The Versatile John Witherspoon

Who was John Witherspoon? The only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon was a well-known fixture of political and religious discourse. Today he is, in Dr. Jeffry Morrison’s words, “the most interesting Founder you’ve never heard of.” Morrison talks with host James Patterson about his 2003 book, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, and more.

Related Links

John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic: Catholicism in American Culture by Jeffry H. Morrison
“The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men” by John Witherspoon
Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730-1805 by Ellis Sandoz

Transcript

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty and Professor of Politics at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee. Today, my guest is Dr. Jeffry Morrison. He’s a professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. And he’s also the Director of Academics at the Federal Government’s James Madison Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. Usually when we have guests on our podcast, it is to discuss a new book, but in this case, we’re talking about one that’s a little older than 20 years and it’s Dr. Morrison’s John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic.

(01:25):

It’s a great book to read, or if you’ve already read it, reread given that this is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Since Witherspoon was not only a signer, but also the only member of clergy to sign the Declaration. Dr. Morrison, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (01:42):

Well, Dr. Patterson, James, thank you very much. I am genuinely gratified to be joining you. I’m a big fan of Liberty Fund and its various institutional manifestations and have a long history with them and I’m a fan of this podcast and so very gratified to be joining you today and thank you for the interest in John Witherspoon. And I do actually have another book on Witherspoon that’s forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. And we’re hopeful to get that imprint in this semi-quincentennial year and it’s a volume of his political writings that’s a part of a relatively new series with Cambridge called “The Political Writings of American Statesmen.”

James Patterson (02:25):

Oh, that’s very exciting and very needed. If Witherspoon is so important, why is he so uncommon in the list of founders that people talk about? Why is he such a rare figure in the American imagination?

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (02:38):

Yes, it’s a great question and partly it’s his fault, actually. And we’ll begin with that. But in a sort of semi-jocular way, I like to say that he’s perhaps the most interesting founding father that you’ve never heard of. And if we were to ask persons of his generation, he’d have been noted as one of the most formidable of the founders and indeed members of the Transatlantic Enlightenment and he was seemingly everywhere and he was at the nexus of three of the most important avenues of political culture in the colonies and the new nation, namely education and religion and politics and was equally formidable in all three of those roles. Why don’t we know more about him? Well, I joke partly it’s his fault. He was maddeningly unconcerned about what our politicians call legacy. He just was not interested in the legacy question. So shortly before his death in 1794, he ordered all his correspondence burned.

(03:45):

Just terrible, terrible loss to biographers and historians and political theorists as you and I are. So in compiling this volume of his political writings, which I’ve done for Cambridge, I’ve had to go to various archival sources and other collections of the writings of founders. Alexander Hamilton, for example, with whom he corresponded when Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton asked him for advice on public credit and Witherspoon wrote him a lengthy response, whose language Hamilton then incorporated into his statements on public credit, for example. So that’s maddening and we don’t quite understand why he did it, but he did. That’s the first reason. Second reason is that I think not to sound conspiratorial, but I think there certainly was at the time and there continues to this day to be a little skepticism about people who are overtly religious participating in politics, holding political office.

(04:49):

And so I think there’s been a slight bias in the academy over the decades and now over the centuries toward a man who by our lights, I think we would say was the most evangelical of the founders. So just to give a quick contemporary example, contemporary to his time, the new Georgia Constitution written as so many of those state constitutions were post-independence, 1776, forbade ministers from holding office in the Georgia legislature. That was not uncommon. So that’s just one example of a kind of bias. Jefferson, in fact, favored a similar prohibition in the new Virginia Constitution and Madison had to gently remind him that that was illiberal and that was actually punishing with a civil penalty someone for their religious beliefs and a violation of Jefferson’s wall of separation, though it’s anachronistic to use that phrase. And so anyway, that’s I think a second factor.

