The sharpest critics of American white supremacy fluently spoke the civic-republican language, whether we bring to mind David Walker critique of our once “slaveholding republic” that betrayed republican principles; Frederick Douglass’s speeches on “composite nationality” and the Roman-republican ideal of civic membership, Martin Delany’s neo-Roman republicanism; the Haitian Revolution’s liberty against domination; or even twentieth-century Black radicals (Hubert Harrison, C.L.R. James) who reread Machiavelli and Harrington through an anti-colonial lens. We must reclaim the classical analogy on anti-slavery, anti-tyranny and non-domination. the Roman Republic itself was repeatedly invoked by enslaved people. “Give me liberty or give me death” is a direct paraphrase of Cato the Younger, quoted by Addison’s play Cato that was performed by Washington’s army and by plantation slaves alike. The late Roman Republic fell into empire and latifundia slavery the more it abandoned its own republican ideals, which was exactly the warning the anti-slavery republicans I want to get into eventually issued to America.
This lost tradition is the sharpest weapon against white supremacy, and it is the fault of our education system that you have not been introduced to this very framework, emphasis and history as American tradition against our current bed-time stories in the American mythos of “White Identity.” The republican tradition is a universal heritage, and I advocate for its true revival, not its subordination to other revolutionary political ideology. The core classical republican idea that freedom means non-domination (not just non-interference) can influence new critiques of structural racism, aristocracy, patriarchy, and capital domination.
Republicanism is not the enemy of equal rights, but the tradition that asks the question liberalism often forgets: “What material and social conditions are required for people to actually exercise the rights they possess on paper?” It is the question asked by every slave revolt and every labor republican. There is a long history of Black, Indigenous, feminist, and working-class republicans from 1776 to the present. The tradition is not the property of only “white people.” The civic republican tradition belongs to everyone who has ever resisted domination.
We have let many factions define the semantic field in America, which is at this point muddying our political language.
The purpose of this work is to not make excuses for the Founders, but there are many actors at play geopolitically and within this country who want Americans to remain clouded and distracted with every idea, but our own tradition. The Founders’ genuinely engaged with the philosophies I have often mentioned, such as Stoicism and Epicureanism, but many others have sought to express a fuller, more uncompromising embodiment of the same tradition. Although, the Founders professed this same tradition, they never fully lived it, and our system requires and demands as our civic duty to fully live it. It is human nature, not mere societal structures and economic conditions that is a central function in the mechanism of the Republic, which has been ignored and discarded for other failed atheistic and materialist political theories.
Civic republicanism was lived most completely by the very people that were enslaved or excluded, because only under the pressure of absolute injustice does the fire reveal its true revolutionary power.
If we want to be true to the history, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and so on did sincerely believe in the philosophies that constructed their new synthesis of Republicanism, since they read texts, annotated them and quoted them daily. So, they cannot be accused of theft or insincerity, but we can simply point out the gap between profession and practice. This is a gap that non-Whites were forced to close through their lived witness.
These are the common narratives that circulate among citizens today.
One opinion is to say, ‘the U.S. Founders’ were hypocrites; therefore, discard the philosophies. Burn the whole system down.’
I have asked such persons, usually college students, “then what will you replace the system with after the burning?”
They respond vaguely, “The Revolution.”
What was the original “revolution?” Not the revolution of the Communists. The republican ideal has a much different quality to it, than Marxism, but the language of revolution has been transferred into the radicalism of Marx’s vision. When people hear the word, “The REVOLUTION,” they think Socialism, Marx, Communism, Soviets, etc, not REPUBLICANISM, and I think that is a serious problem and limitation, especially because all effort at critiquing and challenging “the SYSTEM” can always be lumped with and denounced by associating any form of radicalism as illegitimate power. However, “the system” can be refuted and challenged without using a single word of the Socialists and Marxists. So, it cannot be refuted, because to attack it would be to attack the foundations of the system itself. We come from a point of the roots of the Republican Revolution, and those who govern us corruptly would stand evidently naked in their principles before every citizen capable of reading and discerning their sincerity and civic knowledge. Upon this actually our system depends. Hence, there is a need for reclamation of that system and the philosophy at its roots and its lineage.
The Founders genuinely wrestled with the republican tradition (just as Marx did in his early republicanism) and these other ancient philosophies that inspired them; but most could only live it partially because comfort and power dulled their demands. Enslaved and free Black Americans, e.g., had no such luxury, and their very survival required the full, radical application of the same principles.
