God's Quarrel With Princeton

Young College, New Nation

This year Princeton reaches its quarter millennium. That's no great milestone by the standards of European universities in Oxford, Paris, Bologna, or Heidelberg, which all date from the Middle Ages. Yet from an American perspective 250 years is a very long time indeed, spanning our entire national experience, and then some. Chartered in 1746, the College of New Jersey had reached age 30 when the United States declared independence, and it was 41 years old by 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia to draw up the plan for federal union. Those four decades-a period of extraordinary educational and political innovation-were critical to Princeton and to the new nation, in whose founding the young college played a signal role.
A year ago Professor John Murrin, a historian of the American Revolution, and I sat down to the task of creating an alumni college that would tie together the origins of Princeton and the United States. The more we thought about it, the more important it seemed to visit England and Scotland. There we could explore at first hand what was old and what was original about the fledgling college and nation, weaving together the strands of three undertold tales:
… the College of New Jersey's role in a revolution that almost overwhelmed it and in the Constitutional Convention it did so much to inspire;
… the sources of the American Revolution in the politics of 18th-century Britain and its emerging empire; and
… the debt that the College of New Jersey and all U.S. higher education owe to the Scottish universities and the Scottish Enlightenment.
The result was a 10-day odyssey last spring that allowed our band of alumni to trace the three legs of a fascinating historical triangle. The first described the increasingly vexed relationship between imperial Britain and its American colonies; the second, the relationship between Scotland and England as the Scots traded their romantic thoughts of a separate nation for the economic prosperity of union with this rising commercial power; the third, the inspiration of Scottish ideas on the Founding Fathers, a legacy embodied by Princeton's remarkable sixth president, John Witherspoon-a story laced with ironies described by Murrin on pages 20-22.
Our alumni college took us first to London, where, in several days of lectures within the beautifully restored Royal Society of the Arts, we immersed ourselves in the accidents and miscalculations of 18th-century British politics which did so much to provoke rebellion in the colonies. Americans are fond of believing that we made our own revolution, and so we did from about 1774. But it wouldn't have happened without the provocations of an imperial government that was the victim of its success in the Seven Years War (1756-63), the "Great War for the Empire" by which Britain wrested Canada, India, and much of the West Indies from its great rival, France.
The victories in that war had been paid for by loans that by war's end claimed almost 60 percent of the government's budget. Those loans now had to be repaid. Because the war had so handsomely delivered their American subjects from the threat of the French and their Indian allies, the ministers of George III believed it appropriate to pay part of the current costs of the imperial defense of North America by measures such as the Stamp Act, the Townshend revenues, and the import duties leading to the Boston Tea Party-all infamous in America's schoolbooks. The colonists agreed they should contribute but insisted they must be asked through their legal assemblies. Taxation without consent, they warned, was tyranny.
Americans' objections to these taxes were rooted in their understanding of the relationship between the colonies and the British government. Most of the 13 colonies had been established by the crown through royal charters in the 17th and early 18th centuries, but the hated new taxes were imposed by Parliament, which colonists believed had no legitimate role in their governance, except to regulate oceanic trade. (The colonists, of course, weren't represented in Parliament, and "No taxation without representation" would become a rallying cry of the Revolution.)
For the most part, Americans in 1763 failed to appreciate how power had moved from the king to the House of Commons, the dominant half of Parliament. This shift had occurred over the previous half century, when Britain's political system had evolved into the basic form we know today. Abetting the rise of parliamentary power during the reigns of George I (1714-27) and George II (1727-60) were able leaders in the form of Robert Walpole-in effect the first prime minister, although he didn't carry the title-and William Pitt the Elder, known as the "Great Commoner" for his advocacy of constitutional rights.
In that Walpolean world, the king's ministers simply bought the majority they needed in the House of Commons, using all the enticements available to them in an utterly venal system. If they had chosen to do so, they could almost certainly have used similar corrupt means to pacify the restive colonial assemblies in America. (In Nova Scotia, where Parliament did subsidize the provincial government, the resistance movement faded.) But this would, in effect, have reversed the desired flow of resources from America to Britain by which the government sought to defray the costs of empire. It was a mistake that Britain would not repeat in its later efforts to retain the loyalty of its Canadian and Australian colonies.
