Dear Fellow Travelers,
Today, Americans are celebrating their 250th birthday. In cities across America, you’ll find fireworks, parades, and the full spectacle. (Happy Independence Day to all those who are celebrating!)
Today, on the Fourth of July, I want to explore the Stoic ideas and practices that shaped the Founding Fathers. I hope you enjoy it!
J.W.
💀 Dying Every Day
Dying Every Day is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project. Each episode turns a selected passage from Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation designed to help you (and me) learn how to live.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen...
Stoicism and the Founding Fathers
Welcome to Dying Every Day. This is Day 153.
“A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.”
— Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (1713)
In the brutal winter of 1777, the Continental Army was dying at Valley Forge.
Not in battle. In the cold, the hunger, the disease. Men with no shoes, no blankets, no reason left to believe the war could be won. Desertion was constant. The cause looked finished.
And in the middle of that, George Washington did something strange.
He had a play performed for his men.
The play was Cato—Joseph Addison’s tragedy about Cato the Younger, the Roman senator who stood against Caesar’s tyranny and would not bend. It was Washington’s favorite play. He quoted it throughout his life. And he chose that winter, of all winters, to put it before his freezing, starving soldiers—because he believed the play’s message was the very thing that might keep them in the field.
That message was Stoic virtue. And it ran deeper in the people who founded this country than the fireworks of the Fourth of July tend to suggest.
It is easy this week to talk about the founders in the language of spectacle—bold, brilliant, larger-than-life. But the language they used about themselves was quieter, older, and more demanding. It was, to a striking degree, the language of the Stoics.
They had all read the Romans. Cato, Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus—these were the common furniture of an educated mind in the eighteenth century. And what the founders took from them was not abstraction. It was a practical program: how to bear hardship, how to govern oneself, how to serve something larger than one’s own comfort.
Above all, it was the conviction that a person who cannot command himself has no business commanding anything else.
That idea—self-command as the root of liberty—is the thread that runs through all of them. And no one embodied it more deliberately than Washington.
Washington was not, by nature, a serene man. He had a famous temper. What he had instead of natural calm was something he built—the deliberate self-command of a man who decided early that his passions would not rule him.
He constructed his entire public character around it.
And the model he built it on was Cato.
You can hear the play in the most famous words of the Revolution. When Nathan Hale stood on the gallows in 1776 and said he regretted only that he had but one life to lose for his country, he was paraphrasing a line spoken by Cato over the body of his dead son:
“What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country.” — Addison, Cato
The founders turned to Stoic wisdom at the most consequential moments of their lives because Stoic philosophy had prepared them to meet those moments. The belief that some things are worse than death—that liberty and integrity matter more than survival—was not just a slogan to them. It was the guiding philosophy of the Revolution.
There is one image from Addison’s play that mattered most to that generation, and it is worth dwelling on.
Near the end, Cato sits alone. A drawn sword rests on the table beside him. In his hand is a book—Plato’s Phaedo, the dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the same text the real Cato was said to have read on the last night of his life.
A man at the end of everything, choosing to spend his final hour not in panic or rage, but in the company of philosophy. Choosing to face death as a free man rather than live as a subject.
The founders saw themselves in that image, not because they wanted to die, but because they had absorbed the Stoic idea at its core: that the soul’s integrity matters more than the body’s safety, and that a person who has made peace with death cannot be governed by fear of it. A man who will not be ruled by that fear cannot be ruled by much of anything.
That is the lesson Washington was trying to teach at Valley Forge: hold the line not because victory is promised, but because the holding itself is worth doing.
The soul is tended in how you bear what you cannot control.
But it’s important to acknowledge that the founders did not all read the Stoics the same way. Jefferson is sometimes claimed as a genuine Stoic. He was not. In an 1819 letter, he called himself an Epicurean and dismissed some Stoic doctrine as, in his words, “hypocrisy and grimace.” But in the same breath, he made an exception that reveals what he actually valued in the tradition.
Of the Stoics, he wrote, “Epictetus indeed has given us what was good of the Stoics.” Of Seneca, despite his reservations, “a fine moralist... giving us on the whole a great deal of sound and practical morality.” He kept a volume of Seneca by his bed, and it was there when he died.
