Further Comments on the "John Witherspoon" Essay by the Princeton & Slavery Project
This analysis is a supplement to "Witherspoon’s Defamation by the Princeton & Slavery Project" opinion published by The Princeton Tory.
A Note To The Reader
The Princeton Tory concurrently published my “Witherspoon’s Defamation by the Princeton & Slavery Project” (the “Tory Opinion). There I state, “The Princeton & Slavery Project has placed Princeton’s John Witherspoon in the false light of an incomplete and misleading narrative.” My following review sets forth additional examples of the Project’s flawed Witherspoon narrative. Inclusion of these examples in the body of the Tory Opinion would have far exceeded the typical editorial conventions regarding length that such publications quite understandably follow. Fortunately, for those readers so interested, they are readily accessible here.
I believe it preferable to make these additional examples publicly available concurrently with the publishing of the Tory Opinion. Further, I am striving to make both that Tory Opinion and these additional examples available as much in advance as I can manage to participants and attendees of the forthcoming Witherspoon Symposium. Therefore, readers should anticipate some overlap with the examples — and even text — set forth in the Tory Opinion. Some readers herein may well wish my commentary herein had been better distilled. To them I offer them Mark Twain’s apology, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”
Some six hours after the initial publication of these “Further Comments”, I add this paragraph to advise its readers to focus particular attention below to (1) the Project’s stunning misuse of Yale’s Ezra Stiles as an example by which to condemn Witherspoon and (2) the tendentious interpretation given to a quote attributed to Witherspoon during the drafting of the Articles of Confederation. Discussion of first topic appears below in the subheading “Fourth” under the heading “The Misleading.” The second is addressed under the heading “More Complications – The Articles of Confederation, Tax Debates and Horsefeathers.”
UPDATE – 4/30/23
My discussion of Yale’s Ezra Stiles’ position on the abolition of slavery – set forth below under the subheading “Fourth” in the section entitled “The Misleading” may be incomplete. I address the possible need for further information in a new side note added today to that discussion below.
Now let us proceed.
Introduction
Princeton University’s online history “The Presidents of Princeton University” makes no mention of slavery in its entry for John Witherspoon. His “relationship to slavery” is instead explored by the “John Witherspoon” essay at the University’s Princeton & Slavery Project. (Herein, I refer to the latter essay and its sponsor as the “Essay” and “Project” respectively.)
My discussion in the Tory Opinion and in this commentary is based on the content of the Essay as of March 18, 2023. Further below I provide the text of the Essay in full, perhaps interspersed with additional commentary. (The website sidebar references originally accompanying the Essay text are omitted.) This presentation further below of the entire content of the Essay is intended to give the reader benefit of the full context of the Essay’s specific words upon which I have focused, which words I present there within the Essay’s text as italicized and bold.
Let me first address some overarching themes in my thoughts regarding the Essay. The Essay has matters good, missing, misleading, and – well – complicated. I address them in that order.
The Good
The Essay details how as a minister and educator Witherspoon’s good deeds themselves crossed racial boundaries of his day. While a minister in Scotland in 1756 he “broke with tradition by baptizing an enslaved man” – Jamie Montgomery – whom he gave “the same religious instruction available to his white congregants.” Similarly, the Essay discusses how Witherspoon in America later tutored two free African men (Bristol Yamma and John Quamine) in 1774 and a free African American (John Chavis) in 1792, about two years before Witherspoon died.
The Missing
Certain pertinent information on Witherspoon’s slave ownership was not available for the composition of the Essay, it having only quite recently become available. I speak of the archival property tax records identified by Witherspoon scholar Kevin DeYoung. They are reviewed in his “A Fuller Measure of Witherspoon on Slavery”. I recommend DeYoung’s entire essay. Those readers preferring a summary can find one in “Part 4 - Witherspoon’s Slaves and Their Emancipation” in my “Whither Princeton?” opinion.
As discussed in my Tory Opinion, DeYoung’s findings put a different perspective on the Essay’s disparaging description of Witherspoon’s education of the apparent former-slave John Chavis “even as two enslaved people lived and worked beside Chavis at [Witherspoon’s farm] Tusculum.” DeYoung concludes, “It seems that Witherspoon likely practiced what he preached by making ‘Forton Weatherspoon’ a householder of his own and giving him the opportunity to be fully emancipated, which he appears to have been shortly after Witherspoon’s death.”