(05:55):

The first one is his own lack of interest in his own legacy and the burning of the correspondence. By the way, some of it also was burned and his papers were burned when the British sacked Nassau Hall at Princeton during the revolution. So we are lacking a lot of primary material and paper trail that the other more famous founders were so self-conscious in preserving. We’ve got roughly 20,000 letters of Jefferson’s and I know you’re a proud Cavalier yourself and UVA PhD and I had the privilege of being a visiting professor there last year myself in Jim Ceaser’s program on Constitutionalism and Democracy. But Jefferson left behind 20,000 and carefully preserved them with that letter press. Same with George Washington, roughly 20,000 letters in a quarter century shorter life than Jefferson’s. But Washington saves every scrap of paper he can. Witherspoon doesn’t. Some are burned by the British, he orders them burned.

(06:57):

So those are two, I think, principal reasons why. He’s understudied, I think, and somewhat forgotten. There does seem to be a kind of resurgence or renaissance in Witherspoon studies in recent decades and I’m very pleased to have a small part in helping to bring that about.

James Patterson (07:15):

The future statesmen that are listening to this podcast, please do not burn your letters or delete your emails.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (07:23):

Or your texts or your truths or whatever that may be, tweets or Xs, whatever we have to call these things. James, maybe you share the same concern I do as a kind of political historian and political theorist. Future generations will not have the same kind of archives that you and I have had the privilege of working in because so much of this is ephemeral. Tweets, texts, and emails and things like that, we don’t tend to write physical letters anymore.

James Patterson (07:56):

Yeah. It’s a concern, especially when it comes to not even now but maybe like 10 or 15 years ago when it didn’t occur to people and there are entire inboxes that have just been deleted because somebody died and they wanted to use the identification. I first had this thought when I lost access to an email address and couldn’t find something I needed. And ever since then, I’ve been somewhat compulsively saving all my email in a more Washingtonian style than a Witherspoonian one. So I do like the idea of burning the hard drives though. It goes from just throwing them in the fireplace to like a chemical fire that needs to have a control burn. So who is John Witherspoon and where did he come from?

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (08:49):

He was a native Scotsman. So he was born and raised and educated in Scotland and was principally known as a pastor and was, again, to use a slightly anachronistic analogy: He was a pastor of a couple of mega churches in Scotland and he was prominent in the Scottish Kirk. He was the defender of the more conservative wing of the Scottish Church, conservative theologically and conservative in terms of, well, we might say what sort of public facing. His principal adversary was a man, I’m sure you know, Francis Hutcheson, right? One of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, who himself was an ordained clergyman like Witherspoon, but Hutcheson was the head of the so-called moderate party who were slightly less conservative theologically and also more interested in the public appearance of the church. And so Witherspoon was the leader of the more conservative wing of the church.

(09:53):

And that frankly is one of the things that got him noticed in the colonies and particularly at the struggling little college of New Jersey, which is now Princeton University, who began whose trustees and alumni like Benjamin Rush, for example, began to court Witherspoon in the mid 1760s to come to Princeton and become the president of that struggling de facto Presbyterian college. So he’s a Scotsman, he’s a churchman. When he comes to America, he’s 45 years old, he becomes the sixth president of what’s now Princeton University and he completely reforms that college, revives it. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that he probably saved Princeton from going out of existence and helped to lay the foundation for the great university it has become and I had myself the privilege of teaching there for a year in the early 2000s as a visiting professor of politics.

(10:54):

And there’s a Witherspoon Street there in Princeton. There is a semi-heroic statue of him on the campus, which has been the subject of controversy. But in a nutshell, that’s who he is. But when he comes to America, he begins to wear more hats and a kind of latent genius for organization, for promotion, for fundraising, for education, for politics, comes out. He had never preached a genuinely political sermon in his life until he came to the colonies and very quickly became aligned with the Patriot Cause and then of course later so he serves in the New Jersey provincial assemblies, committees of correspondence, then preaches May 17 was the 250th anniversary of Witherspoon’s most famous sermon called “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men.” That is one of the, if not the most, one of the handful of most important political sermons of the entire revolutionary era.