We cannot say that Stoicism and Epicureanism are tainted by association with slave-owners, because the same Stoic and Epicurean texts the Founders read were lived more rigorously in the quarters, on the Underground Railroad, and in the hush harbors than in any Virginia plantation house. Epictetus’s “Bear and forbear” (ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου) was not a parlor motto! It was the daily reality of the enslaved. Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” remained theoretical, but Harriet Tubman’s nineteen trips north made it literal. Our ancestors lived and embodied the republican tradition.
If someone says, well for Jefferson, “All men are created equal,” but Black people are inferior and must be deported, David Walker’s rebuttal would be “All men are created equal,” therefore any system that denies this is blasphemy against the Creator and will be destroyed. If George Washington thought that slavery was a necessary evil for his time. David Walker in that same time period, taught that divine spark demands immediate overthrow of the corrupted system that denies it. If someone advocated for Franklin’s gradualism where we should petition Congress politely, for Walker, if petitions fail, the spark in our Black bodies itself becomes revolutionary fire. Thomas Jefferson wrote about the spark while owning six hundred human beings, but David Walker believed the same spark so completely that he was willing to die and cause others to die to see it honored. This is the citizen demanded.
The concept of human rights is rooted in the same Ionian philosophy of Heraclitus and in the ancient African traditions. Some of our Founders used this language and understood that human rights based in human dignity is rooted in the divine quality (fragment of God) in every individual. It is in the Enlightenment era of “objective science,” with science being a field of trial and error, that we get scientific racism and its ridiculous racial hierarchies and racial classifications. Yet we find in the 1500s, individuals like John Ball during his Peasants’ Revolt arguing for equal rights using the same Bible that later slaveholders would use to ground human beings into submission and labor.
The concept at the basis of republican human rights existed in antiquity in African, Roman and Greek traditions alike before the Christian principles, and was universal before it was ever racialized. Hence, we have more than the Christian social teaching and precepts to invoke REPUBLICANISM. When David Walker wrote in 1829 that God “will make the oppressors feel that the soul of the black man is as precious in his sight as the soul of the white man,” he was simply completing the argument that Cicero and Seneca began but Jefferson left unfinished.
The Declaration’s individual rights clause was weaponized by enslaved and free Black people from 1776 onward to demand their own freedom. David Walker (1829), Maria Stewart (1831), Frederick Douglass (1852), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1963) all quoted it as their charter. Enslaved Africans and their descendants practiced a deeper, more radical Stoicism and Epicureanism under conditions the Roman Stoics only imagined. Nat Turner’s ascetic discipline and calm acceptance of death paralleled Marcus Aurelius last moments on the cross. Sojourner Truth’s question, “Ain’t I a Woman?” is the same truth as Epictetus’s passage, “Who is your master? Anyone who controls what you care about.” The secret doctrine of the divine spark, which lies at the basis of our concept of human rights existed as the African primordial fire, the Orphic scintilla, the Stoic logos spermatikos, and the Christian imago Dei. It was invoked by Black abolitionists as proof that the slave’s soul was just as divine; and therefore, the entire system was sacrilege1. American Republican tradition is an unfinished ideal. Every time a non-White child today is told they are inherently violent, have no inner light, or lack intelligence, or their skin color is bad, the same lie that justified chattel slavery is still operating. Reviving this philosophy in its universal, pre-racial form is therefore an anti-racist act, not a conservative one.
There are others who say therefore from opinions not born from this knowledge, we must reject the Founders’ heritage, but this in fact takes you further away from the heritage of republican democracy. This heritage does not belong exclusively to the Founders. It belongs to whoever lives it most completely. By that measure, the truest heirs of the Stoic-Ciceronian tradition in American history have been individuals like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr., not the men who wrote about it, while holding the whip; and who still try to hold the whip and keep the Indigenous, Black, Latino and Asian people “in their place,” or give either the whip to harm and divide each other.
We must do the same as Cicero in his repeated calls to preserve the republic in his Catilinarian Orations, where Cicero declares the Senate’s resolve to protect the republic: “O di immortales, ubinam gentium sumus? Quam rem publicam habemus?” (“O immortal gods, in what country are we? What republic do we have?”). During this time (63 BCE), Cicero rallied senators to “save the republic” (rem publicam salvandam esse, a rallying cry in the senatorial assemblies), emphasizing non-domination and civic vigilance.
My friends, the divine spark burned brightest where it was most fiercely tested, and we are the heirs of this radical republican tradition and must fully restore it. Remember, SALUS REIPUBLICAE. It is your responsibility. Every citizen is the salvation of the Republic.
FOOTNOTES
- See Henry Highland Garnet’s 1843 “Address to the Slaves” and Absalom Jones’s 1808 thanksgiving sermon quoting Acts 17:26-28 (“of one blood”) ↩︎
The American Minervan 
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