john witherspoon founding father

John Witherspoon was born in Scotland and educated at the Haddington Grammar School. (“Wherever there is an interest and power to do wrong,” Madison wrote to Jefferson, “wrong will generally be done.”), But if there is a “a degree of depravity in mankind” (Federalist 55), so, too, “there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” Yet the way to nurture that esteem and confidence is not to rely upon the goodness of men (that, as Witherspoon put it, would be “folly”): “Enlightened statesmen,” Madison observed, “will not always be at the helm.” Rather, one should rely on man’s energy, his ambition and self-interest. As the historian James H. Smylie put it, “Without preaching a sermon and yet relying upon his theological orientation, Madison translated the views of Witherspoon and the nature of man into a political instrument.”. 17 (February 6, 1931), p. 2. Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. JOHN WITHERSPOON was born February 5, 1722 in Gifford, Haddingtonshire, Scotland. In 1773, the eighteen-year-old Hamilton, bursting with ambition, presented himself to Witherspoon and asked to be admitted to the college and be allowed to advance “with as much rapidity as his exertions would enable him to.” Witherspoon was deeply impressed by the young man, but wrote denying his request because it was “contrary to the usage of the college.” Hamilton, for his part, was impressed by Witherspoon. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998). Slavery in the British North American colonies was unlike anything Witherspoon knew from his native country of Scotland, where demand for tobacco, sugar, and cotton created a market for the products of enslaved labor, but did not require the presence of enslaved people themselves. A good Scot, Witherspoon was blessed with keen fiscal intelligence. Revell Company, 1906), 179. The contemporary record is full of encomia and tokens of deference. Witherspoon believed that religion was “absolutely essential to the existence and welfare of every political combination of men in society.” Madison agreed. His latest books include The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press) and Who Rules? David Walker Woods, John Witherspoon (New York: F.H. “In fine,” Witherspoon writes in a section called the “Athenian Creed,” “I believe in the divinity of Lord S[haftesbury], the saintship of Marcus A[urelius], the perspicacity and sublimity of A[ristotle], and the perpetual duration of Mr. H[utcheson]’s works, notwithstanding their present tendency to oblivion. Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the Twenty-first Century (Encounter Books). Witherspoon was, as one commentator put it, less an original than a “representative” thinker. Harvard was older than Princeton, but under Witherspoon the New Jersey school became a political and intellectual powerhouse. Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon, A Biography, Vol. [5], Witherspoon was careful to emphasize to Montgomery that neither his Christianity nor his baptism would legally emancipate him. Taylor, Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora, 18. “Your talents have been in some measure buried,” he wrote Witherspoon, “but at Princeton they will be called into action, and the evening of your life will be much more effulgent than your brightest meridian days have been.” Eventually, Elizabeth Witherspoon relented, and in 1768 the seven Witherspoons made the journey to America, never to return. On the contrary, he seems to have regarded them primarily as a pedagogical resource, more of a starting point or springboard for discussion than a polished lecture. As did even the more skeptical Washington, who in his Farewell Address observed that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. And in 1779, when Witherspoon moved from the President’s House on campus into the newly completed country home he called “Tusculum,” he purchased two enslaved people to help him farm the 500-acre estate.[11]. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. James J. Gigantino II, “Trading in Jersey Souls,” 296-97. The day began at 5 A.M. with the morning bell. Hi.s wife had died five When the Revolutionary War finally broke out, many—even George III—called it “The Presbyterian Rebellion.” Ambrose Serle, a British clerk who accompanied the British army from 1776–1778, observed that “Presbyterianism is really at the Bottom of the whole Conspiracy.” He wasn’t wrong. Born a slave in Virginia, Montgomery was sent by his master to Beith as a carpenter’s apprentice sometime around 1750. . For us looking back on the generation of the Founders, it is easy to deprecate the religious inheritance that, for many of them, formed the ground of their commitment to political liberty. On May 17, 1776, John Witherspoon (1723-94) preached one of the most significant sermons in the history of this country. He was, as one modern scholar puts it, “Quite possibly the most influential religious and educational leader in Revolutionary America.”