John Witherspoon was a Scottish-American Presbyterian minister, educator, farmer, slaveholder, and a Founding Father of the United States.
38 Facts About John Witherspoon
2.
John Witherspoon was the only active clergyman and the only college president to sign the Declaration.
3.
John Witherspoon was born in Yester, Scotland, documented in the Old Parish Register as the eldest child of the Reverend James Alexander Witherspoon and Anne Walker, a descendant of John Welsh of Ayr and John Knox.
4.
John Witherspoon was a staunch Protestant, nationalist, and supporter of republicanism.
5.
John Witherspoon became a Church of Scotland minister at Beith, Ayrshire, where he married Elizabeth Montgomery of Craighouse.
6.
John Witherspoon became prominent within the Church as an Evangelical opponent of the Moderate Party.
7.
At the urging of Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, whom he met in Paisley, John Witherspoon finally accepted their renewed invitation to become president and head professor of the small Presbyterian College of New Jersey in Princeton.
8.
John Witherspoon instituted numerous reforms, including modeling the syllabus and university structure after that used at the University of Edinburgh and other Scottish universities.
9.
John Witherspoon firmed up entrance requirements, which helped the school compete with Harvard and Yale for scholars.
10.
John Witherspoon personally taught courses in eloquence or belles lettres, chronology, and divinity.
11.
An advocate of natural law within a Christian and republican cosmology, John Witherspoon considered moral philosophy vital for ministers, lawyers, and those holding positions in government.
12.
Firm but good-humored in his leadership, John Witherspoon was very popular among both faculty and students.
13.
John Witherspoon had been a prominent evangelical Presbyterian minister in Scotland before accepting the Princeton position.
14.
John Witherspoon helped organize Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey.
15.
Nonetheless, John Witherspoon transformed a college designed predominantly to train clergymen into a school that would equip the leaders of a new country.
16.
Long wary of the power of the British Crown, John Witherspoon saw the growing centralization of government, progressive ideology of colonial authorities, and establishment of episcopacy authority as a threat to the liberties of the colonies.
17.
Soon, John Witherspoon came to support the American Revolution, joining the New Jersey Committee of Correspondence and Safety in early 1774.
18.
John Witherspoon served on over 100 committees, most notably the sitting committees, the board of peace and the committee on public correspondence or common affairs.
19.
John Witherspoon spoke often in concurrence; helped draft the Articles of Confederation; helped organize the executive departments; played a major role in shaping public policy; and drew up the instructions for the peace commissioners.
20.
John Witherspoon fought against the flood of paper money and opposed the issuance of bonds without provision for their amortization.
21.
John Witherspoon served twice in the New Jersey Legislature and strongly supported the adoption of the United States Constitution during the New Jersey ratification debates.
22.
John Witherspoon was responsible for its reconstruction after the war, which caused him great personal and financial difficulty.
23.
John Witherspoon died in 1794 on his farm Tusculum, just outside Princeton, and is buried along Presidents Row in Princeton Cemetery.
24.
The next oldest son, John Witherspoon, graduated from Princeton in 1779, practiced medicine in South Carolina, and was lost at sea in 1795.
25.
David, the youngest son, graduated the same year as his brother John Witherspoon, married the widow of Abner Nash, and practiced law in New Bern, North Carolina.
26.
At the College of New Jersey, John Witherspoon revised the moral philosophy curriculum, strengthened the college's commitment to natural philosophy, and positioned Princeton in the larger transatlantic world of the republic of letters.
27.
John Witherspoon was a proponent of Christian values, his common sense approach to the public morality of civil magistrates was influenced by the ethics of Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson and Reid rather than Jonathan Edwards.
28.
In regard to civil magistrates, John Witherspoon thus believed moral judgment should be pursued as a science.
29.
John Witherspoon held to old concepts from the Roman Republic of virtuous leadership by civil magistrates, but he regularly recommended that his students read such modern philosophers as Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and David Hume, even though he disapproved of Hume's "infidel" stance on religion.
30.
John Witherspoon saw morality as having two distinct components: spiritual and temporal.
31.
John Witherspoon made a profound impression on his student James Madison, whose suggestions for the United States Constitution followed both Witherspoon's and Hume's ideas.
32.
John Witherspoon accepted the impossibility of maintaining public morality or virtue in the citizenry without an effective religion.
33.
John Witherspoon owned slaves and lectured against the abolition of slavery.
34.
However, in his "Lectures on Moral Philosophy", Dr John Witherspoon advocated for the humane treatment of laborers and servants, stating:.
35.
John Witherspoon can have no right either to take away life, or to make it insupportable by excessive labor.
36.
The settled opinion among the American founding fathers, including Dr John Witherspoon, was that slavery would eventually disappear naturally within a generation.
37.
John Witherspoon was firmly grounded in the Reformed tradition of High to Late Orthodoxy, embedded in the transatlantic Evangelical Awakening of the eighteenth century, and frustrated by the state of religion in the Scottish Kirk.
38.
John Witherspoon was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1789.