(12:00):

It’s in Ellis Sandoz’ great collection, revolutionary sermons and the fame of that and it’s reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic and widely circulated, that catapults him into the Second Continental Congress and he arrives in late June in time 1776 to argue down the more conservative faction, conservative meaning people like John Dickinson, for example, who think it’s too early to be declaring independence. And Witherspoon takes part in those debates, argues down Dickinson, arrives in time to do that, and then sign the declaration. And in my view, it’s partly speculative, but I’m fairly convinced that it’s he who introduces the language of the protection of divine providence into the text, the final text of the declaration. And then he goes on in a 26-year career as the president of Princeton to, as I say, reform, revive that institution to make it the most truly national of the colonial colleges and then the early national colleges.

(13:07):

It is a factory of American patriots and then early national leaders at the state level as well state judges. I have a list in that book, which you may have seen in John Witherspoon and the Founding the American Republic. The list of his graduates and the influence that he had in politics in particular is it’s just astounding. Gary Wills has called him probably the most influential teacher in the entirety of American history. I would endorse that Pulitzer Prize winner in Gary Wills. So in very brief, that’s who he is. He’s a man at the nexus of these three most important avenues of political culture, education, religion and politics and they form a kind of seamless integrated whole in his life. In short, that’s who he is.

James Patterson (13:57):

One of the first things Witherspoon does when he gets to Princeton is he tries to shift a kind of metaphysical point of view that he sort of vigorously opposed Berkeley and idealism in favor of his own Scottish enlightenment, common sense philosophy. This is part of the influence that he has on this, as you call foundry of statesmen, right? That they learn something that’s a little less esoteric.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (14:24):

Yes, you’re exactly right about that. And you’re right to bring up Bishop Berkeley, B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y. That’s how the Brits say it. Bishop George Berkeley was an Anglican bishop, very Orthodox in his Christian theology, but held to idealism, which is to say that he believed as other European philosophers did as Jonathan Edwards actually seems to have believed, the American evangelist, that the external world is not independent of minds. And incidentally, University of California at Berkeley is named for Bishop Berkeley in the town of Berkeley, California, though we Americans say it Berkeley, is his legacy. Yeah, it’s his namesake, that town and that university.

James Patterson (15:15):

So we have him to blame.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (15:20):

That’s right. He has sins to answer for. That’s right. But at any rate, you’re exactly right. One of the first things Witherspoon does is to root that out, go after that root and branch at Princeton. And he basically fires all of the tutors, including Jonathan Edwards Jr., who carry that philosophy and he replaces them and it—it being the idealism—with his own version, which is kind of an amalgam of Scottish sense, Scottish common sense philosophy and Scottish moral sense philosophy. And we needn’t get too far in the weeds and it’s easy for me to get out of my depth in that as well. But basically it is, as the name suggests, a belief, a philosophical belief that is held by people like Thomas Reid, R-E-I-D, in Scotland and others. It’s kind of a forerunner one might say of maybe American pragmatism, that the external world exists independent of our minds and perceptions, that what we perceive about the external world, everything from colors to secondary qualities and things are reliable.

(16:37):

It is a pushback against skepticism. The skepticism of that towering Scottish enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, H-U-M-E, who likewise called into question the existence, the independent existence of an external world and even things like cause and effect. So again, without getting too esoteric, this is a word you used rightly a few minutes ago, that’s Witherspoon’s contribution to bring Princeton back to a more common sensical view of the world and our perceptions and to root that out, that idealism and that stuck for a long, long time.