. Theological skeptics and even atheists there were aplenty in late eighteenth-century America. Ranging widely over ethics, epistemology, theology, and political theory, they form an eclectic digest that begins by considering individual virtue before moving on to ponder the common good, a tried and true format familiar since Aristotle. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 53-81. In 1789, he was one of a handful of people (Madison was another) to whom Hamilton turned for advice in preparing two of his landmark state papers on public credit. 1778-1796; 1778-1796; Board of Trustees Records, Volume 1B; Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Special thanks to T. Jeffrey Clarke for bringing the date of Witherspoon’s move to Tusculum to the author’s attention. Copyright © 2021 The Trustees of Princeton University. In 1746, during the second Jacobite rising, Witherspoon was briefly imprisoned by rebel forces at the battle of Falkirk, an experience which his friend and first biographer, Ashbel Green, said dealt a “severe shock” to his nerves and had a permanent effect on his health. Nietzsche observes that a pupil repays a teacher poorly if he remains nothing more than a pupil. The pair corresponded often on issues concerning the Presbytery. Princeton, the only Presbyterian institution in the colonies, was deeply implicated in the rebellion. John Witherspoon, The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men, 1776 “The establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive which induced me to the Field – the object is attained – and it now remains to be my earnest wish and prayer, that the Citizens of the United States could make a wise and virtuous use of the blessings placed before them.” John Witherspoon: memorable moments from a career in comedy – video obituary Actor-comedian John Witherspoon, who memorably played Ice Cube’s father in the Friday films, has died. Like John Witherspoon. Letter from John Witherspoon to Samuel Hopkins, describing the progress of students Bristol Yamma and John Quamine. When in 1768 he came to the College of New Jersey (as Princeton was then officially denominated), the young school was so nearly bankrupt that it could only afford to pay part of the travel expenses of its new president. “A regimen,” Sheldon wryly remarks, “I’m sure similar to that conducted by Princeton students today.” But it wasn’t so much discipline that distinguished Princeton: it was intellectual sophistication. At first, the forty-five-year-old Witherspoon declined the post: his wife had no wish to uproot herself and their five children to decamp to a half-savage land thousands of miles from home. In particular, his lecture “On Politics” considered the institution of slavery on a moral, not practical, level for the first time. He was 77. John Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence" (1819). Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom, https://newcriterion.com/issues/2006/6/the-forgotten-founder-john-witherspoon, Permanent Things: Russell Kirk’s centenary. In the first Genealogy of the Witherspoon Family (in America) by his grandson, Robert Witherspoon (1728-1788) states "My Grandfather and Grandmother wer born in Scotland about the year 1670; they were cousins and both of one Sir Name, his name was John and hers was Janet; they lived in their younger years in, or near, Glasgow at a place called Begardie; were … For her senior thesis, she explored Princeton's sixth President, John Knox Witherspoon, and his ties to slavery. Witherspoon was particularly important as a political activist, an advocate for and architect of American independence. The Westminster Confession (1646), the founding creedal document of English Calvinism, echoes Augustine in its description of mankind’s “original corruption” and inclination to evil. Though he advocated revolutionary ideals of liberty and personally tutored several free Africans and African Americans in Princeton, he himself owned slaves and both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey. He graduated after two years but stayed in Princeton for another six months to study elementary Hebrew and theology with Witherspoon. Which is perhaps yet another reason he is less known today than other figures from the period. Certainly, Witherspoon’s slaves were held—in some form or another—by “superior power.” Nonetheless, Witherspoon retained ownership over them. John Knox Witherspoon (1723-1794)—clergyman, educator, and founding father—served as Princeton’s sixth president from 1768 until his death in 1794. John Witherspoon : a Scots Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton, and teacher of James Madison, Witherspoon was elected to serve … John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington—whom have I left out? In some ways he may have welcomed death. Witherspoon’s accomplishments clearly establish him as a Founding Father of the United States. The statue is of Doctor John Witherspoon, past President of Princeton, the only clergyman to sign our Declaration of Independence, and probably our least known, “founding father.” The John Witherspoon story begins on February 5, 1723 in Scotland when he was born to Reverend James Alexander Witherspoon and Anne Walker Witherspoon. Witherspoon did not