In contrast to the DeYoung revelations above, the following pertinent information was available at the time of the Essay, but is nowhere reflected in the Essay, nor elsewhere on the Project’s site: (1) Witherspoon’s work with the Presbyterian Church, and (2) his support of John Newton. These are quite unfortunate omissions.
The first of these omissions is Witherspoon’s work to get the Presbyterian Church to call for the elimination of slavery. I direct the reader to the section “Witherspoon and the Presbyterian Church’s Statement on Slavery” in DeYoung’s “A Fuller Measure of Witherspoon on Slavery” for a fuller discussion. In brief, Witherspoon guided passage of the national Presbyterian church’s historic 1787 resolution that called for “the final abolition of slavery.” It further called upon Presbyterians to provide their slaves prior to their emancipation — in the resolution’s words — “some share of property” or to “grant them sufficient time, and sufficient means . . . that may render them useful citizens.”
The British deemed Witherspoon’s College of New Jersey a “seminary of sedition.” An active member of Continental Congress, Witherspoon "likely also would have been selected to the Constitutional Convention had he not been meeting simultaneously in Philadelphia to draw up a constitution for his own denomination, which paralleled the national document in a number of key respects." The First Amendment’s prohibition on the creation of a national religion and the Constitution’s Article VI provision against any religious test for office both embody Witherspoon’s advocacy.
The second of the unfortunate omissions is Witherspoon’s relationship with the famed British opponent to the Atlantic Slave Trade John Newton. I discuss Newton in “Part 4 - Witherspoon and John Newton” of my earlier referenced writing. Next to William Wilberforce, Newton was perhaps Britain’s foremost advocate against the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Moreover, under Witherspoon Princeton in 1791 awarded Newton an honorary degree, apparently the only academic institution anywhere to do so. Again, DeYoung offers an apt assessment, “If Witherspoon had been seen as a friend of slavery and an enemy of abolition in his own time it is unlikely that Newton and Wilberforce would have thought of him so highly and praised his work so unreservedly.” This scholarly assessment stands against the Essay’s distorted characterizations of Witherspoon as a man who “both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey” and “contributed to the United States becoming a cradle of slavery from its very founding.”
Last, this, too, is missing from the Essay. John Witherspoon educated one-fifth of the members of the Constitutional Convention. “Some historians believe Witherspoon became the most influential college president in American history, since nine of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention were former students of his; also from among his personally-taught Princeton students came three Supreme Court Justices, ten cabinet officers, twelve members of the Continental Congress, twenty-eight United States Senators and forty-nine members of the U. S. House of Representatives.”
The Misleading
My comments here cover four aspects in which the Essay misleads.
First
The body of the Essay is about 1,800 words. Yet it fails to state the number of slaves Witherspoon owned (two) until about 660 words (more than 1/3 of the way) after the Essay in its second sentence first points out that Witherspoon owned – an unspecified number of – “slaves” (“Though he advocated revolutionary ideals of liberty and personally tutored several free Africans and African Americans in Princeton, he himself owned slaves . . .”). A more even handed presentation would instead have said he “owned two slaves” or “owned at least two slaves”. This shortcoming is compounded by the Essay’s making a second reference to Witherspoon owning “slaves” before belatedly specifying that the number was two (“Witherspoon adapted to this new context by owning slaves himself . . .”).
Second
The Essay’s most profound shortcomings I briefly noted above in the “Missing” section. These shortcomings are found in summary statements at the Essay’s outset and close. The former is that Witherspoon “both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey.” [Emphasis added.] This is the latter — “[I]n his life and career, Witherspoon also contributed to the United States becoming a cradle of slavery from its very founding.” [Emphasis added.] My companion essay — “Witherspoon’s Defamation by the Princeton & Slavery Project” — quoted other authors on the Project to rebut the implications of the preceding Essay statements that Witherspoon advocated slavery and worked to increase its prevalence.
As I noted in the Tory, these shortcomings are based in the Essay’s faulty analysis of Witherspoon’s advocacy of a gradual elimination of slavery and his related opinions and actions not to press for immediate legislative abolition of slavery. The Essay fails to address these different approaches to the end of slavery on their respective merits for Witherspoon’s time. Instead the Essay wrongfully implies that not to favor immediate legislative abolition of slavery is tantamount to favoring slavery itself.
For a discussion of the challenges of ending slavery in Witherspoon’s time and later decades, I direct the reader to “Part 7 - “No Union With Slaveholders” of “Whither Princeton?”.