The failure of Americans to grasp the subtleties of British politics would have long-lasting significance on our own political system when, four years after the 1783 Treaty of Paris formally ended the Revolutionary War, we came to write our Constitution. In the years prior to the revolution our grievances had centered on Parliament, but during the war they came to focus on the crown. Through his prime minister, the hated Lord North, George III worked to restore the power of the monarchy while running roughshod over the opposition Whigs, who at least in the war's beginning showed some sympathy for the rebels' cause. To Americans, the king was a despot, and Parliament did his bidding. We saw British political machinations through the lens of Montesquieu, a philosopher who advocated the separation of powers within a government to ensure freedom, and it was this view that the Framers took with them to Philadelphia. During our alumni college's stay in London, David Butler of Oxford developed this theme in a lecture pointedly titled "On the Benefits to America of Having so Persistently Misunderstood British Government."

he london phase of our alumni college included a side trip to Bath, a favorite resort of William Pitt the Elder, earl of Chatham, whose resignation as prime minister in 1768 removed a champion of policies that might have reversed the slide toward rebellion. Our odyssey continued with a flight to Edinburgh, where we bedded down in a hotel on the rift between the medieval city that was the seat of an independent Scotland and the new town that grew up during the 18th century, when English power protected the lowland Scots from marauding highlanders. The English and Scottish crowns had been united since the accession of James I (VI of Scotland), in 1603. James was the first in the line of Stuart monarchs that would include Charles I and II, and Mary II, who ruled with William of Nassau, after whom Nassau Hall would be named. Throughout the 17th century, Scotland continued to maintain a quasi-independent status, with its own parliament in Edinburgh, and the country remained divided in its attitude toward England. The mainly mercantilist lowlanders favored stronger ties with their southern neighbor, while the agrarian highlanders remained fiercely independent. The Scots, who were overwhelmingly Presbyterian, also split along theological lines. Their doctrinal conflicts spilled over into the struggle for national identity, which would not resolve itself until the mid-18th century.
In 1707, a century after the union of crowns, the English and Scottish parliaments were joined. The uniting of the two nations raised political and intellectual issues that did much to unleash the flow of thought that marked the Scottish Enlightenment. The philosopher David Hume (1711-76) and the political economist Adam Smith (1723-90) are only the best-known of the luminaries associated with this extraordinary period, when Scotland became a kind of Greece to England's Rome.
Even while favoring the union with England, many of the Enlightenment's leading figures felt a deep ambivalence about their country's loss of political autonomy. One detects some of these feelings in John Witherspoon (1723-94), who, before his leaving Scotland in 1768 to assume the presidency of the College of New Jersey, had secured his reputation as a cleric of penetrating intelligence.
It should be noted that Witherspoon, while influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, was not of it. A conservative in theological matters, he did not share its more worldly views, and he inveighed against clerics who advocated humanism over dogma. Witherspoon also preached that churchmen should avoid politics, but a man of his energy and convictions living in such tempestuous times found this dictum easier to follow in the abstract. His years in Scotland were marked by a smoldering civil conflict that occasionally burst into open insurrection by Jacobites, the highland followers of the Stuart pretenders, who had lost the British crown to the House of Hanover in 1714. One of these periodic highlander uprisings caused the young Witherspoon to leave his pulpit in Paisley and set off at the head of a group of Unionists to bolster the defense of nearby Glasgow. To the Unionists' chagrin, the military authorities rebuffed their offer to help and told them to go home. Their humiliation was complete when they were captured by rebels and imprisoned in a castle-from which Witherspoon escaped by tying together bed sheets and lowering himself to the ground.
One of the stops on our Scottish itinerary was Paisley, where we visited what was once the laigh kirk (low church) in which Witherspoon ministered. Among Witherspoon's many published works was a treatise attacking the immorality of plays. Ironically, the building in which he preached for two decades is now a theater. In Paisley Abbey we admired a plaque to Witherspoon that fellow Scotsman Ernest Gordon, the emeritus dean of the Chapel, helped to dedicate.
