The Roman Republic was formed in 509 B.C. and lasted 482 years, until 27 B.C. when Octavian crowned himself Caesar Augustus, Roman emperor. By comparison, the United States’ 250 years barely crosses the halfway point of republican Rome.

Aware of Rome’s longevity, America’s Founders approached their project with remarkable ambition. They were not designing a regime to be a transient blip on history’s screen; they were building for eternity “a new order of the ages” — Novus Ordo Seclorum, as is inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States.

They recognized that founding a free society was a great challenge, but assuring its continuity was an even bigger one. The problem is not having an election, but having another one, and another, and another, with the peaceful transfer of power following each.

They saw an educated electorate as the key. That is why Thomas Jefferson — a graduate of the College of William and Mary, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and later, America’s third president (1801-09) — counted the founding of the University of Virginia as one of his greatest accomplishments.

Soon after the Declaration was signed, Jefferson turned his attention to another matter, in his home state of Virginia, where he introduced legislation to abolish one of the foundation stones of inherited English aristocracy: the legal principle of “entail,” under which a family’s wealth and property — and the power that goes with it — is passed from generation to generation, typically through the eldest son.

As Jefferson recounted in his autobiography, “The transmission of this property from generation to generation … raised up a distinct set of families, who, being privileged by law in the perpetuation of their wealth, were thus formed into a Patrician order.”

From this order, “of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society,” he wrote, “the king habitually selected his counsellors of State,” devoted not to the common good, but “to the interests and will of the crown.”

Ending this became one of Jefferson’s top priorities. As Jefferson explained, “instead of an aristocracy of wealth,” he sought “to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions.”

In short, Jefferson argued that the people should hold sway over the governing class, rather than the reverse, which he “deemed essential to a well-ordered republic.”

To effect this, he wrote, “no violence was necessary, no deprivation of natural right, but rather an enlargement of it by repeal of the (entail) law.”

The belief that “all humans are equal in fundamental worth, moral status and rights” — egalitarianism — is a core American principle, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Today, the power of the super-rich is being debated again. The challenge is how to let Jefferson’s aristocracy of virtue and merit flourish while preventing it from deteriorating into an artificial aristocracy of wealth.

You can tax the income and net worth of America’s financial, industrial and technology titans, but you run the risk of them moving to new jurisdictions (or even new countries) to avoid the taxes. Or you can make it harder for extreme wealth to be passed along by changing inheritance law.

Half a century after Jefferson abolished entail, the French commentator on democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, recognized the effect, noting that American inheritance law was like a “machine set in motion,” working silently across generations to create movement and energy, forcing new talent to the top, while also encouraging risk-taking and ambition among all Americans by detaching them from any particular piece of land.

In a letter to John Adams, several years after his presidency, Jefferson returned to education and egalitarianism.

After the Declaration of Independence, he said, he was especially proud of the work he had done in Virginia, where he had “laid the axe to the root of pseudo-aristocracy” by abolishing entails and primogeniture (passing an estate or title to the first-born child), and had led efforts to establish a broad-based public education system, from local schools “for reading, writing, and common arithmetic” through the university — so individuals “from every condition of life” could successfully compete and participate in the self-government experiment.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Frederic J. Fransen is the president of Amerion College in Huntington (W.Va.) and CEO of Certell Inc. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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