In another, earlier essay “John Witherspoon: President and Patriot,” DeYoung states, “It is sometimes said that Witherspoon taught and voted against abolition, but this is only true if we equate abolition with immediate emancipation. When Witherspoon, in 1790, chaired the committee considering the possibility of abolition in New Jersey, he did not vote against abolition. He argued that sufficient laws against slavery were already in place and that slavery would soon die out.”
In his later essay, DeYoung notes that as to the belief slavery would soon die out in America, “[Witherspoon] was, of course, wrong in this last conclusion, but most colonial leaders shared the same assumption. They did not know Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (invented in 1793) would revolutionize the cotton industry and vastly increase the demand for slave labor in the South.”
As the Tory Opinion discussed in further detail, the Essay’s concluding sentence wrongly refers to “the United States becoming a cradle of slavery from its very founding.”
Third
As the Tory Opinion discussed in further detail, the Essay misleads in its discussion of Witherspoon’s tutoring of the “two free African men” Yamma and Quamine.
Fourth
The Essay invokes an utterly whitewashed example of Ezra Stiles to criticize Witherspoon. This Essay’s same paragraph noted above about Yamma and Quamine goes on to state, “While his colleagues Stiles and Hopkins would both eventually advocate for the abolition of slavery, Witherspoon’s motivations did not stem from antislavery sentiment. Rather, he hoped that these students would ultimately serve as missionaries and spread Christianity throughout Africa.”
First, the Essay fails to disclose that in 1773 Ezra Stiles and fellow Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins themselves “collaborated on a plan to send two black men [Yamma and Quamine] to Africa to evangelize the continent.” Moreover, these men were the very same Yamma and Quamine that Witherspoon began teaching the following year. So, the Essay denigrates Witherspoon for his missionary hopes when Stiles and Hopkins in just the preceding year had that very hope for the same Yamma and Quamine.
Further, the Essay itself identified Yamma and Quamine as free when Witherspoon taught them. The Essay does not and indeed cannot explain how teaching them – whatever Witherspoon’s motivations – could have been an “antislavery” act. In contrast, in that same year – 1774 – Ezra Stiles himself still owned the slave he had first possessed in 1756. Moreover, the “abolition of slavery” Stiles endorsed was gradual abolition. So the Essay commends Stiles the slaveholder and gradualist, while disparaging Witherspoon for advocating the same end to slavery and later owning two slaves himself. Nor does the Essay tell the reader that Hopkins, too, had been a slaveholder.
The Essay’s failure to report these salient facts about Stiles is outright troubling. It cannot be explained by lack of knowledge of appropriate source material. The Essay’s own footnote 11 in its discussion of the Stiles and Hopkins relationship cites a posting “Ezra Stiles College.” That very essay at Yale, Slavery & Abolition itself details Stiles’ investment in the African Slave Trade, his own slave ownership, and his advocacy for the gradual abolition of slavery.
SIDE NOTE – 4/30/23
Because of a statement made by Professor Sean Wilentz during Q&A at the April 21, 2023 “John Witherspoon in Historical Context,” the historical record may show that Stiles at some point changed his advocacy of gradual elimination of slavery to that of its immediate end. Thus far I have proved unable to find such records.
I have emailed Professor Wilentz today (4/30/23) requesting his assistance in resolving this matter. Readers having pertinent information to email me are also welcome to do so.
At moment, the best information I have as to Stiles’ position is from Yale, Slavery & Abolition’s “Stiles’ Emancipation Society”. It reports Stiles as serving as the first president, beginning in 1790, of an organization that advocated gradual emancipation, and notes that by 1792 Stiles was no longer an active member. Yale, Slavery & Abolition does not report Stiles becoming an advocate for immediate abolition.
I here note that this “Yale, Slavery & Abolition” website – whatever its provenance – is not to be mistaken (as I previously had done) with the official Yale University “Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal.” My use of the search tool on that latter site quite surprisingly produces no relevant results for either of the terms “Ezra” and “Stiles”.
I did find this statement in Wikipedia about a 1783 publication by Stiles, “He opined that ‘in God’s good providence’ Indians and Africans ‘may gradually vanish’, thus ensuring that ‘an unrighteous SLAVERY may at length, in God’s good providence, be abolished and cease in the land of LIBERTY.’” To my knowledge, this is not the manner of slavery’s end Witherspoon ever hoped for.
