How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  It was the sort of forthright democratic attitude Benjamin Rush, son of the New Light, could identify with, and he was not alone. For, as he explained to Witherspoon, his visit to Paisley was not a pleasure trip. Rush was there on business. He was there to persuade Witherspoon to accept the post he had been offered a year ago November, to become the new president of Princeton College in America.

  II

  Princeton, or Nassau Hall as it was sometimes called after its principal building, had had a run of bad luck. It had gone through five presidents in twenty years—one of whom, Jonathan Edwards, had died less than three months after accepting the post. The college needed a president who could give it continuity and stability, and its trustees believed Witherspoon had the right qualifications and the proper orthodox Presbyterian spirit to do that. They also believed that Witherspoon could help the Church heal its New Side–Old Side schism, since Witherspoon had the respect of both groups (the head of the Old Siders, William Alison, was a fellow Scot). On November 19, 1766, they wrote to Witherspoon, offering him a salary of 146 pounds sterling, as well as use of a house and garden, and land for “winter fuel and pasturage.” They closed with, “we ardently pray, that Providence may make your way plain before you for the acceptance of [our] choice.”

  At first glance, it seems odd that Witherspoon would even consider such an offer. His reputation in Scotland was made; Paisley was a rapidly growing city, and he felt duty-bound to stay and oversee the church he had been building there. He had already turned down offers from Dublin, Dundee, and the Scottish church in Rotterdam. Besides, as he explained to the trustees and to Benjamin Rush when he came to visit, his wife was very wary of the long and dangerous voyage to America. It was a prospect to daunt anyone, especially someone with a settled and comfortable life.

  Yet the fact remained that Witherspoon, like many other Scottish Evangelicals, felt drawn to America. Since the 1750s they had been fighting a losing battle for control over their Kirk. At the same time they had seen the Presbyterian churches in the colonies newly awakened to the spirit of the Lord. A suspicion took hold in their minds, that the place God had destined for the new covenant with His chosen people might not be Scotland after all, but America. A Scottish colleague who had heard about the Princeton offer wrote to Witherspoon, urging him to accept it: “I have long thought it the intention of Providence . . . to fix the great seat of truth and righteousness in America; and that New Jersey seemed to promise fair for being the nursery of the most approved instruments for carrying on that great design, in that wide continent.”

  Similar thoughts must have occurred to Witherspoon, as well. The opportunity to shape “that great design” and make the College of New Jersey its educational epicenter seemed too good to miss. We will never know whether Rush’s own appeal affected his final decision. But on February 4, 1768, Witherspoon informed him his doubts were resolved and he would take up the presidency of Princeton. “Pray that it may be for the Glory of God and the publick interest,” he wrote Rush, “for it is a very hard piece of work—and more against my worldly interest than you yet know but I will not draw back.”

  On May 10 he informed his saddened parishioners that he was leaving them and Scotland forever. On the eighteenth he and his wife boarded a ship at Greenock bound for America. They reached the mouth of the Delaware River on Saturday, August 6, after a harrowing trip of nearly eleven weeks. That Sunday, John Witherspoon landed at Philadelphia, greeted by a throng of church officials and well-wishers. Five days later they set out by carriage for Princeton. As Witherspoon and his wife came up the drive that night, they found Nassau Hall, the building that housed the college and its students, ablaze with light. The students had asked permission to illuminate the college in honor of their famous new president, and had hung Nassau Hall with dozens of candles, lamps, and lanterns, an iridescent beacon in the surrounding darkness.

  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. The model he chose was his own Scottish alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, and its curriculum would be the rigorous humanistic one that Hutcheson and others had introduced at Glasgow. Witherspoon saw education not as a form of indoctrination, or of reinforcing a religious orthodoxy, but as a broadening and deepening of the mind and spirit—and the idea of freedom was fundamental to that process. “Govern, govern always,” he told his faculty and tutors, “but beware of governing too much. Convince your pupils . . . that you wish to see them happy, and desire to impose no restraints but such as their real advantage, and the order and welfare of the college, render indispensable.” Under his guidance, Princeton became a vital meeting ground of America’s evangelical fervor and Scotland’s modernizing humanism—and a principal conduit for the flow of Scottish ideas into the culture of the colonies.

  Some of this was in place even before Witherspoon arrived. Samuel Blair, one of Princeton’s Ulster Scot founders, had said the school’s curriculum should “cherish a spirit of liberty and free enquiry,” so that every religious denomination, not just Presbyterians, enjoyed full freedom of conscience. Students were also introduced to a wide range of advanced secular, as well as theological, study. After one and a half years of Latin and Greek, they pressed on not only to traditional subjects such as logic and rhetoric, but also to history, geography, and science. Princeton’s founders believed, as Witherspoon did, that science was the ally, not the opponent, of religion. It was the sort of view of education anyone trained in a Scottish university would understand: that of a basic unity of all human knowledge, which every student can be exposed to and can ultimately master.