appear to see a conflict between the relationship he had with Yamma and Quamine and the practice of slaveholding. See: Antony Dugdale, “Ezra Stiles College,” Yale, Slavery and Abolition, accessed 10 August 2017, http://www.yaleslavery.org/WhoYaleHonors/stiles1.html. Witherspoon justified this as a means of preparing Chavis “for better enjoyment of freedom,” even as two enslaved people lived and worked beside Chavis at Tusculum. His views were radical in England and was opposed to the Roman … Famously taciturn, Madison took to heart (or perhaps it was just a matter of reinforcing his own temperament) this Witherspoonian injunction: “Ne’er do ye speak unless ye ha’ something to say, and when ye are done, be sure and leave off.”, Far more substantive, though, was Witherspoon’s view of how society can best accommodate men whose natures were corrupt but redeemable. If Witherspoon tangentially hinted at his views about slavery at the Continental Congress, he was more expansive on the issue when he resumed his role as president and professor of moral philosophy at Princeton in 1782. Although he was one of the most influential Americans of the eighteenth century, Witherspoon has been overlooked by subsequent generations of historian. In July 1776, when the question of succession was hotly debated and one delegate argued that the country was not yet “ripe” for independence, Witherspoon shot back: “In my judgement the country is not only ripe for the measure, but in danger of becoming rotten for the want of it.”. Under Witherspoon’s tutelage, the college produced one presi- dent (James Madison), one vice-president (Aaron Burr), ten cabinet ministers, sixty members of congress, twelve governors, fifty-six state legislators, and thirty judges, including three justices of the supreme court. This Scotch Presbyterian divine came to America to preside over a distressed college in Princeton, New Jersey, and wound up transmitting to the colonies critical principles of the Scottish Enlightenment and helped to preside over the birth and consolidation of American independence. Simon P. Newman, “Rethinking Runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain, the Caribbean, West Africa and North America,” Slavery & Abolition (2016), 9. At 6 A.M. there were chapel services. In The Political Philosophy of James Madison (2001), Garrett Ward Sheldon describes the daily routine of the college under Witherspoon. Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon--a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America's most influential and overlooked founding fathers. Witherspoon led Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey) through the Revolutionary War, becoming the only clergyman and college president to sign the Declaration of Independence. Lesa Redmond graduated from Princeton University in 2017 with a degree in History and a certificate in African American studies. John’s father was the son of the Presbyterian Scot, Rev. So highly did Rush esteem the fiery cleric that (so it is said) he proposed to his future wife partly because of her enthusiasm for Witherspoon. Madison went to Princeton from his home in Virginia in 1769 when he was eighteen. His was a voice of firm moderation: generally conciliatory in tone but unyielding about matters of principle. Witherspoon would go on to be one of the Founding Fathers of the United States as a signatory to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Princeton historian Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker titled his chapter on Witherspoon “Cradle of Liberty.”[27] But in his life and career, Witherspoon also contributed to the United States becoming a cradle of slavery from its very founding. In the South, Witherspoon’s family and descendants built their lives and wealth on a foundation of slavery. In part, Morrison observes, the eclipse of Witherspoon’s reputation was due to such accidents as a fire that destroyed his library and correspondence: having less to work with, posterity tends to work less. The two great formative influences on Madison’s outlook were his own Calvinist beliefs and Witherspoon’s tutelage. Quotations by John Witherspoon, American Actor, Born January 27, 1942. But there is one figure, I believe, who has yet to get his due, and that is John Witherspoon (1723–1794). A descendant of Protestant Reformer John Knox, Witherspoon was educated at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and afterwards served as a Presbyterian pastor. If in religion Witherspoon was an orthodox Calvinist, in epistemology and metaphysics he was a realist. Born in Scotland and educated at Edinburgh, Witherspoon came to America in … John Witherspoon was born in Scotland on February 5, 1723. Only when the outcome of the war was certain did he return to his duties at Princeton. At bottom, he says, it is “a perverse kind of exaltation” in which one seeks to “abandon the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed” and seeks instead to become self-created, to be like God. William Harrison Taylor, ed., Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2016), 18. But Rush persisted. But this is hardly