So, the Essay seriously misleads by not giving its readers – in the body of its text nor in its footnotes – the courtesy of any of these important and easily accessible and historical facts detailed above about Stiles and Hopkins. The Essay compounds the outrage by condemning Witherspoon for engaging in the same or better practices as did Stiles and Hopkins. This is a shocking failure in scholarship, a pronounced injustice to Witherspoon, and a dereliction of duty by the Project to readers who relied upon the Essay — in the words spoken (video at 57:20) by Professor Danielle Allen ’93 — to “bring the truth to light.”
Complicated – The Life and Times of Yale’s Ezra Stiles
Ezra Stiles (1727 - 1795) became the president of Yale in 1778. His life is illustrative of the challenges and complications then sometimes faced by the free, the slave, and the formerly enslaved. Stiles lived in Newport, Rhode Island, at the time of this call to Yale. Before proceeding, I pause to recommend a superb 2012 lecture — “Newport, R.I., as a Center for the Slave Trade in America” — by historian Keith W. Stokes. It provides understanding on the lives of Africans brought to Newport as slaves in the 18th century.
As a young minister in Newport, Stiles from time to time invested in the Atlantic Slave Trade, as did some of his congregants. In 1756 Stiles provided a 106 gallon cask of rum for an Africa-bound ship and was later “repaid” by Stiles’ receiving a 10-year-old boy to be his slave. (In this same 1756, as noted above and in contrast, Witherspoon instead baptized another person’s slave.) Stiles named the slave “Newport”. Stiles wrote and preached against the slave trade during the same period he owned the slave Newport. When in 1778 Stiles became president of Yale, he freed Newport (then in his early 30s) rather than take him to New Haven.
Four years later, in 1782, Newport (who then had a wife and a two-year-old son, Jacob) himself went to New Haven seeking employment from Stiles. Newport and Stiles agreed to two things: (1) Newport would work for Stiles at a specified salary for seven years, and (2) two-year-old Jacob would serve Stiles as an indentured servant until age 24, some 22 years. Newport continued work for Stiles for a total of 13 years, until Stiles’ death in 1795.
Newport’s efforts to provide for his family and himself illustrate the importance of freed slaves having sufficient marketable skills and other means to support themselves. This places in a different light a statement by Witherspoon in his lectures on moral philosophy that the Essay wrongfully uses to cast Witherspoon as a crass hypocrite.
That the statement by Witherspoon — “I do not think there lies any necessity on those who found men in a state of slavery, to make them free to their own ruin.” — and the Essay’s unfair interpretation of it are discussed further in the Tory Opinion .
More Complications – The Articles of Confederation, Tax Debates and Horsefeathers
The Essay notes that Witherspoon was both a signer of the Articles of Confederation in 1777 and an active participant in the debates to draft them. The Articles created the governmental structure among the original States that existed until the adoption of the Constitution of the United States in 1787.
The Essay states, “In the Articles of Confederation, leaders of the new country codified slavery as a national institution and delineated the nature of human property.” This statement is false. The Articles are silent on the subject of slavery, nowhere referring to slaves or slavery by terms explicit or implicit. During the period of the Articles of Confederation – as in the time preceding them – slavery was a matter of the respective States’ jurisdictions. The Articles neither “codified slavery” nor “delineated the nature of human property.” That said, the topic of slaves did come up in the debates over the Articles, and these debates foreshadowed later controversies involving slavery in the creation of the Constitution.
The Essay quotes Witherspoon in a debate over taxation under the Articles of Confederation. The Essay goes out of its way to take offense in this quotation attributed to Witherspoon, “It has been objected that negroes eat the food of freemen & therefore should be taxed. Horses also eat the food of freemen; therefore they also should be taxed.” The Essay decries this statement as “dehumanizing words” with this reasoning: “By comparing slaves to horses, Witherspoon denied enslaved people their humanity and defined them simply as another form of property.”
Before considering the meaning of this quoted statement, we should examine the reliability of its phrasing and perhaps even its substance. These words are not based on a transcript of the debate. The source that the Essay references (by footnote 19 – the Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790) was completed over 40 years after the debate in which Witherspoon participated – January 6, 1821 – by 77-year-old Thomas Jefferson. At least Jefferson had his roughly contemporaneous notes to assist him. By simple fairness the Essay — before attempting to condemn Witherspoon by these words — first should have given the reader their pedigree.