James Patterson (17:21):

As you say, Witherspoon’s training in the Scottish philosophy and moral sense, and especially in common sense epistemology, could hardly have been better preparation for his distinguished career in American politics. And then you quote him directly saying, this is a few pages later, this is him Witherspoon: “I do not refuse submission because the British are corrupt or profligate, although probably many of them are so, but because they are men and therefore liable to all the selfish bias inseparable from human nature, I call this claim unjust of making laws to bind us in all cases whatsoever because they are separated from us independent of us and have an interest in opposing us.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (18:01):

My bigger point there is that this philosophical and epistemological, that’s just the philosopher’s fancy word for a theory of knowledge, it is literally commonsensical. That’s what the Scottish school is called and Americans are, I hope not painting with too broad a brush, but I’ve got Tocqueville that we can call into our ranks as proof of this or an argument for this Americans are, well, commonsensical. I mentioned pragmatism earlier. We Americans have come up with precisely one philosophical school and it’s pragmatism and reduced to one sentence, what is pragmatism? It’s the belief that if it works, it must be true. I mean, that’s as pragmatic as you can get. That’s as American as you can get. We Americans in general don’t go in for too much highfalutin esoteric, keep coming back to your good word there philosophy. We leave that to the French and the Germans.

(19:07):

Yes, even to Hume and others. Tocqueville has this great line somewhere in democracy in America where he says, “Americans are frightened by general ideas. They’re frightened by them.” He says, we’re much more interested in making money and the virtues that are associated with that sort of thing. And I think he’s right on the money as he is on so many things, Tocqueville. So as I say, it couldn’t have been better preparation for Witherspoon, but his mind is already formed. He’s 45 years old when he comes to the colonies. And so he is a mature intellect and just peaking in his powers. And so the next 26 years spent as president of that college are, I think some of the most dispositive in all of American history and it’s the perfect time, right? 1768 to 1794, those are the years of the American founding. The pot’s beginning to boil over in the sort of pre-revolutionary period there and he is involved. He’s right at the epicenter from Philadelphia to Princeton and you just draw a circle around that, that’s roughly 60 mile radius there.

(20:22):

He’s just at the right place at the right time and he has the right ideas and the right skills and they are latent and they come out as an educator, as a politician, as a preacher.

James Patterson (20:35):

One of the things that I learned from this book, I didn’t know this, was that … Well, I mean, we all should know that his greatest student was James Madison. That’s normally how people even know about Witherspoon is that he was Madison’s teacher. But what I did not know is that he was almost Alexander Hamilton’s teacher, which would’ve been insane.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (20:54):

No kidding, no kidding. And it would’ve made a much better book, too, James. If I’d had two of the three primary authors of the Federalist as his star pupils. Yeah. And it’s an interesting story if you indulge me for a minute or two.

James Patterson (21:13):

Oh, sure. Yeah. I was about to ask you to tell that story.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (21:15):

Yeah. Why Hamilton didn’t end up going there. So Hamilton comes his ship, he comes from the island of Nevis, I believe. So he’s born and raised in the Caribbean, comes, takes ship, lands in New York City and then spends some time in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, at a little college prep school. He has already manifested his brilliance and genius and he’s kind of in his late teens when he arrives. Hamilton didn’t know the year of his birth. We still don’t know for sure. You look him up on Wikipedia or some other scholarly website, you’ll see that there’s a range of dates for his births, but he’s in his late teens. And so having been in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and having been sponsored by some Presbyterian elders in the Caribbean, he’s already predisposed to Presbyterianism. So he hears about the College of New Jersey. He’s interested in it.

(22:20):

He goes and has an audience with President Witherspoon. It’s a kind of informal application and Witherspoon examines him orally and concludes that he’s a brilliant young man already near total recall well educated for a youth, though he picked it up, Hamilton picked it up in the Caribbean then the short time at the academy. Witherspoon is inclined to recommend to the trustees of the college to admit Hamilton, but at the last moment, Hamilton says, “There’s just one condition. I want to be able to go through the curriculum as fast as I can.” And they had kind of a set curriculum and Witherspoon says in our lingo, “It’s a big ask. I’ll run it by the trustees, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.” So he does and the trustees reject that, that little rider that Hamilton puts on it. I had mentioned earlier that Witherspoon remade Princeton as the most national, the most patriotic during the revolutionary period, the most national and republican with a small “r” of the colonial and then early national colleges and Hamilton likes that.

