Young College, New Nation

God's Quarrel with Princeton

When John Witherspoon reached North America in 1768, he was greeted with exuberance in Philadelphia, and Princeton celebrated his arrival with joy and high expectations. Both the College of New Jersey and the Presbyterian Church in the American colonies saw him as the answer to their problems.
The College of New Jersey had been founded in 1746 to perpetuate the Great Awakening, an enormous transatlantic religious revival that swept through Britain and most of the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. But the Awakening also divided the American Presbyterian Church into bitter factions-the antirevivalist Old Side, which controlled the Synod of Philadelphia and most of the presbyteries, and the revivalist New Side, which dominated the Presbytery of New Brunswick and much of Long Island. Outvoted in the Synod of Philadelphia, the New Siders seceded, established a rival Synod of New York, and in 1746 wrested a charter for a college from John Hamilton, the aging acting governor of New Jersey. Anglican opponents claimed Hamilton was senile and didn't know what he was doing. Yet the revivalists opened their college despite the criticism. They chose Jonathan Dickinson of Elizabeth, New Jersey, as its first president, and he used his parsonage as its first building. When he died after six months, Aaron Burr, the Presbyterian pastor at Newark (and father of Aaron Burr, Jr. 1772, who would gain notoriety for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel), moved the College into his parsonage and presided over the education of the first 10 graduating classes (1748-57).
During Burr's presidency the trustees raised enough funds in Britain to finance the construction of a permanent college building, arranged to move the school to the crossroads village of Princeton, and engaged as their architect Robert Smith, a Philadelphian who also designed Carpenters' Hall, where the First Continental Congress would later meet. When Burr and the students moved to Princeton in November 1756, Smith's building was the largest stone structure in British North America, and it even had an organ in the chapel, a luxury possessed by no other Presbyterian institution in the colonies. Some of the godly wagged their heads and mumbled that no good could come of such wanton display. The trustees cheerfully offered to name the building Belcher Hall, in honor of Governor Jonathan Belcher of New Jersey, who had issued a second charter to the College in 1748 and had strongly encouraged the move to Princeton. In his last great service to the College, Belcher declined this honor and suggested the name of Nassau Hall, in honor of King William III of England (1689-1702), Prince of Nassau, who had saved English liberty in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
God's quarrel with Nassau Hall soon began. As Esther Edwards Burr (the President's wife) recorded in her remarkable journal of those years, a powerful revival engulfed the student body, which at first seemed to ratify all the trustees' expectations for the College. But then Anglican parents began to withdraw their sons from a school that to them seemed to have become a sectarian hothouse. In August, Governor Belcher died, and, at his family's request, President Burr rode north to Elizabeth to deliver the funeral sermon, though severely ill himself. After his return to Princeton, his health deteriorated alarmingly, and in late September 1757 he died at age 41, just a few days before the graduation of the College's 10th class.
The chastened trustees next offered the presidency to Burr's father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards, the famous Massachusetts revivalist. While he prayerfully considered the offer, his own father died, but he accepted anyway and arrived in Princeton in February 1758, only to find smallpox raging in central New Jersey. Edwards strongly believed in the harmony of science and religion and, partly as an example to his new neighbors, submitted to the fairly novel procedure of inoculation. Things went well at first, but then Edwards became deathly ill. One tearful onlooker sobbed that all these deaths were providential. They were God's just punishment for the vanity and arrogance of Nassau Hall. An expression of horror and anxiety appeared on Edwards's face. We can only guess what he was thinking. Perhaps, "Go forth, good people, and rip it apart, stone by stone!" But then his countenance softened, and he reminded those in attendance that the Lord's ways are not man's and that we must accept the judgments of Providence. After only five weeks, Princeton lost its third president.
The calamities continued. Days later, Esther Edwards Burr, widow of Aaron Burr and daughter of Jonathan Edwards, also died. Later that year so did Sarah Edwards, the widow of Jonathan. For the College's fourth president, the alarmed trustees turned to Samuel Davies, the man who had raised 2,000 pounds in Britain in 1753 to finance the construction of Nassau Hall. His administration lasted only a year and a half before he too died, in 1760. His successor, Samuel Finley, died in 1766 after five years in office. During the College's first four years in Princeton, it lost three presidents, and during its first 10 years, it lost four. A generation raised on providential thinking had to suspect that God did indeed have a severe quarrel with Nassau Hall. But the trustees interpreted this train of disasters as a series of trials, not a judgment. Each was a separate event, and they saw no causal link among them. Yet the trustees did resolve to try something new. In 1766 they agreed to look for a new president on the other side of the Atlantic, and they quickly chose John Witherspoon, the pastor at Paisley, Scotland, not far from Glasgow.
