John Witherspoon: Educating for Liberty

On the campus of Princeton University, near the chapel and the Firestone Library, there is a statue of the college’s president during the American Revolution, John Witherspoon. Outside a few corners of academia, Witherspoon is little remembered anymore. Few Americans know that he was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Even among scholars, he has largely fallen into the faceless category of “Forgotten Founders” of our republic. Far better known, in 2023, is the actress Reese Witherspoon, who claims to be his descendant. Yet in his lifetime, and for at least a century thereafter, Witherspoon was widely esteemed as (in one writer’s words) “one of the great men of the age and the world.” More recently, a small but growing number of historians has concluded that he was probably “the most influential teacher in the entire history of American higher education” and the most important college president America has ever known. It seems not too much to say that, were it not for Witherspoon, American politics in the 1770s and 1780s might have taken a different trajectory.