John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic

Jeffry H. Morrison

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. Witherspoon was an active member of the Continental Congress and was the only clergyman both to sign the Declaration of Independence and to ratify the federal Constitution. During his tenure as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Witherspoon became a mentor to James Madison and influenced many leaders and thinkers of the founding period. He was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of politics, religion, and education during the crucial first decades of the new republic.

Morrison locates Witherspoon in the context of early American political thought and charts the various influences on his thinking. This impressive work of scholarship offers a broad treatment of Witherspoon’s constitutionalism, including his contributions to the mediating institutions of religion and education, and to political institutions from the colonial through the early federal periods. This book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in American political history and thought and in the relation of religion to American politics.

Sujets

• Revolutionary Periode
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• United States

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 27 janvier 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780268087227
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

J ohn W itherspoon
AND THE FOUNDING OF THE
AMERICAN REPUBLIC
J ohn W itherspoon
AND THE FOUNDING OF THE
AMERICAN REPUBLIC
JEFFRY H. MORRISON

University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
All Rights Reserved
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2005 by University of Notre Dame
Paperback edition printed in 2007
Reprinted in 2015
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morrison, Jeffry H., 1961-
John Witherspoon and the founding of the American republic / Jeffry H. Morrison
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN -13: 978-0-268-03485-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN -10: 0-268-03485-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN -13: 978-0-268-03508-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN -10: 0-268-03508-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Witherspoon, John, 1723-1794. 2. Witherspoon, John, 1723-1794-Political and social views. 3. Statesmen-United States-Biography. 4. United States. Declaration of Independence-Signers-Biography. 5. Presbyterian Church-United States-Clergy-Biography. 6. United States-Politics and government-1775-1783. I. Title.
E 302.6. W 7 M 677 2005
973.3 092-dc22
2005004931
ISBN 9780268087227
This book is printed on acid-free aper
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
for melissa
If we could go right back to the elements of societies and examine the very first records of their histories, I have no doubt that we should there find the first cause of their prejudices, habits, dominating passions, and all that comes to be called the national character . America is the only country in which we can watch the natural quiet growth of society and where it is possible to be exact about the influence of the point of departure on the future of a state .
-Alexis de Tocqueville
contents

Acknowledgments

Preface
chapter one
Forgotten Founder
chapter two
The Public Interest of Religion : Virtue, Religion, and the Republic
chapter three
Plain Common Sense : Educating Patriots at Princeton
chapter four
An Animated Son of Liberty : Revolution
chapter five
An Equal Republican Constitution : Confederation, Union, and Nationhood
chapter six
John Witherspoon and Early American Political Thought
appendix a
Witherspoon and the Debate in Congress on Independence, July 1776
appendix b
Dating the Sermon Delivered at a Public Thanksgiving After Peace, November 1782