(23:42):

He wants to go to a college that’s known for its small “r” republican virtues and orientation, but the trustees turn that little ask down. They say, “We’ll, admit him, but he has to go through the regular curriculum just like everybody else.” And so Hamilton decides to enroll at what was then King’s College, right? So it’s got that monarchical, it’s now Columbia University. And so it’s got that monarchical taint to it. He would have preferred to go to Princeton, but he just wants to tear through there as quick as his intellect will allow. And so that’s why he ends up Hamilton and ends up at Columbia, King’s College Columbia rather than at Princeton and makes my book not so weighty as it might have been. We would know. Maybe James, we would know more about what he’d be more famous than he is if he’d had that connection.

(24:34):

But I’ll quickly add, if you don’t mind, Hamilton and Witherspoon continued to stay in touch and Hamilton reached out to Witherspoon. I’ve already mentioned this when he was the new first Secretary of the Treasury in the first Washington administration. And he respected Witherspoon’s learning enough and especially his theories of political economy to reach out to Witherspoon to ask him for advice on the public credit, how to shore that up in this broke fledgling republic post revolution, post Articles of Confederation and Witherspoon wrote him back and Hamilton incorporated some of that language into his report on public credit. And the editors of the Hamilton papers note this in a footnote. So the association didn’t end, but sadly it was not as it was with Madison, a close relationship educationally. Madison readers may know or listeners may know, stayed on roughly an additional academic year following his graduation at Princeton to study under Witherspoon in a tutorial relationship.

(25:44):

So he took tutorials under Witherspoon’s guidance in at least two subjects. Law, that’s very important I think for the future of this country and Hebrew of all things, which tells us that Madison is thinking about the ministry as a vocation. So that’s the Hamilton story.

James Patterson (26:04):

So the thing with Madison is that he seems to carry a lot of Witherspoon’s political theology with him into his adult life. How much overlap is there really though between the two? Or maybe I’m seeing things.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (26:21):

Oh, I think there’s quite a bit. So I think your eyesight’s accurate. It’s 2020 and that’s a good phrase, by the way, James, political theology. It’s political and it’s theological and they’re not necessarily contradictory. We Americans were very scrupulous about separating the two and especially today that most controversial of phrases, Christian nationalism. It’s a little mysterious to me. I’m not sure exactly what that thing is, but whatever it is, we sure seem to be scared of it. So we’re very scrupulous and my own view is rightly so in separating. We don’t ever want an established church. We don’t want there ever to be civil penalties or rewards for private religious beliefs and we want what the founders called freedom of conscience always to be guarded and protected. It’s a natural right. It’s an inalienable right, freedom of conscience. But political theology, it was almost its own sort of branch of study in the founding period.

(27:36):

Witherspoon is complex and nuanced and even though he is the lone clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, I believe he’s also the lone clergyman to sign the Articles of Confederation, what I consider to be our first national constitution. I know the doctors disagree about that, but it’s my own view that it is. And then on behalf of New Jersey, he ratifies the Constitution as part of the New Jersey Convention. So there’s three of those four organic laws of the United States right there in which he has a direct hand, but he always wore his clerical vocation literally on his sleeve. That’s called a Geneva collar. John Calvin would have worn and George Whitfield wore and Jonathan Edwards wore, but it also … So that’s the collar, but they also had cuffs, big cuffs that the clergy wore. Witherspoon intentionally wore that garb to the Continental Congress, to political gatherings in the New Jersey provincial and later state legislature to make a point, which was Georgia is wrong to forbid clergymen from serving in the legislature.

