ability to stop it too weak.
“Are these men ignorant, that usurpations, which might have been successfully opposed at first, acquire strength by continuance, and thus become irresistible?”
Adams walked us through just how government gets the people on their knees.
“The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue.”
By pensioners, he wasn’t addressing retirement plans. This was referring to all the people who become financially dependent upon government. He warned that the more this happens, the more that society would devolve to immorality and corruption.
“The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society”
THE ANCIENT MAXIM
James Madison knew the United States wouldn’t even exist if the people hadn’t spotted the massive danger hidden inside a small tax on tea.
“The people of the U. S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprized in the precedent.”
He warned that Americans need to continue using that same wisdom by invoking an ancient warning that went back thousands of years.
“Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching agst. every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings. Obsta principiis.”
John Adams defined it plain English.
“Obsta principiis – Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people”
That maxim comes from the Roman poet Ovid around 2 AD. It means you must stop the disease at the very start. Because if you don’t, even if you eventually find a cure, it could arrive too late.
“Resist beginnings; too late is the medicine prepared, when the disease has gained strength by long delay.”
The Roman historian Tacitus captured the danger in one powerful line from a speech by the Emperor Claudius. What is done today will be used as the basis for more in the future.
“What we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.”
While the Empire saw this as a positive, the American Revolutionaries recognized its inherent danger. And, as Machiavelli documented, two centuries prior to Claudius, this principle was a common understanding in the Roman Republic.
“Thus in all these cases the Romans did what all wise princes ought to do; namely, not only to look to all present troubles, but also to those of the future, against which they provided with the utmost prudence.”
Drawing on the maxim that Ovid would later write, he noted they looked far in the future for potential dangers.
“For it is by foreseeing difficulties from afar that they are easily provided against; but awaiting their near approach, remedies are no longer in time, for the malady has become incurable.”
Machiavelli – also compared that danger to a deadly disease.
“It happens in such cases, as the doctors say of consumption, that in the early stages it is easy to cure, but difficult to recognize; whilst in the course of time, the disease not having been recognized and cured in the beginning, it becomes easy to know, but difficult to cure.”
He saw the same principles applied in the constitutions of our body as in the constitutions of our body politic. Resist the beginnings, or you could be done for.
“And thus it is in the affairs of state; for when the evils that arise in it are seen far ahead, which it is given only to a wise prince to do, then they are easily remedied; but when, in consequence of not having been foreseen, these evils are allowed to grow and assume such proportions that they become manifest to every one, then they can no longer be remedied.”
THE STANDARD
Fast forward back to the Revolution. Jonathan Mayhew took that ancient warning to the pulpit. In his famous sermon, The Snare Broken, he preached that preserving liberty means spotting every violation of it – and taking action to stop it.
“For those who would preserve and perpetuate their liberties, to guard them with a wakeful attention; and in all righteous, just and prudent ways, to oppose the first encroachments on them. “Obsta principiis.” After a while it will be too late.”
The following year, James Otis Jr said that should be the default American position. Every violation of rights, no matter how small, demanded immediate response
“It is my countrymen of the utmost consequence that we boldly oppose the least infraction of our charter, and rights as men. Obsta Principiis is a maxim never to be forgot: If we do not resist at the first attack, it may soon be too late.”
It’s not like the politicians don’t know all this. But as Dickinson wrote, they use it as a weapon. They first dress up their schemes in legitimacy.
“All artful rulers, who strive to extend their power beyond its just limits, endeavor to give to their attempts as much semblance of legality as possible.”
Then, he showed how precedent builds on precedent.
“Those who succeed them may venture to go a little further; for each new encroachment will be strengthened by a former.”
And finally, he brought it full circle – directly citing Tacitus.
“‘That which is now supported by examples, growing old, will become an example itself,’ and thus support fresh usurpations.”
Understanding this, it’s no surprise that this phrase from Montesquieu was a foundational one for the American Revolution.
“Slavery is ever preceded by sleep”
Using a well-known biblical parable, Mayhew drew on this to warn exactly what happens when the people sleep on the job, instead of taking action to resist beginnings.
“For in the states and kingdoms of this world, it happens as it does in the field or church, according to the well-known parable, to this purpose; That while men sleep, then the enemy cometh and soweth tares, which cannot be rooted out again till the end of the world, without rooting out the wheat with them.:
Dickinson, quoting the Roman satirist Persius, summed up this entire view with a single line that he used to sign off the ninth of his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.
“Oppose a disease at its beginning”
THE PATH
Thomas Jefferson took it even further, warning that it’s better to prevent the bad guys from getting started than to resist them after they do.
“The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”
No one summed up that take better than “Old” Abraham White, an anti-federalist at the Massachusetts Ratifying convention.
“I wouldn’t trust a flock of Moseses!”
Living under the largest government in history, this DEADLY DISEASE is everywhere. For us today, there are two essential lessons.
First – oppose any and all new usurpations of power – right away – no matter how small.
Second – and this one is even more difficult. There has to be significant action to cut out the cancer that’s already around us – everywhere. And that’s not going to be done by “voting bums out” in the hope that the new bums aren’t constitutional criminals too.
As Thomas Jefferson warned, getting from the largest government in history to a real land of the free?
That won’t be quick. Or easy.
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather-bed.”
That’s the bad news.
But here’s the good news from St. George Tucker – it’s never truly game over.
“The acquiescence of the people of a state under any usurped authority for any length of time, can never deprive them of the right of resuming the sovereign power into their own hands, whenever they think fit, or are able to do so, since that right is perfectly unalienable.”
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