Selecting Witherspoon was easy. Getting him to accept was far more difficult. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Witherspoon was an articulate and effective spokesman for the Popular (or Calvinist evangelical) Party in the Kirk (church) of Scotland. He had won widespread acclaim for his Ecclesiastical Characteristics (1753), which satirized the leaders of the Moderate (or Enlightenment) faction of the kirk, and for his Essay on Justification (1756), which affirmed traditional Scottish orthodoxy. In Scotland most ordinary worshippers sympathized with the Popular Party (hence its name), but the Moderates controlled the universities and the patronage structure of the kirk and were able to fill most pulpits with their supporters. Such leading moderates and Enlightenment figures as Francis Hutcheson (the outstanding moral philosopher of his day), David Hume (a profound philosophical skeptic), William Robertson (one of the finest historians produced by the 18th century), and Adam Smith (the founder of modern economics), were coming to be recognized as some of the greatest minds in Britain, indeed all of Europe. Traditional religious values had almost no place in their intellectual world, and they usually refrained from theological and doctrinal controversy. Witherspoon plunged into this gap and exposed its implications. His writings delighted two Princeton graduates, Richard Stockton 1748 and Benjamin Rush 1760, who had been commissioned by the trustees to find the next president.
They and several Popular Party clerics convinced the 43-year-old Witherspoon that the College of New Jersey offered a rare opportunity to spread the gospel and strengthen the Presbyterian cause throughout the Atlantic world. But all of them encountered fierce opposition from an unexpected source-Witherspoon's wife, Elizabeth. To her, New Jersey sounded like a desolate place beyond the ends of the earth. She detected no divine imperative in a call to a college famous mostly for killing its presidents. She harbored understandable fears of being left a widow in North America, far from friends and family with several small children to raise. It took two years for the eloquence of Popular Party advocates to change her mind, but in 1768 the Witherspoons finally took ship for America.
Princeton's trustees thought they were getting an orthodox evangelical with sufficient educational credentials to block criticism from the Old Side faction, which had reunited with the New Side in 1758, despite continuing disagreements and tensions. Witherspoon surprised them all, particularly by the way he transformed the curriculum. His most popular innovations confined instruction in the classical languages to freshman year and permitted adequately prepared students to enter as sophomores, when all classes were in English. He also introduced the lecture course for the junior and senior years, a device that aroused an excitement difficult to appreciate today among college graduates who have dozed through more than their quota of undergraduate lectures. But compared with recitation in Latin or Greek, it had limitless potential for engaging the imagination of students, most of whom were about two years younger than they are today.
Finally, Witherspoon revamped the philosophical assumptions of the Princeton curriculum. When he arrived, he was alarmed to discover that the Idealism of Bishop George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards dominated philosophy courses in the College. Only ideas are real, students were taught, and we and the whole universe exist only as ideas in the mind of God. These assumptions ran counter to everything being taught in Scottish universities. To Witherspoon they seemed more perilous than any differences that separated the Popular Party from the Moderates in Scotland. He quickly eased Jonathan Edwards, Jr. 1765 out of his position as tutor and began introducing Scottish common sense and moral-sense philosophy in the place of Idealism, even though this change meant the active use of Hutcheson, Hume, Robertson, and other Moderates.
Scottish common-sense philosophy had risen as a response to Berkeley's Idealism and Hume's extreme skepticism. It affirmed that we can trust our senses-that trees exist, the sky is blue, and a chair is a chair. With these basics established, philosophers could legitimately explore larger and more important questions. Moral-sense philosophy taught that everyone possesses an inherent moral sense enabling him or her to take delight in something good and decent (a favorite example always seemed to be a mother nursing her child) and to be repelled by loathsome acts. Despite an implicit tension between moral-sense philosophy and the doctrine of original sin, it caught on and is still being taught today in evangelical schools such as Wheaton College in Illinois, Hope College in Michigan, and Bob Jones University in South Carolina.
In effect, Witherspoon made his Scottish opponents a central part of the Princeton curriculum. Confident in his own ability to guide and direct young minds, he thought he could introduce them to the most challenging ideas of the day without undermining their religious orthodoxy. A Christian gentleman, he affirmed in more than one graduation address, ought to be both learned and redeemed. He thus bridged the gap in the Presbyterian community between the New Side and the Old Side. Both found in Witherspoon an eloquent spokesman for what they cherished most deeply.
Until American independence, Witherspoon's formula worked amazingly well. Even though he redirected recruiting away from New England and toward the southern colonies, the percentage of graduates entering the pulpit held steady at almost half of a typical class, even while the number of graduates rose. But the Revolution brought a sharp reversal of this pattern. By the early 1790s fewer than 10 percent of Princeton students were choosing a clerical career. Law, medicine, public service, even business-all seemed more exciting than preaching. After Witherspoon's death in 1794, the disjunction between the Scottish Enlightenment and evangelical expectations would haunt his successors for most of the 19th century. They could not sustain what he had brought together.