(28:57):

Virginia would be wrong to do it. Jefferson was wrong to support that separation. Madison, and since you mentioned it, Madison is kind of the recipient and carries much of Witherspoon’s political theology into his own career. I think you’re exactly right about that. That’s one of those articles of faith, if you will, of Witherspoon’s political theology, that religion has a seat at the table. It’s not forbidden, it’s not dangerous. As a matter of fact, he holds to an axiom, which I think every major and minor founder holds to from the most skeptical like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to the most Orthodox and evangelical like John Witherspoon, John Jay, for instance, very similar in his own deep Christian faith and everybody in between. They all agree about this, that there is an axiom that religion is necessary for healthy republican and small “r” government, democratic republican government.

(30:05):

Why? Because you can’t have a moral people without a religious people and you must have a moral people in order to have a healthy and stable republican government, democratic government. Because of all the forms of government, a democracy is supposed to have the lightest hand in the government. We don’t have a police state. We don’t have a cabinet position for theological orthodoxy like they do in some parts of our world today. So not having a police state, not having a real heavy government hand, we have to have citizens who are self-governing, who respect private property and who respect the natural and civil rights of their neighbors and fellow citizens. And that comes from inside since it doesn’t come from outside in a Republican government with a very heavy hand. So where does that come from? Comes from religion according to the founders. Now we might disagree with that today.

(31:13):

We might say that that’s been disproven today or something, but every one of them holds that and James Madison held it. So when Madison had his two terms as president, what does he do? He issues religious proclamations, which Thomas Jefferson had not done, right? His best friend and political colleague. Madison returned to the practice of George Washington in issuing those kinds of things because he carried John Witherspoon’s political theology into his own career. What was one of the articles of faith of that political theology, that civil society is best when there is a recognition of religion and when religion has a seat at the table, so to speak, when it is free from government penalties and rewards as well, but free to do its good work of producing moral self-governing citizens and how do you encourage that? Well, occasionally you can have a very kind of plain vanilla religious proclamation in which the country acknowledges its gratitude to the deity.

(32:24):

It’s not necessarily Christian, it’s not necessarily Judeo-Christian, but of course that’s the milieu of the time. But Madison, in fact, says that society has a duty, a duty to render a due reverence to the creator, to the deity without ever forcing that on people. We don’t force them to be Presbyterians or even Christians or Jews or any religion, but that there is a duty on the part of the government and civil society to acknowledge from time to time the benevolence of the creator and the deity. So those are the kinds of things that without, without establishment, Witherspoon was emphatic that no religion was to be established by the government, not New Jersey, not in the United States, not even his own religion of Presbyterianism. And so Madison carries some of those articles of faith, tenets of that political theology into his career. Now the interesting thing, James, if you’ll give me another minute or two on Madison is- It’s

James Patterson (33:32):

Your show, man. Of course.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (33:34):

No, it’s your show. And I like to be it. Later in his life, Madison evidently repented of some of the things he did while president, like issuing religious proclamations and commissioning clergy who were chaplains in the armed forces. So there’s something that historians called the detached memoranda, which were undated, but we probably think were written in 1819. They’re detached in the sense that they weren’t part of any other document. They were never meant to be public. They’re probably just musings that Madison—kind of doodlings, almost that Madison wrote to himself—trying to work through some issues and looking back on his career as president, he had rather troubled two terms as president. And what does he write in there? That it was probably a mistake for him now, to looking back on it to have issued those religious proclamations and he questions whether he should have commissioned chaplains in the US armed forces.

(34:43):

He doesn’t have any qualms about states doing such things. So perhaps he did repent of that and sort of … But in the pressure of the moment, right during the war of 1812, he on behalf of the nation and encourages the nation to cry out to the Creator who had so signally, he thought, protected and guarded the United States in its infancy. So during this war, which, side note, Madison basically caused, kind of hectored the Congress into declaring. So he got the Capitol building burned to the ground, for example, and the White House on his watch. So yeah, maybe he did have some reason to repent of many things that he did during that presidency, but in the pressure of the moment, right, he reverts back to the practice of earlier presidents Washington and Adams and he reverses the course that had been taken by Thomas Jefferson, his close friend and co-founder of the Democratic Party.

