Whither Witherspoon?

There’s a push on at Princeton University to remove John Witherspoon’s statute from its place of honor on the campus. The push is driven by the fact that Witherspoon owned two slaves.

As a Presbyterian I am concerned about anything that challenges the place in our history of the only clergy person to sign the Declaration of Independence. Yes, Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister—a Scottish Presbyterian minister—who came here in 1767 to become president of what eventually became Princeton University.

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Arthur Herman’s 2001 book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, about Witherspoon’s time at Princeton:

Once in office, Witherspoon proved to be the opposite of the stereotypical narrow-minded Evangelical hard-liner. He intended to make Princeton not only the best college in the colonies, but in the entire British world. (Princeton’s) curriculum would be (a) rigorous humanistic one… Witherspoon saw education not as a form of indoctrination, but as a broadening and deepening of the mind and spirit—and the idea of freedom was fundamental to that process. … Under his guidance, Princeton became a vital meeting ground of American’s Evangelical fervor and Scotland’s modernizing humanism—and a principle conduit for the flow of Scottish ideas into the culture of the colonies. (p. 243)

Later, Herman writes of the college-sponsored grammar school in Princeton that Witherspoon took over as headmaster: 

Witherspoon’s attitude was that even if you disagreed with a philosopher or thinker, you still needed to read (them) in order to appreciate (their) arguments and refute them. So Witherspoon’s students found themselves inundated with a host of thinkers Witherspoon disapproved of, but whom, “in the spirit of free inquiry,” they were expected to understand and digest. As a result, Witherspoon’s influence ranged far beyond his own views and positions, and pointed in directions he himself could not have foreseen. (pp. 244-245)

NOTE: That was what he expected students to experience in grammar school!

Finally, this from Herman’s book: “(Witherspoon) recruited Native American students and blacks, such as the future teacher and minister John Chavis.” (p. 245)

John Chavis was the first Black ordained Presbyterian minister in America.

I am not defending slave-holding or slave-holders. We must be upfront about the central place of slavery in our nation’s history and success, and slavery’s on-going impact in our civic life today. Even the defenses I’ve read of Witherspoon’s attitudes toward slaves and slavery are not sufficient to shield him from his human failure as a slave-holder.

But people are complex and history is complex. And complex people functioning within complex histories often makes evaluation of them complicated. There’s a balancing act involved. You can tear down anyone based on some particular facet of their being, particularly when they engaged in something we now find  wrong. Yet if you remove from sight everyone who doesn’t measure up to today’s standards, who do you have left? Where do you turn for inspiration and guidance when there’s no one back there good enough to make the cut?

Witherspoon, of all people, surely was aware of the insidious power of sin…that inescapable human condition that alienates us from our creator and from one another. He was enlightened enough that we may have some confidence that had he lived in a later time, he’d have recognized that slavery, like the racism that underlay it in the Western World, is sin, and have separated himself from it.

On balance, what John Witherspoon did for the good of Princeton and of our nation is worth remembering. One proposal is to replace his statute with a plaque noting both the positive and the negative aspects of his legacy. I am not sure I am okay with that solution to the problem. But, given the assaults upon free inquiry and speech in our time—especially from the far right, bolstered as it is by political power—John Witherspoon’s understanding of education and that understanding’s influence upon our founders and our nation ought not be hidden from our sight.