  What Witherspoon brought to this was his own dedicated energy. He swept into Princeton like a human dynamo. In addition to serving as president, and as principal orator of the college, Witherspoon was also chairman of the Philosophy Department, of the History Department, and of what today we would call the English Department, and gave sermons in the college chapel every Sunday. In addition, he tutored students in French and Hebrew.

  He then reorganized the college-sponsored grammar school attached to Princeton and took over as headmaster. As one would expect a Scot to do, he doubled the amount of formal training in English in the grammar school’s curriculum, and added English literature and composition to the college entrance requirements. He focused the curriculum on subjects central to the reforms Francis Hutcheson and his allies had earlier carried out in Scotland, particularly the classics, moral philosophy, and rhetoric and criticism—or what his old Moderate antagonists would have called belles lettres. He included massive doses of reading in all these subjects, not just the great ancient philosophers, but also modern ones. These included his fellow Scots and his Moderate opponents, such as Hutcheson, Kames, Ferguson, Adam Smith, and even David Hume. Witherspoon’s attitude was that even if you disagreed with a philosopher or thinker, you still needed to read him in order to appreciate his 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.

  Witherspoon did chart his students’ intellectual progress in other ways. He encouraged them to reorganize Princeton’s two student clubs along Scottish lines, as places for intellectual discussion as well as conviviality. Two of his best students, James Madison, who was just eighteen, and Aaron Burr, stepped in to help. Witherspoon also organized debates and speeches almost every evening in Nassau Hall, so that Princeton students, as he put it, “may learn, by early habit, presence of mind and proper pronunciation and gesture in public speaking.” On those evenings Witherspoon threw the doors open to the public, encouraging Madison, Burr, and the rest to sharpen their wits and loosen their
tongues before a large audience on a wide variety of subjects, including political topics—topics so volatile and controversial (this was at the time of the Boston Massacre) that locals began to get alarmed.

  All this was part of Witherspoon’s vision of Princeton as a place not just for teaching students and would-be ministers, but also for training future public leaders. It was one reason he wanted Princeton to be as “inclusive” as possible. Princeton drew students from all the colonies, not just New Jersey. He encouraged non-Presbyterians to attend, such as the Episcopalian Virginian James Madison. Even more amazingly, he recruited Native American students and blacks, such as the future teacher and minister John Chavis. Witherspoon wanted his students to think of themselves as Americans, and to think of themselves as obligated to lead America to a new future.

  That future was very much on his mind, and on his students’ minds, as 1770 ushered in what promised to be a decade of conflict between the colonies and Britain. These were the years of the Boston Massacre, protests against the so-called Intolerable Acts, and the first meetings of the Committees of Correspondence. In the midst of this tense and confusing crisis, Witherspoon had no doubts where he stood. Whatever his feelings as a Briton and a Scot, his loyalties were now with his adopted home. He had chosen the Popular Party in Scotland, he said, because he was opposed to “lordly domination.” Now the same issue was at stake. America must be free to fulfill its place in God’s “great design,” and if the mother country refused to permit that freedom, then Americans had to be ready to take matters into their own hands.

  Witherspoon published his first words of support for the American cause in 1771. Three years later, as events brought delegates from all the colonies together for the first Continental Congress, he composed his Thoughts on American Liberty. He urged the Congress to start thinking of America as a nation, with a distinct national interest. Although they should still avow their loyalty to Britain and its laws, they had to take a firm stand against Parliament’s efforts to tax and regulate their affairs. It was time, America’s most distinguished educator urged, to begin drawing up plans for union. He made much the same point in a pastoral letter to all the Presbyterian churches in the colonies, saying that he preferred “war with all its horrors, and even extermination, to slavery, riveted on us and our posterity.”

  In the predawn hours of April 19, 1775, British troops marched into Lexington, Massachusetts, to find one hundred or so local volunteers drawn up on the village green to oppose them. Shots were fired; eight militiamen died, ten others were wounded, and the rest scattered. All that day British regulars and Massachusetts Minutemen exchanged gun-fire, as the American Revolution drew its first blood. When news of the fighting reached the other colonies, supporters of armed struggle sprang into action. Ulster Scots in the Shenandoah Valley took up the cause with alacrity; in Rockbridge County, Virginia, they even named their new county seat Lexington, in honor of the fallen. In North Carolina, Scotch-Irish volunteers gathered in Charlotte and, at midnight on May 20, declared Mecklenburg County to be free and independent from the British Crown.

  The most pressing priority was turning the uprising in the separate colonies into a single national movement. This was partly a military problem: without a unity of command, the rebels had no chance of holding their own against their vastly superior British foes. It led to the creation on June 14, 1775, of the Continental Army, under the command of General George Washington. But it was also a political issue: how to convince colonists to think of themselves as part of a large whole, dedicated to a single purpose and requiring equal sacrifice from everyone? Fortunately, the Great Awakening had already pointed the way, and no one was more keenly aware of the deep resources waiting to be tapped there than John Witherspoon. American unity required more than just rational planning; it needed a strong moral base, and Witherspoon pointed out where to find it.