Notes

Bibliography

Index
acknowledgments
William Wilberforce once remarked that a man he had just met was sadly in need of the chastening hand of a sound classical education. The same can be said of me; but fortunately I had the benefit of many chastening hands (and brains) along the way to writing this book. To begin with, there were my teachers at Georgetown University: Walter Berns, George Carey, and Joshua Mitchell. Carey, that most enlightened person, made especially trenchant suggestions. There were also these colleagues and mentors who helped me in innumerable ways: Daniel Dreisbach of the American University; my former colleagues in the Department of Political Science at the United States Air Force Academy, particularly Paul Carrese and Stephen Knott (now at the University of Virginia); John Witte, Jr., of Emory University Law School; Mark Hall of George Fox University; Garrett Ward Sheldon of the University of Virginia s College at Wise; Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute; Barry Ryan of Regent University; and Robert George of Princeton University. I owe a special debt to my editor (now friend) at the University of Notre Dame Press, its associate director, Jeffrey Gainey. Of course, as academic authors are compelled to say, none of these people is to be held accountable for the book s shortcomings and errors, though I do recall Publius saying something like I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man.
I received help from a number of archivists and librarians while researching. Among these I am especially grateful to: Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., of the American Philosophical Society, for making available to me his files on Witherspoon; Marvin W. Kranz of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Ben Primer and Margaret Sherry at the Princeton University Library; and Dr. Elizabeth Stone, archivist of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.
Last, I wish to acknowledge the extraordinary generosity of the Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute of Wilmington, Delaware; and the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey, all of whom under - wrote my efforts; and the faculty and staff of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, which hosted me and provided a visiting professorship during the academic year 2003-2004.
Spring 2004
Princeton, New Jersey
preface
In the northwest quadrant of that monumental city, Washington, D.C., a bronze statue of John Witherspoon towers over traffic between Connecticut Avenue and N Street: stately, imposing, and altogether ignored. Most people who work or live in Washington, even residents of fashionable Northwest, are equally ignorant of its existence (it is a stone s throw from a well-known statue of Longfellow) and the man it memorializes.
That monumental statue, now one of three in the U.S. to Witherspoon-another, equally ignored, is in Philadelphia s Fairmount Park-was erected in the early twentieth century in front of the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, whose members wished to commemorate one of their own denomination who had signed the Declaration of Independence and had earned, they thought, a distinguished place in American history. 1 Those Presbyterians wished to memorialize Witherspoon both as a churchman and as a statesman. A Witherspoon Memorial Association was formed; private donations were solicited from Andrew Carnegie and others; the sculptor William Couper, creator of the Longfellow statue in Washington and the heroic likeness of John Smith at Jamestown, was commissioned; and in 1909 the statue was unveiled and dedicated. At the dedication ceremony addresses were given by Lord James Bryce, the English ambassador, and by President Woodrow Wilson, a son of Witherspoon s Princeton, whose address was titled a Review of the Life and Services of Witherspoon. 2 Around that time the statue became, as so many things eventually do become, the property of the federal government. 3 Years passed, the Church of the Covenant was torn down, and in 1976, during the bicentennial of the Declaration, a committee of Presbyterians was formed to have the Witherspoon statue moved to the National Presbyterian Church on Nebraska Avenue. In the event, the statue remained where it had always been, and Witherspoon himself continued to fade from memory.
I began this project in 1994, the bicentennial of Witherspoon s death. In the decade I have been studying Witherspoon I have conceived a fondness for that statue, partly because I like underdogs, but mostly because it teaches two telling object lessons. First, it illustrates how thoroughly Witherspoon has been ignored in the century since its commissioning; second, it shows up the confusion that sometimes exists in modern America over the proper degree of separation between church and state. Apparently the proposed transfer of the statue in 1976 occasioned some hand-wringing over the constitutionality of the federal government honoring a minister with a statue in the first place. Two bills (H. R.12778 and S.2996) 4 were introduced in Congress that year authorizing the relocation of the Witherspoon monument, but the project died a quiet death, lost in the welter of bicentennial activities and what a contemporary wag called tons of red-white-and-blue junk. Nevertheless, because he was a preeminent churchman and statesman, Witherspoon still affords an ideal point of departure, to appropriate Alexis de Tocqueville s language, for addressing questions about religion and politics and, more broadly, about the American founding.
But Witherspoon scholarship remains, as one writer put it in 1990, astonishingly thin. 5 The best book on Witherspoon is still Varnum Lansing Collins s President Witherspoon: A Biography , a two-volume work from 1925 that was reprinted in 1969. There have been several other biographies of varying quality besides the Collins work. Of these, two repay attention: a portrait of Witherspoon by his former pupil, Ashbel Green, probably written in 1840-1841 and finally published under the editorship of Henry Lyttleton Savage in 1973; and one by Witherspoon s descendant, David Walker Woods. 6 In 2001, L. Gordon Tait published The Piety of John Witherspoon , a solid study of his religiosity that devotes little space to his political life. 7 Beyond these books Witherspoon has merited chapters in edited volumes such as Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten s Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment , and histories such as Mark Noll s Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822 . 8 Usually, however, he has merited pages rather than chapters, and nothing to speak of by a political scientist. 9 So far as I know, this is the first comprehensive treatment of Witherspoon s political thought and career.
Much of the scholarship on Witherspoon has dealt with hi