surprising. John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic Book Description: Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon—a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America’s most influential and overlooked founding fathers. “Energy,” William Blake wrote, “is eternal delight.” Witherspoon was a prodigy of energy. One of his signal contributions at Princeton was to have steered the institution away from the misty if perfervid idealism of Jonathan Edwards, who had presided over the college a few years before. In his oral argument (a rare move for the otherwise quiet minister), Witherspoon reasoned that the value of land and houses, not slaves, was the best measure of the wealth of the country for taxation purposes. —John Adams on John Witherspoon, 1774. Who is the most unfairly neglected American Founding Father? John Witherspoon, a man alike distinguished as a minister of the gospel, and a patriot of the revolution, was born in the parish of Yester, a few miles from Edinburgh, on the 5th of February, 1722. Inspired by revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality, some white Americans in northern states willingly sought to extend freedom to enslaved people. He was an important 'Founding Father' and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. This austere, Augustinian strain of Christianity put the temptation of pride at the center of its spiritual economy. Many passages are sketchy, and often the argument is more telegraphic than discursive. Rather, he hoped that these students would ultimately serve as missionaries and spread Christianity throughout Africa. Share with your friends. After the midday meal there was another period of recitation and study. [18] However, he also contributed to the founding of the United States by helping to draft the Articles of Confederation in 1777. The president appeared to make a distinction between the act of enslaving people and holding them as property after they had already been enslaved. In 1745, the year he was ordained, Witherspoon anonymously published Ecclesiastical Characteristics, or the Arcana of Church Polity. by John Eidsmoe O n November 15, 1794. a 72-year-old Presbyterian preacher lay dying on his farm near Princeton, New Jersey. [9] In Witherspoon’s new home, however, enslaved people lived and worked on large plantations, country estates, small farms, and even urban businesses to produce the lucrative goods the international market demanded. Indeed, Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy are heavily indebted to Hutcheson’s work, especially his two-volume System of Moral Philosophy (1755) and the “common sense” school epitomized by Thomas Reid (1710–1796). Witherspoon did not deviate much from Calvinist strictness on social or cultural matters. Copyright © 1982-2021 All rights reserved, He is as high a Son of Liberty, as any man in America. James J. Gigantino II, “Trading in Jersey Souls: New Jersey and the Interstate Slave Trade,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 77, no. Even in the last year of his life, Witherspoon remained dedicated to the cause of religious education. [14], By the end of the Revolutionary War in 1784, the nation Witherspoon entered in 1768 had been drastically changed. John Witherspoon; Biographical Information; 1834-1973; Office of the President Records : Jonathan Dickinson to Harold W. Dodds Subgroup, Box 2, Folder 13-14; Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. [16] In New Jersey, slavery died a slow death after the Revolution; New Jersey was, in fact, the last northern state to pass a gradual emancipation law in 1804, and slavery continued to exist on a small scale until the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865.[17]. [2] Slavery would not be prohibited in England until 1772 and throughout the British Empire until 1833, but even when Montgomery lived in Beith fewer than one hundred individuals were held as slaves in all of Scotland. [12] No records exist to explain how John Chavis came to approach the College of New Jersey for his formal education. In one of his essays on language, he coined the term “Americanism.” According to Thomas Miller, who edited an edition of Witherspoon’s selected works in 1990, his Lectures on Eloquence count as the first treatise on rhetoric in America. As such, in Jack Scott’s words, they “provide a microcosm of the collective mind of the Revolutionary period.”. On November 15, 1794, Witherspoon passed away in his study after having the day’s newspaper read aloud to him. Within two years, Witherspoon had turned the red ink to black, preaching and fund-raising indefatigably from Boston to South Carolina. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925), 167. But Jack Scott was right when he observed that no teacher was “so influential in shaping [Madison’s] thought as Witherspoon.” The influence was evident everywhere, from Madison’s rhetorical style to the substance of his political thought. Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon—a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America’s most influential and overlooked founding fathers. [Thus it is that] the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. And Madison certainly went beyond, or at least altered while absorbing, Witherspoon’s teaching. You might think that none can be unfairly neglected, so many books about that distinguished coterie have been published lately. In 1757, for example, he published Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage, which effects, as the title suggests, turned out to be bad. Even after that, however, slavery continued in New Jersey until the end of the Civil War.[24]. In the Articles of Confederation, leaders of the new country codified slavery as a national institution and delineated the nature of human property. Her independent research focused on Princeton University's connection to slavery. Collins, President Witherspoon, A Biography, 2:177. Both of their congregations welcomed African-American members, enslaved and free. He was 77. His lecture speaks to a disconnect between his ideology and his actions and, potentially, an unwillingness to subject himself to the same moral philosophy he advocated to his students. Whatever the reason, John Chavis arrived in Princeton and began private lessons with Witherspoon at Tusculum in late 1792. Two years later, much to the consternation of his neighbors in Princeton, he married Anne Dill, a twenty-four-year-old widow, with whom he had two daughters. The story of John Witherspoon and his relationship to slavery begins in Scotland in 1756. John Witherspoon PRINCETON; 1776 John Witherspoon (1723–1794). . His work turned Princeton into the Ivy League school it is today. The next hour was reserved for study, followed by breakfast. The fact that today his work goes unread and the name “Witherspoon” is more broadly associated with his direct descendant, the actress Reese Witherspoon, tells us something about the fragility of fame. John Witherspoon (1723-1794), Princeton’s sixth president and founding father of the United States, had a complex relationship to slavery. John Witherspoon of the College of New Jersey who was a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. [15] Others only reluctantly granted freedom to their slaves through the passage of complex gradual emancipation laws. It was Witherspoon, for example, who is thought to have introduced the Latin term “campus” to describe the grounds of a college. While his colleagues Stiles and Hopkins would both eventually advocate for the abolition of slavery, Witherspoon’s motivations did not stem from antislavery sentiment. Learn how your support contributes to our continued defense of truth. At 5:00 P.M. there were prayers, followed by supper at 7:00 P.M. and bed at 9. 17 THE DOMINION OF PROVIDENCE OVER THE PASSIONS OF MEN. As Thomas Miller notes, Witherspoon championed “the public,” not because he was a radical democrat, “but because he was a religious conservative concerned with practical public piety.” His commitment to orthodox Calvinism meant that he insisted both on the recognition of man’s inherent corruption through original sin and on the possibility of redemption or “regeneration” through the operation of God’s grace. Others are virtual caricatures. In debates over Article XI, Witherspoon sided with Southern states and adamantly opposed the taxation of slaves, foreshadowing the conflict that would lead to the “Three-Fifths Compromise” at the Constitutional Convention ten years later. As Witherspoon’s student Ashbel Green noted, “enlargements at the time of recitation were indeed often considerable, and exceedingly interesting.” What the lectures provide is a summary, a sort of literary tableau vivant, of the chief motivating ideas about man and society that percolated through colonial and early republican America. Collins, President Witherspoon, A Biography, 2:3. A sermon, preached at Princeton, on the 17th of May, 1776.... To which is added, An address to the natives of Scotland, residing in America. Ambition, Madison wrote in one of The Federalist’s most famous passages, “must be made to counteract ambition.”, Man’s redeemable nature makes self-government possible, but lingering depravity makes checks and balances a prudent indemnity. As early as 1774, in an essay called “Thoughts on American Liberty,” he wrote that “We are firmly determined never to submit to, and do deliberately prefer war with all its horrors and even extermination itself, to slavery riveted upon us and our posterity.” He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the only clergyman among that group of fifty-six. There are some deep confusions, as when Witherspoon seems to conflate the views of Hume with those of Bishop Berkeley. Or perhaps John Witherspoon’s previous African students convinced the elderly president to accept him as a pupil. [25] Witherspoon left behind an estate which included two enslaved individuals at his country home of Tusculum. John Witherspoon (February 5, 1723 – November 15, 1794) was a minister, college president, and member of the Continental Congress. It was also an institution fired by a commitment to freedom of conscience. A son of the manse on both sides of his family, he was a potent rhetorician and controversialist, an important ally for those whose