Salvo 11.14.2025
Forming Americans who are worthy to carry on the country’s legacy.
Washington was hailed as Cincinnatus for restraint. Adams read Cicero to learn the duties of a citizen. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay argued like Romans about factions, offices, and law in The Federalist. Tocqueville saw that institutions float on habits formed long before statutes are passed. These classical measures met the republic’s better religious energies. Courage was yoked to limits, ambition was answerable to judgment, and liberty was disciplined by reverence. It was a living grammar, producing men who knew that freedom without a proper moral foundation soon degenerates into a mass of individuals with unbalanced appetites.
America’s generals were heirs to the same tradition. Robert E. Lee, schooled at West Point when Latin and moral philosophy still shaped a man, read Plutarch’s Lives and Marcus Aurelius until duty became instinct. His letters breathe that Stoic air—self-command, reverence, and the conviction that honor isn’t pride but proportion. “Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language,” he wrote, echoing Marcus Aurelius’s injunction: “Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.” Though defeated on the battlefield, Lee carried himself with a Roman dignity that turned surrender into an act of moral victory.
Ulysses S. Grant, Lee’s opposite in temperament, was no philosopher, but the same formation ran in his marrow. He wrote like Caesar: plain, spare, factual, and untouched by ornament or self-pity. His Memoirs possess that austere honesty the ancients called gravitas. Where Lee personified Stoic resignation, Grant embodied virtue—the quiet courage to endure, to press on after failure, and to be magnanimous in victory.
Their causes divided them; their formation united them. Each, in defeat or triumph, acted as the Romans would have understood: disciplined, modest, untheatrical. They were the last products of an education that taught duty before ideology and character before charisma—a republic that still produced adults.
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