That is not a man swallowing a doctrine whole. It is a man taking what is useful and leaving the rest—which is itself the most Stoic way to read philosophy. Not as dogma, but as practical instruction, tested against experience and applied where it works.
Franklin did much the same thing, but in a different key. He never wrote about Stoicism as such, but in his Autobiography, he describes a project that is pure Stoic practice: a list of thirteen virtues, tracked daily in a little book, one worked on each week, and the whole list cycled through again and again throughout his life. Temperance, silence, order, resolution, justice, tranquility.
The deliberate, repeated training of character that Seneca described in his letters and Marcus practiced in his journal. And Franklin freely admitted that he never reached the perfection he aimed for. He fell short constantly. He believed, as the Stoics did, that falling short was not failure. The trying was the practice.
Which brings us to the hardest part—and the part that makes this more than a history lesson.
The founders did not live up to their own ideals.
They spoke the language of liberty while holding human beings in bondage. They wrote that all men are created equal and built a country that did not treat them as equals. Washington and Jefferson—the very men who modeled themselves on Cato’s virtue—owned slaves.
The distance between what they professed and what they practiced is vast.
But notice what that gap actually is. It is not unique to them. It is the oldest and most universal human problem there is—the distance between the person we say we are and the person our conduct reveals. We all live in that gap.
The founders’ version of it was more consequential and more damning than most. But its structure is the structure of every human life: professed values on one side, actual behavior on the other, and a space between them that never fully closes.
The Stoics did not pretend that space could be eliminated. That was the whole point. Virtue, they insisted, is a practice, not a possession. No one arrives.
Everyone—the wise, the powerful, the celebrated—falls short of the ideal and must keep climbing toward it anyway. Franklin knew he never reached moral perfection. Washington wrestled with his temper until the end. They knew they were not Cato. They knew the ideal stood above them, judging them, and calling them higher than they had managed to climb.
That is the quieter inheritance worth claiming.
Not the marble and the myth.
The idea is that a free people must govern themselves before they can govern anything else. Liberty without self-command is not liberty but license, and the republic they imagined ultimately depended not on documents but on character—on citizens willing to do the daily, unglamorous work of becoming people worthy of the freedom they claimed.
They did not finish that work. Neither will we. That was never the point.
The point is to take up the practice.
Daily Practice
Today, I invite you to take up one small part of the practice the founders took up—and, like everyone, fell short of.
Choose a single virtue, as Franklin did. Just one: courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. And practice it in your dealings with the people you meet today.
Hold it before you for the day—not as a rule you will keep or break, but as a direction to return to each time you drift. Notice where you fall short.
Don’t punish yourself for it. Note it, as Franklin marked his little book, and begin again. The republic was always a practice, never a possession.
So is the self fit to live in it. Begin there.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen…
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. Catch up on recent (and past) meditations in the archive!
Fantastic essay! Thank you, Josh. I am 83 years old and I conclude that I never have a never have your will I live up to the standard that are inherent in the ideas of the Stoic you have described. As much as I would like to. The fact is, for me anyway, it is just too hard to standard. Would I rather live in the United States as a so-called free man or in a country like Great Britain as a subject, or die? It’s too hard a choice for me.
I also have a question. Did Cato own slaves. I know the Romans did, as the Greeks, and Society’s all over the world, even Africa, and even Jesus said “Slaves obey your masters.” so is it fair to criticize the founding fathers for this? Not that I’m in favor of slavery. I am very much opposed to it. But I’m just saying it was a mindset for probably thousands of years. The American Indians, own slaves. When they won a battle, they enslave the people they conquered. It wasn’t right, but it just was at the time, what people thought. Somehow that has to be part of the equation for criticizing people in the past.
But I could always be wrong. As Socrates said “the more I know the more I realize I don’t know.“ So maybe I’m wrong.
All the best, and keep these essays coming!
Great article, Josh. I’ve been watching The American Experiment on Netflix - it’s quite a lot the founding fathers accomplished.