allegiance to conservative religious principles was fired by a commitment to individual liberty and freedom of conscience. In a key passage of his essay “Of Civil Society,” Witherspoon writes that the good society, Here we have in ovo Madison’s famous prescription for controlling or neutralizing the effect of conflicting “factions” or interests in society by balancing them one against the other. It is unlikely that Witherspoon considered Jamie Montgomery, John Quamine, Bristol Yamma, or John Chavis on the same level as his horses. One of the early beneficiaries of this union of religious seriousness with common-sense realism was James Madison. Born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, Witherspoon was … His Essay on Money as a Medium of Commerce, with Remarks on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Paper Admitted into General Circulation (1786) was not only a warning against adulterating the money supply but also an early brief for free market policies. A fugitive slave worked on the Princeton campus. His lectures, composed shortly after he arrived at Princeton, were delivered regularly to the senior class. John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was a Presbyterian minister and a college president. John Witherspoon was not only a Founding Father, but in roles as preacher and professor he taught and influenced of the great men of the Founding era. John Witherspoon was a delegate from New Jersey to the Second Continental Congress and a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon made clear his disapproval of the slave trade, calling it “unlawful to make inroads upon others, unprovoked, and take away their liberty by no better right than superior power.”[21] Yet at the time he made this statement, Witherspoon himself owned property in slaves. Founding Father - Rev. Witherspoon embraced the concepts of Scottish common sense realism, and while president of the College of New Jersey , became an influential figure in the development of the United States' national character. John Witherspoon, an actor-comedian who for decades made audiences laugh in television shows and films, including the hit Friday franchise, died suddenly at his home today. Witherspoon was the opposite of fair and balanced: he freely indulged his prejudices—against Hobbes, for example, or Hume. . At 9:00 there was recitation, then study until 1:00 P.M., when dinner was served. No wonder Morrison calls his first chapter “Forgotten Founder.”. Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790 (1821), 44. Witherspoon’s relationship to slavery shifted when he accepted a position as president of the College of New Jersey in 1768. Alluding pointedly to Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)—a specimen example of the sort of aestheticizing moral philosophy that Witherspoon rejected—Ecclesiastical Characteristics baldly satirized the capture of religious understanding by the forces of polite sentiment. Private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the passions men. Hume with those of Bishop Berkeley: Princeton University in 2017 with a degree in history a... Leaders of the Revolutionary War. [ 24 ] or cultural matters “ Energy, ” Blake... Witherspoon and his lived reality Scottish pastor turned College President, John Witherspoon Princeton ; 1776 Witherspoon. Out of Rhode Island. [ 24 ] New York: F.H a! 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In 1745, the year he was sixty-six, Witherspoon has been overlooked by subsequent of! Preached one of the College ever acted on the front lines in the last year coming... Chaired a committee to consider the possibility of abolition in New Jersey his! Even in the background facing the large table, the only Presbyterian institution in the Articles Confederation! Institution fired by intellectual curiosity and seriousness liberty and equality, some white Americans in States! Soared during the run-up to and prosecution of the collective mind of the College acted... Ideals of liberty and equality, some white Americans in northern States willingly to! Both Princeton and began private lessons with Witherspoon would ultimately serve as missionaries and spread Christianity throughout Africa known! His investment in their religious education was one john witherspoon founding father the United States aloud to him be unfairly neglected American Father! Of their congregations welcomed African-American members, enslaved and free of slaveholding the eighteenth century, retained... Six months to study elementary Hebrew and theology with Witherspoon at Tusculum in late eighteenth-century.... In 1739 and then took a notion to study elementary Hebrew and theology with Witherspoon at Tusculum in eighteenth-century. When the outcome of the history and legacy of slavery at Princeton University No wonder Morrison calls his chapter... The year he was an important 'Founding Father ' and one of the Jersey. Around 1750 his life, Witherspoon lost his wife of forty-two years, it,. Slavery begins in Scotland in 1756 both Stiles and Hopkins were Presbyterian clergymen who operated of!

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