(35:54):

And so I would agree with you that those are instances where Madison seems to, not only seems to, does in fact follow in Witherspoon’s footsteps and adopt Witherspoon’s again, good phrase of yours, political theology in his political career.

James Patterson (36:15):

So it’s been 23 years, maybe 24 years since the first publication of this book. So what’s changed? What have we learned maybe in the ensuing years that might show up in the forthcoming book, maybe in its introduction in our understanding of Witherspoon?

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (36:32):

Yeah. Well, there have been quite a few books that have come out that sort of a little cottage industry of Witherspoon studies and I think much-needed and some very good work has been done by historians, by … Well, just to take one quick example, the great Princeton historian, Sean Wilentz wrote a marvelous piece, journal article on the travail of John Witherspoon respecting slavery. So there is one aspect of Witherspoon’s life and career that has received more attention. It’s controversial. I alluded earlier to a controversy on the Princeton campus about whether the semi-heroic statue to him that was erected in the early 2000s should be torn down, should be moved to somewhere else, should have a plaque attached to it, which explains, qualifies Witherspoon’s place in Princeton history because he did own for a period of time first one and then two enslaved persons. But the story around that is very complex and Sean Wilentz has written, as I say, a marvelous piece, historical detective work, which I think was published in a journal called Theology Today.

(37:59):

I think that’s where that piece came out. In fact, I think there’s an entire edition of that number of that journal devoted to that very question, John Witherspoon and slavery, but book length studies, some by theologians, some by historians, some by political scientists and philosophers have come out. So the slavery issue, that’s one thing we’ve learned quite a bit about and turns out again, it’s very nuanced and complex. And one of the things I have tried to do in this forthcoming volume from Cambridge on Witherspoon’s political writings is to give a fuller sort of documentary record Witherspoon’s multifaceted career or careers plural. I have reconstructed a lot of his correspondence, which had to have been gathered from these various existing repositories and things and his political sermons and religious writings and his Princeton lectures. There’s another area that we’re learning more about. There’s an entire series of lectures that he gave lectures on chronology and history that have never been published.

(39:15):

And I’m working with a younger scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on and created an annotated edition of those lectures. And I sample some of them in the forthcoming volume. So there’s an entire little area of Witherspoon scholarship that’s being looked into now. His Princeton lectures, very influential. Some of them, his lectures on moral philosophy, for example, were the first of their kind ever given in an American university. So I think there’s still much to learn as David McCullough once said, the late David McCullough, we owe great debt to men of that generation and to quote McCullough directly, “We cannot learn too much about them.” So I think he was exactly right about that and Witherspoon, though not one of the famous six, one of the big six who left those enormous paper trails still has much to teach us, I think. And he literally is unique.

(40:14):

That’s a word that gets misused an awful lot, I think, because it means only one of a kind. You can’t modify the word unique. Can’t be sort of unique or very unique or kind of unique. Witherspoon was literally unique. There was only one of them. He’s the only one. He’s the only practicing clergyman to sign the Declaration, to sign the Articles of Confederation to help ratify the Constitution. And he wears all three of these hats with equal skill, college president, politician, preacher. I’m encouraged to see that there is, as I say, kind of a little cottage industry of Witherspoon Scholarship that’s grown up in the 23 years as you point out uncomfortably to me it’s been since that book came out.

James Patterson (40:59):

The book is John Witherspoon and the founding of the American Republic, the author, Dr. Jeffry H. Morrison. Thank you so much for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison (41:09):

Well, Dr. Patterson, it’s been a real pleasure and a privilege for me. Thank you.

James Patterson (41:14):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.