In their use of force to sustain it, the English also came to feel a certain ambivalence toward the union of their country with Scotland. We gleaned some sense of this when our alumni journey reached its northernmost point, the site of the Battle of Culloden Moor, just east of Inverness. There, in 1746, the British put a bloody end to a rising of highlanders in support of the last Stuart pretender, whom the Scots called Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Culloden was the last battle fought on British soil, and in the subsequent campaign to clear the highlands of any remnant of rebellion the English used methods bordering on genocide. The brutality repulsed many Englishmen. By a process of historical learning that characterizes all countries, the outlook of England's leaders changed as the aftermath of Culloden sank into their consciousness. Two decades later, they went to considerable lengths to avoid imposing any "peace of Culloden" on the colonies, a course that likely would have required keeping 50,000 troops in America indefinitely. The memory of Culloden was one reason why General Thomas Gage, the royal governor of Massachusetts, in 1775 proved so reluctant to bring the colonists to heel by brute force in Boston, and why a year later the brothers William and Richard Howe used such restraint in establishing British land and naval power in New York. They did not want to capture, or be obliged to hang, George Washington. Indeed, early in the war they did not want to kill or capture any more colonists than absolutely necessary. By demonstrating the near invincibility of the British army in the New York campaign, they hoped to show the rebels that resistance was hopeless, their cause was lost, and they ought to go home. A majority did. But Washington used the tattered remnants of his army to surprise the garrisons of Trenton and Princeton on December 26, 1776 and January 3, 1777. The British abandoned New Jersey, and the Revolution survived. In the 1777 campaign, the British routinely burned abandoned farms. In the South in 1780-81, they often massacred prisoners and destroyed civilian property. To the British, the choices became but two: the peace of Culloden or the loss of the colonies.

itherspoon's commitment to public service and his stature in Presbyterian circles helped shape his young college and its role in the emergence of the nation. Among the few colleges founded in the colonial era, Princeton was unique in drawing students from the full length of British North America. The horizons of the first two of these colleges, Harvard and William and Mary, were bounded respectively by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Virginia. The third college, Yale, was a little less parochial, having attracted a few students from the southern colonies. By contrast, over 40 percent of pre-Revolutionary students at Princeton came from New England or the South, while fewer than 60 percent were from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware put together.
Princeton was a place where a lad like James "Jemmy" Madison 1771 could come up from Virginia and discover how the world looked to someone from Massachusetts or the Carolinas. Witherspoon traveled widely in search of bright young prospects, and his stature counted for a great deal among Presbyterian families. But the college's openness to religious freedom appealed to people of other denominations, too. This was the primary reason that Madison's father sent his son to Princeton rather than to William and Mary, which was aligned with the established Anglican church.
We can be sure that Witherspoon's students discussed the leading public issues of the day, including the mother country's efforts to share her financial burdens with the colonies. Here, too, Witherspoon's outlook played an essential role. He imbued his students with his passion for public life and set them the example of his own service as a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress, which coordinated the colonies' resistance to the British. At the moment of full defiance, he became the one college president (and the only clergyman) to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Student discussion of these issues wasn't confined to Witherspoon's classes. He encouraged the college's rival literary and debating groups, the American Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society, which enrolled a large fraction of the student body. Although many detailed records of their debates during the Witherspoon era were lost in the two fires that later gutted Nassau Hall, we can assume that the societies-in their ill-lit chambers at opposite ends of the third-floor corridor of Nassau Hall- spent many a cold winter evening debating the issues that were alienating the colonies from Britain. In the process, the students would have come to see their common interest and to think of themselves as Americans, a term just coming into widespread use during Witherspoon's time. They would also have come to appreciate the outlooks of the varied interests and factions in the several colonies.
In this way, Princeton-even before we were a nation-became our first truly national college. From here it is only a short step to understanding the origins of Madison's 10th Federalist, the philosophical bedrock of our constitution and the nation's greatest contribution to Western political science. Madison would not have left Princeton with a finished plan of federal union in his pocket, even allowing for his postgraduate year studying law under Witherspoon. He needed the experience of independence and the political disorders that followed it under the Articles of Confederation. Madison undoubtedly spelled out many of his ideas of federal union only as the Constitutional Convention worked through the summer of 1787-and some only as he and Alexander Hamilton were furiously writing the columns in which "Publius" sought to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution. All the same, it is reasonable to believe that Madison's years at Princeton laid the foundations of the 10th Federalist, which argued that a shared commitment to a wider American commonwealth could sustain a federal union while protecting its citizens against the tyranny of local majorities.
Other graduates of the College of New Jersey shared Madison's views and followed Witherspoon's example of public service. Many became governors, legislators, and justices who figured prominently in the transformation of the colonies into states. When the Framers assembled in Philadelphia to incorporate Madison's vision into our fundamental law, one delegate in six was a Princetonian.
One irony of modern Princeton is that Woodrow Wilson 1879 looms so large in the university's historical self-image that he obscures much of what went before. We're left with an impression that the tradition of Princeton in the nation's service sprang Athena-like from Wilson's brow a century ago. But Wilson never imagined he was doing more than reaffirming a tradition created by Witherspoon.
We understood Witherspoon's prior claim as we re-created the times of this remarkable Scot and retraced the role that he and his graduates played in the nation they helped to form.