Now let us consider the substance of these words written by Jefferson that the Essay disingenuously passes off as a verbatim quote by Witherspoon. By them Witherspoon implicitly acknowledges that slaves were legal property. But this statement did not “define” them as such. The issue at hand was taxation among the states, not whether slavery was a legal status. In slaveholding states, slaves were already legally defined as property.
The Essay takes pronounced objection to the comparison of horses and slaves. “By comparing slaves to horses, Witherspoon denied enslaved people their humanity . . .” Here’s some needed context.
One delegate thought the tax burden should be apportioned among the states according to their total number of freemen and slaves. Jefferson reports that delegate reasoning, “That slaves occupy the places of freemen and eat their food. Dismiss your slaves & freemen will take their places.”
Witherspoon instead favored tax allocation based on the value of land and its improvements (including housing) rather than on population. Witherspoon rejoined, in part, “It has been objected that negroes eat the food of freemen & therefore should be taxed. Horses also eat the food of freemen; therefore they also should be taxed.”
So the former delegate placed into the debate the notion that slaves could provide substitute labor for that of freemen and “eat their food.” In rebuttal, Witherspoon noted that horses (also substitutes for laborers in the provision of services) “eat their food” and yet were not counted for tax purposes under the plan advocated by that former delegate.
By this the Essay proclaims Witherspoon “denied enslaved people their humanity and defined them simply as another form of property.” Let us further examine the offending words attributed to Witherspoon:
It has been objected that negroes eat the food of freemen & therefore should be taxed. Horses also eat the food of freemen; therefore they also should be taxed.
If I say, “Kentuckians eat oats, and horses also eat oats,” have I “denied [Kentuckians] their humanity” or “defined them simply as another form of” grain eater? Let’s say another person asserts that Kentuckians may vote because they eat oats. I then challenge that assertion by pointing out such logic implies horses, too, may then vote. Have I somehow “denied [Kentuckians] their humanity” or “defined them simply as another form of property”?
The Essay makes a fallacious and tendentious interpretation of Witherspoon’s words. I say, “Horsefeathers!” Others may disagree with my assessment, and perhaps find me here utterly clueless. To them I respond that the Essay’s presentation of the quote at issue fails to bring “truth to light.” Neither does the Essay evaluate the words at issue with “gentleness and empathy.”
Additionally, the Essay states that Witherspoon “adamantly opposed the taxation of slaves.” This mischaracterizes Witherspoon’s position reflected by Jefferson’s reporting on the taxation debate. Witherspoon favored taxation based on the value of land and its improvements and opposed taxation based on population per se, not on whether the measure of population included slaves.
Finally, the Essay states, “In the Articles of Confederation, leaders of the new country codified slavery as a national institution and delineated the nature of human property.” This statement is false. The Articles are silent on the subject of slavery, nowhere referring to slaves or slavery by terms explicit or implicit. During the period of the Articles of Confederation – as in the time preceding them – slavery was a matter of the respective states’ jurisdictions. The Articles neither “codified slavery” nor “delineated the nature of human property.”
The Full Text of the Project’s Essay (with Interspersed Commentary)
John Witherspoon
By Lesa Redmond
John Witherspoon (1723-1794), Princeton’s sixth president and founding father of the United States, had a complex relationship to slavery. 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.
Witherspoon and Slavery
John Knox Witherspoon (1723-1794)—clergyman, educator, and founding father—served as Princeton’s sixth president from 1768 until his death in 1794. Born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, Witherspoon was a prominent 18th-century intellectual associated with the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. After migrating to New Jersey in 1768, he also became a major figure in both Princeton and United States history.
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. As one Princeton historian has written: “his influence upon the college and upon American education was profound and lasting.”[1] In order to understand Witherspoon’s “profound and lasting” legacy, however, it is first necessary to understand his complex and sometimes contradictory relationship with slavery and enslaved people.
Commentary:
I think “seemingly contradictory” would be more accurate. We might at first blush think Witherspoon was at cross-purposes on slavery. An even-handed evaluation shows a remarkable and overriding consistency throughout Witherspoon’s life in his statements, apparent purposes, and actions. Such an even-handed evaluation also would have forthrightly stated that Witherspoon — in contrast to Newton and Yale’s Stiles — had never been an investor in the Atlantic Slave Trade nor (as in the case of Newton) a slave ship captain.
