Open Letter to the Princeton & Slavery Project
To Professor Martha A. Sandweiss, Project Director, via email April 28, 2023, 2:42 PM E.D.T.
Open Letter
Via Email
April 28, 2023
Professor Martha A. Sandweiss
Project Director
Princeton & Slavery Project
Professor Sandweiss:
I write to bring to your certain and inescapable attention grave, inexplicable, and ongoing gross misrepresentations of Princeton’s John Witherspoon by the Princeton & Slavery Project, for which you are Project Director. I request your prompt and thorough undertakings to rectify these grievous wrongs – not simply to Witherspoon, but to all who have looked to the Project for trustworthy information and understanding about Witherspoon’s relation to slavery. Their reliance on the Project and trust in the imprimatur of Princeton University itself have been wantonly betrayed.
In my recent opinion in The Princeton Tory, “Witherspoon’s Defamation by the Princeton & Slavery Project” I made out the case that the essay “John Witherspoon” (the “Essay”) – first published by the Project at its inauguration in 2017 and continuing to the moment of my present writing – with its multiple and fundamental misrepresentations should never have seen the light of day. These misrepresentations have had serious consequences within the University community and beyond. The successful petitioners in 2020 to strip Witherspoon’s name from the Princeton public middle school made the Essay their foundation. Similarly, so have the authors of the May 2022 petition to remove the Firestone Plaza statue honoring Witherspoon. Such highly publicized petitions should have given the Project pronounced reason to review internally whether its Essay, in light of best evidence then available, properly guided those looking to the Project on Witherspoon.
Circumstances strongly suggest that the Project never undertook such an internal reevaluation of the Essay’s fundamental assertions. Indeed, over the last four months, major revelations about Witherspoon’s relation to slavery have been made – and publically circulated online within the Princeton community. Yet, none of these have been reflected by the Project in the essay itself nor elsewhere on the Project’s website. Indeed, nary a footnote!
The Project cannot plead oversight nor other form of ignorance in these matters, as Princetonians for Free Speech on March 1, 2023 published an Open Letter to President Eisgruber and Princeton's Board of Trustees to draw the latter’s attention to important new findings on the nature of Witherspoon’s slave ownership and to point out its paramount relevance to the petition to remove Witherspoon’s statue. Kevin DeYoung had made these findings in his January 26, 2023 “A Fuller Measure of Witherspoon on Slavery.” That Princetonians for Free Speech open letter stated plainly, “Furthermore, this new information shows the history of Witherspoon on the University’s Princeton and Slavery Project website to be both incomplete and misleading.
And, yes, my Tory opinion of some ten days ago on the Project’s defamation of Witherspoon still goes unanswered in its call upon the Project to update its site to tell the truth about Witherspoon’s relation to slavery.
Most stunningly of all, the Project has done nothing to reflect the compellingly relevant pronouncements on Witherspoon at the “John Witherspoon in Historical Context” Symposium held seven days ago under the auspices of the CPUC Committee on Naming – and even moderated by that committee’s chair, Prof. Angela Creager. As of my writing to you, the full video of this Symposium has not yet been posted by the Committee on Naming. I strongly urge the Project to post these same videos – as soon as they become available and with prominent attention – at the Project’s website.
I attended that Symposium. I would think that you and others from the Project attended this compellingly relevant event as well and, therefore, already know what I am about to relate. I understood Prof. Sean Wilentz, based on his own historical research and independent interpretation, to have reached opposite conclusions to the Essay on two key points: (1) whether Witherspoon’s being a gradualist on the elimination of slavery places him in leagues with pro-slavery advocates of his time, and (2) whether the vote by Witherspoon as chair of a 1790 New Jersy legislative committee that the Essay so greatly condemned should be understood properly as a pro-slavery act.
Most stunningly of all, the author of the Essay itself – and a featured presenter at the Symposium – herself acknowledged that in the six years since writing that Essay, she has changed some of her views about Witherspoon. She did not detail these changes, as best I recall, with any specificity. But what she set forth in her presentation paled in comparison to the damning case against Witherspoon she had attempted in the 2017 Essay. As I heard it, the worst she had to say against Witherspoon was to ask why he, though a gradualist opponent to slavery, could not have acted sooner himself and immediately freed his own slaves rather than delay their freedom further.
I close my letter to you by noting that as of its writing the Project most egregiously has failed to act to provide its readers – present and past – any indication of how it has so inexplicably misguided them on Witherspoon and slavery. I call upon the Princeton & Slavery Project to commence immediately to tell the truth about Witherspoon. I further call upon the Project to tell the Princeton community which has sponsored it – and the rest in the world who have relied upon it – (1) how the Project came so badly and so unjustly to guide them on Witherspoon, and (2) why the Project’s breach of duty has continued unacknowledged – for over five years and despite open entreaties for correction – much less any amends even attempted.
I close with the clarion summons of W.E.B. Du Bois, “And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
Sincerely,
Bill Hewitt
Princeton Class of 1974