  In March 1776 the British evacuated Boston; the scene of conflict was shifting from New England to New York. On May 15 the Continental Congress took the first tentative steps toward separating itself formally from Britain. Two days later Witherspoon stepped to the pulpit in Princeton and delivered a sermon he later published as The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men. It began with a survey of the role of God’s Providence in world history—of how, as the Psalms had put it, “not a sparrow falls but God knows it.” This was because, as Witherspoon explained, God ultimately knows and wills everything that happens in His creation, especially the fate of His chosen people. His benevolence had protected the Jews, and then the early Christians; it had guided the Reformation, and then extended it to the shores of America. Now God was guiding the turbulent events in the colonies, even as the powers arrayed against them seemed destined to triumph.

  Witherspoon’s next sentence rang out from the pulpit like a bell reverberating over the landscape:

  I am satisfied that the confederacy of the colonies has not been the effect of pride, resentment, or sedition, but of a deep and general conviction that our civil and religious liberties, and consequently in a great measure the temporal and eternal happiness of us and our posterity, depended on the issue.

  What was at stake was not just taxes or the rights of freeborn Englishmen, but the principle of a Christian commonwealth dedicated to God. In fact, the political and religious issues were inseparable. “There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost and religious liberty [kept] entire.” The final proof, in Witherspoon’s mind, that this rebellion was part of God’s divine plan was that so many different religious denominations—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, yes, and even Episcopalians—had come together to support it. “He is the best friend to American liberty,” Witherspoon asserted, who combined commitment to political freedom with a commitment to God. If Americans could do this, “there will be the greatest reason to hope, by the blessing of God, for prosperity and success.”

  A Christian commonwealth dedicated to liberty and God: no political vision could possibly be further removed from the principles of a David Hume or an Adam Smith. But in America in 1776 it struck precisely the right note. When historians emphasize the role that secular political ideas played in inspiring the American Revolution, and point to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison—who actually did turn to David Hume for guidance, as we shall soon see—they sometimes overlook the powerful religious dimension of the revolt. Witherspoon’s invocation helped to tip the balance in the minds of thousands of colonists who might have been hostile, or at least cool, to the idea of political rebellion against their sovereign king. It was the authentic voice of Protestant America. Witherspoon mobilized a revivalist fervor that the revolution needed to succeed, and that the new nation would inherit.

  Certainly contemporaries recognized it. The Dominion of Providence went through nine editions, with publishers in Philadelphia, London, and Glasgow. The Edinburgh editors of the Scots Magazine strongly condemned it, and concluded that “the unhappy commotions in our American colonies” were due almost entirely to “clerical influence,” and that “none . . . had a greater share . . . than Doctor Witherspoon.” Horace Walpole, son of the former prime minister, rose in Parliament to speak. “There is no use crying about it,” he said. “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.” Everyone knew whom he meant.

  On June 28, 1776, Witherspoon was in Philadelphia as part of the New Jersey delegation to the Continental Congress. They were there to draw up a declaration of American independence.

  III

  Revolution thrust on all Scottish immigrants, and on Americans of recent Scots or Ulster Scots extraction, a set of difficult choices. Should the colonists rebel or not rebel, in order to secure their rights? If they did rebel, should one join with them or remain loyal to the British Crown?

  Recent immigrants, particularly those from the Highlands, tended to choose the Crown. Remarkably, even some of those who had fled in the wake of the Forty-five remained loya
l to the government that had done so much to drive them from their homes. When Flora and Allan MacDonald heard the news about Lexington, Allan immediately offered his services to the loyalist side. He became second-in-command of the loyalist militia raised from the Highlanders in the Cape Fear region, under one Brigadier Donald MacDonald, a British officer dispatched to North Carolina—who also happened to be a cousin. Their Highland militiamen, complete with bagpipes and broadswords, ran afoul of the rebels at Moore’s Creek at the end of February 1776. Leading the charge was another Cape Fear Highlander, Donald MacLeod, who died with nine musket balls in him; thirty or so others also fell until the loyalists fled in confusion. The field belonged to the rebels—most of whom were almost certainly Ulster Scots.

  In the Mohawk Valley in New York, Highland immigrants rallied to the British colors under two veterans of Culloden—one who had served on the Jacobite, the other on the Hanoverian side. The old Hanoverian, Alexander MacDonald, declared that “nothing can cure the madness that prevails all over America but the sternest of measures.” He led an ugly and savage guerrilla-style war in the valley, pitting Indians against rebel settlers, and Highlanders against Continental regulars. Incidents such as this, and the fighting at Moore’s Creek, made Scottish immigrants synonymous with loyalist or “Tory.” They became easy targets for abuse. John Witherspoon even penned an Appeal to the Natives of Scotland, urging them to reconsider on grounds of self-interest. Independence, he insisted, would make their new American home “powerful and opulent to a degree not conceived.” Eventually Britain and America would be bound together by ties of another kind, of free trade (he even quoted David Hume on this point!). They were not giving up their old roots, but were gaining new ones.