DeYoung, for example, also sees Witherspoon acting consistently with his beliefs that the practice of slavery be ended. Witherspoon came into possession of his slaves beginning around 1787. DeYoung’s new evidence supporting this dating for the onset of Witherspoon’s slave ownership conflicts with the 1779 date the Essay gives it. Witherspoon’s second wife may have brought them with her from Pennsylvania. Alternatively, they may have come with Tusculum, the farm Witherspoon purchased. Or he may have purchased them separately himself. Again, as DeYoung points out, 1787 was also at the time Witherspoon worked for the resolution calling upon Presbyterians to prepare their slaves for emancipation, and that this is what Witherspoon appears to have himself done.
Jamie Montgomery
The story of John Witherspoon and his relationship to slavery begins in Scotland in 1756. While a minister for the Beith parish of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), Witherspoon broke with tradition by baptizing an enslaved man named Jamie Montgomery. Born a slave in Virginia, Montgomery was sent by his master to Beith as a carpenter’s apprentice sometime around 1750.[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.[3] Jamie Montgomery may, in fact, have been the only enslaved person in Beith. Apparently Montgomery’s legal status did not trouble Witherspoon, and the minister offered him the same religious instruction available to his white congregants.[4] Witherspoon granted him a certificate verifying his “good Christian conduct” and then baptized him under the name James Montgomery in April 1756.[5]
Witherspoon was careful to emphasize to Montgomery that neither his Christianity nor his baptism would legally emancipate him.[6] He baptized Montgomery with the understanding that he was freeing him from sin, not slavery, and likely did not anticipate that his actions would embolden Montgomery to seek his freedom.[7] Shortly after his baptism, however, Montgomery fled his bondage on a ship bound for Virginia. He later testified to his belief that “by being baptized he would become free,” sparking debate within Scottish legal and religious communities regarding the morality of slavery.[8]
African and African American Students
Witherspoon’s relationship to slavery shifted when he accepted a position as president of the College of New Jersey in 1768. 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.[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.[10] Witherspoon adapted to this new context by owning slaves himself, but he maintained a commitment to the religious instruction and education of people of African descent—much as he had with Jamie Montgomery in Scotland.
Bristol Yamma and John Quamine
In 1774, while serving as president, John Witherspoon privately tutored two free African men—Bristol Yamma and John Quamine—at the request of fellow ministers and educators Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins. Witherspoon did not appear to see a conflict between the relationship he had with Yamma and Quamine and the practice of slaveholding. While his colleagues Stiles and Hopkins would both eventually advocate for the abolition of slavery, Witherspoon’s motivations did not stem from antislavery sentiment. Rather, he hoped that these students would ultimately serve as missionaries and spread Christianity throughout Africa. 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]
Abolition in New Jersey
Witherspoon put this ideology into practice in 1790, when he chaired a committee to consider the possibility of abolition in New Jersey.[23] The committee report recommended that the state take no action on the issue of abolition—claiming that slavery as an institution was already dying out in New Jersey and would not last beyond twenty-eight years. Ultimately, the committee’s vote against immediate abolition allowed slavery to continue in New Jersey largely undisturbed until 1804, when the state finally passed a gradual emancipation law. Even after that, however, slavery continued in New Jersey until the end of the Civil War.[24]
Commentary:
The Essay’s preceding footnote 23 is to a book by Varnum Lansing Collins. DeYoung provides us context for that legislative committee’s work with this quote from Collins: “As chairman of the [abolition] committee Dr. Witherspoon reported that the law already in force forbade the importation of slaves except actual servants of immigrants from other States, or of transient residents; that the exportation of slaves was likewise forbidden; that the law as it stood encouraged voluntary manumission of slaves; and that by it, moreover, slaves were protected from violence. He then offered the suggestions that New Jersey might enact a law that all slaves born after its passage should become free at a certain age, as for example 28; but in his opinion ‘from the state of society in America, the privileges of the press, and the progress of the idea of universal liberty,’ there was little reason to believe that there would be any slaves at all in America twenty-eight years from that time.”
The Essay claims that the Witherspoon committee’s failure to approve the bill for immediate legislative abolition “allowed slavery to continue in New Jersey largely undisturbed until 1804 . . .” This conflates the committee with the entire legislature, whose action would have been required to pass any such ban. Moreover, such approval was highly unlikely in 1790, as by the Essay’s own recounting, it took another 14 years to 1804 – 10 years after Witherspoon’s death – for the enactment in New Jersey even of a “gradual emancipation law.”
