Council of Founding Fathers
Founding Fathers
A Word
To The Wise
Significant Guidance

George Washington
"Honesty is the best policy."
George Washington's
Rules of Civility

110 Maxims Helped Shape and Guide America's First President.

As a young schoolboy in Virginia, George Washington took his first steps toward greatness by copying out by hand a list of 110 'Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.' Based on a 16th-century set of precepts compiled for young gentlemen by Jesuit instructors, the Rules of Civility were one of the earliest and most powerful forces to shape America's first president, says historian Richard Brookhiser.

Most of the rules are concerned with details of etiquette, offering pointers on such issues as how to dress, walk, eat in public and address one's superiors. But in the introduction to the newly published Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace, Brookhiser warns against dismissing the maxims as "mere" etiquette. "The rules address moral issues, but they address them indirectly," Brookhiser writes. "They seek to form the inner man (or boy) by shaping the outer."

Benjamin Franklin
Avoid Extremes.
 Thirteen Virtues
Today, “virtue” has taken on soft and effeminate connotations. But originally, the word “virtue” was inextricably connected to what it meant to be a true man.

The word comes from the Latin virtus, which in turn is derived from vir, Latin for “manliness.”

These days guys excuse their lack of virtue by hiding behind the excuse of being “just a guy.” Men need to do better and strive to improve themselves each day. It’s time to restore the tie between manliness and virtue.

Thomas Jefferson
"Question with boldness."
 More than a mere renaissance man, Jefferson may actually have been a new kind of man. He was fluent in five languages and able to read two others. He wrote, over the course of his life, over sixteen thousand letters.

He was acquainted with nearly every influential person in America, and a great many in Europe as well. He was a lawyer, agronomist, musician, scientist, philosopher, author, architect, inventor, and statesman.

Though he never set foot outside of the American continent before adulthood, he acquired an education that rivaled the finest to be attained in Europe. He was clearly the foremost American son of the Enlightenment.

John Adams
Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.
 Thoughts on Government
Several representatives turned to Adams for advice about framing new governments. Adams got tired of repeating the same thing, and published the pamphlet Thoughts on Government (1776), which was subsequently influential in the writing of state constitutions. Using the conceptual framework of Republicanism in the United States, the patriots believed it was the corrupt and nefarious aristocrats, in the British Parliament, and their minions stationed in America, who were guilty of the British assault on American liberty.

George Whitfield
Fight the good fight of faith.
 Revival Meetings

He first took to preaching in the open air on Hanham Mount, Kingswood, in southeast Bristol. A crowd of 20,000 people gathered to hear him. Even larger crowds—Whitefield estimated 30,000—met him in Cambuslang in 1742.

Benjamin Franklin attended a revival meeting in Philadelphia and was greatly impressed with Whitefield's ability to deliver a message to such a large group. Franklin had dismissed reports of Whitefield preaching to crowds of the order of tens of thousands in England as exaggeration. When listening to Whitefield preaching from the Philadelphia court house, Franklin walked away towards his shop in Market Street until he could no longer hear Whitefield distinctly. He then estimated his distance from Whitefield and calculated the area of a semicircle centred on Whitefield. Allowing two square feet per person he realized that Whitefield really could be heard by tens of thousands of people in the open air.[6] Franklin and Whitefield became close friends.

Whitefield is remembered as one of the first to preach to the enslaved.

























Council of Founding Fathers - more....
Founding Fathers
A Word
To The Wise
Significant Guidance

Thomas Jefferson
"Question with boldness."
 MORE.....

In 1775 when a Virginia convention selected delegates to the Continental Congress, Jefferson was selected as an alternate. It was expected that Payton Randolph, (then Speaker of the Virginia House and president of the Continental Congress too,) would be recalled by the Royal Governor. This did happen and Jefferson went in his place. Thomas Jefferson had a theory about self governance and the rights of people who established habitat in new lands. Before attending the Congress in Philadelphia he codified these thoughts in an article called A Summary View of the Rights of British America. This paper he sent on ahead of him. He fell ill on the road and was delayed for several days. By the time he arrived, his paper had been published as a pamphlet and sent throughout the colonies and on to England where Edmund Burke, sympathetic to the colonial condition, had it reprinted and circulated widely. In 1776 Jefferson, then a member of the committee to draft a declaration of independence, was chosen by the committee to write the draft. This he did, with some minor corrections from John Adams and an embellishment from Franklin, the document was offered to the Congress on the first day of July. The congress modified it somewhat, abbreviating certain wording and removing points that were outside of general agreement. The Declaration was adopted on the Fourth of July.

John Adams




Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.
 MORE.....

Adams advised that the form of government should be chosen in order to attain the desired ends, which are the happiness and virtue of the greatest number of people. With this goal in mind, he wrote in Thoughts on Government, "There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; because the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'" Thoughts on Government defended bicameralism, for "a single assembly is liable to all the vices, follies, and frailties of an individual." He also suggested that there should be a separation of powers between the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature, and furthermore recommended that if a continental government were to be formed then it "should sacredly be confined" to certain enumerated powers. Thoughts on Government was enormously influential and was referenced as an authority in every state-constitution writing hall.

Declaration of Independence
On June 7, 1776, Adams seconded the resolution of independence introduced by Richard Henry Lee which stated, "These colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states," and championed the resolution until it was adopted by Congress on July 2, 1776.

He was appointed to a committee with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and Roger Sherman, to draft a Declaration of Independence. Although that document was written primarily by Jefferson, Adams occupied the foremost place in the debate on its adoption. Many years later, Jefferson hailed Adams as "the pillar of [the Declaration's] support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults it encountered."