Witherspoon's Legacy
On November 15, 1794, Witherspoon passed away in his study after having the day’s newspaper read aloud to him.[25] Witherspoon left behind an estate which included two enslaved individuals at his country home of Tusculum.[26] At the time of his death, three of Witherspoon’s children lived and prospered in Southern states—at the heart of slavery in the young nation. In the South, Witherspoon’s family and descendants built their lives and wealth on a foundation of slavery.
John Witherspoon’s relationship to slavery forces us to reconsider of [sic] the history and legacy of slavery at Princeton University. Just as his ideology of slavery permeated generations of his own family, it also influenced the students he taught as the leader of the college for nearly three decades. 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.
References
[1] Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1746-1896 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7; “The Montgomery Slavery Case, 1756,” The National Archives of Scotland, accessed 16 August 2007, http://www.nas.gov.uk/about/070823.asp. ⤴
[2] “The Montgomery Slavery Case, 1756.” ⤴
[3] William Harrison Taylor, ed., Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora(Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2016), 18. ⤴
[4] Simon P. Newman, “Rethinking Runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain, the Caribbean, West Africa and North America,” Slavery & Abolition(2016), 9. ⤴
[5] Ibid. ⤴
[6] Ibid. ⤴
[7] In fact, the Presbyterian Church settled this matter in 1741, decreeing that “baptism simply freed slaves from the bondage of sin and Satan,” but did not free them from their physical bondage. Taylor, Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora, 18. ⤴
[8] Ibid., 11. ⤴
[9] Ibid., 15. ⤴
[10] Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 53-81. ⤴
[11] Both Stiles and Hopkins were Presbyterian clergymen who operated out of Rhode Island. The pair corresponded often on issues concerning the Presbytery. Both of their congregations welcomed African-American members, enslaved and free. See: Antony Dugdale, “Ezra Stiles College,” Yale, Slavery and Abolition, accessed 10 August 2017, http://www.yaleslavery.org/WhoYaleHonors/stiles1.html.
Special thanks to T. Jeffrey Clarke for bringing the date of Witherspoon’s move to Tusculum to the author’s attention. See John Witherspoon to Henry Remsen, letter dated 14 December 1779, reprinted in “Sugar, Tea, Silk Paid College Bills in 1779, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Vol. XXXI, No. 17 (February 6, 1931), p. 2. For Witherspoon’s two slaves, see 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. ⤴
[12] 1778-1796; 1778-1796; Board of Trustees Records, Volume 1B; Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. ⤴
[13] It is unclear whether the College ever acted on the charge to fund Chavis. Chavis, John; circa 1796; Historical Subject Files Collection, Box 101, Folder 35; Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. ⤴
[14] David Walker Woods, John Witherspoon (New York: F.H. Revell Company, 1906), 179. ⤴
[15] Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 103. ⤴
[16] Ibid. ⤴
[17] 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. 3 (2010): 282. ⤴
[18] Woods, John Witherspoon, 217, 248. ⤴
[19] Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790(1821), 44. ⤴
[20] Witherspoon held intermittent positions in Congress from 1773 to 1776, then from 1780 to 1781. Collins, President Witherspoon, A Biography, 2:3. ⤴
[21] John Witherspoon and Jack Scott, An Annotated Edition of Lectures on Moral Philosophy (Newark : London: University of Delaware Press ; Associated University Presses, 1982), 125. ⤴
[22] Ibid. ⤴
[23] Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon, A Biography, Vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925), 167. ⤴
[24] James J. Gigantino II, “Trading in Jersey Souls,” 296-97. ⤴
[25] Collins, President Witherspoon, A Biography, 2:177. ⤴
[26] 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. ⤴
[27] Wertenbaker, Princeton, 1746-1896, xxvii. ⤴
Final Thoughts
In closing this commentary on the “John Witherspoon” Essay, I repeat my concluding remarks the Tory Opinion that drew inspiration and guidance from Du Bois:
Mindful of the clarion summons by W.E.B. Du Bois, I now call upon the Princeton & Slavery Project to update its site on Witherspoon’s relation to slavery so that we Princetonians may be guided by ‘the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable.’ Inviting Witherspoon scholar Kevin DeYoung to contribute an essay on Witherspoon would be a fitting first step.
Bill Hewitt is an alumnus of Princeton in the Class of 1974. In this exercise of free speech, Bill is prepared to be labeled a Concerned Reactionary Alum of Princeton (CRAP), preferably by Yalies. He can be reached at hewitt74@alumni.princeton.edu.
