“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
– W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
In 2001, Princeton University honored John Witherspoon – its indispensable sixth President and a founder of our nation – with the installation of a prominent statue of him on Firestone Plaza. The University’s then President and Trustees authorized this action. Within the past year, petitioners at Princeton have called for the removal of this statute, and a decision by the University on whether to do so is now pending. Among the questions this dispute presents is why so many Princetonians now oppose honoring Witherspoon. This essay offers insight into this important question.
The Princeton & Slavery Project, a group made up of both Princeton and non-Princeton affiliates created to “investigat[e] the University’s involvement with the institution of slavery,” has placed Witherspoon in the false light of an incomplete and misleading narrative. This is no small matter. Princetonians forming their judgments in the Witherspoon statute debate naturally look to the Project for guidance on Witherspoon’s relation to slavery. Indeed, the statue removal petition itself cites the Project’s website for “Witherspoon’s connections to slavery.” But the Project gravely misleads. Its “John Witherspoon” essay (the “Essay”) stands as an untrustworthy lighthouse that shines unjust calumny on Princeton’s sixth President to convince readers that Princeton memorializes an offensively unworthy man.
The pending decision on the fate of Witherspoon’s statue by the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) Committee on Naming makes it all the more urgent to make public my concerns about the Princeton & Slavery Project’s website now. Before any such recommendation or decision, the entire Princeton community should have as sound a factual foundation and historical analysis as possible of Witherspoon’s relation to slavery. This urgency is furthered by the Committee on Naming’s quite recent announcement of a scholarly Symposium – “John Witherspoon in Historical Context” – set for April 21, 2023.
The formerly named John Witherspoon Middle School in the town of Princeton exhibits the extension of the Essay’s harm even beyond the University’s gates. In their July 2020 letter to the Princeton school board – which clearly cites the Princeton & Slavery Project – the middle school petitioners condemned Witherspoon as “anti-abolitionist.” From their reading of the Project, these middle school petitioners – and likely innumerable others – concluded that Witherspoon “oppressed and tyrannized Black lives in Princeton and throughout the state during his lifetime.” The Princeton & Slavery Project bears the leading responsibility for this harmful misunderstanding.
Princeton’s history certainly includes mistakes and wrongs. In its own words, the Princeton & Slavery Project is “[a]n exploration of Princeton University’s historical ties to the institution of slavery.” I earlier commended the Project for its profound undertaking. I there noted that for the Project, “[W]ith great power comes great responsibility.” I further stated my belief that the Project needs improvement, as I had developed concerns over the trustworthiness of the Essay.
The Princeton & Slavery Project is composed of many works by different authors. I think they have labored in good faith. Yet, we all fall short at times in our endeavors. Sometimes another’s perspective can be instructive. I now offer mine, and my writing here no doubt has its own shortcomings. An earnest and open exchange on the issues raised herein can work for the betterment of Princeton.
The Essay argues that Witherspoon “both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery” and “contributed to the United States becoming a cradle of slavery,” implying that he advocated slavery and worked to increase its prevalence. Reading these statements could make anyone wonder: Was Princeton’s Witherspoon an odious precursor to Yale’s Calhoun?
Yet these statements are contradicted by two other essays on the Princeton & Slavery Project site. “Princeton and Slavery: Holding The Center” argues that “John Witherspoon provided the intellectual underpinnings for antislavery sentiment at Princeton,” and “Slavery in the Curriculum” asserts that “Witherspoon laid the groundwork for future Princeton students to debate the morality of slavery in an academically rigorous environment.”
Furthermore, Kevin DeYoung, scholar and author of The Religious Formation of John Witherspoon, has revealed important new information on Witherspoon’s slave ownership. DeYoung’s findings put a different perspective on the Essay’s disparaging description of Witherspoon’s education of the apparent former slave John Chavis “even as two enslaved people lived and worked beside Chavis at [Witherspoon’s farm] Tusculum.” DeYoung concludes, “It seems that Witherspoon likely practiced what he preached by making [his slave] ‘Forton Weatherspoon’ a householder of his own and giving him the opportunity to be fully emancipated, which he appears to have been shortly after Witherspoon’s death.” The records are not as clear as to the fate of Witherspoon’s second slave, but DeYoung believes that slave to have been Forton Weatherspoon’s wife.
Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) published DeYoung’s “John Witherspoon: President and Patriot” essay in December and “A Fuller Measure of Witherspoon on Slavery” at the end of January, but as of mid-April, the Project has not updated the Essay to reflect DeYoung’s findings.
In contrast to the DeYoung revelations above, the following pertinent information was available at the time of the Essay but is nevertheless nowhere reflected in it, nor elsewhere on the Project’s site: (1) Witherspoon’s support of John Newton, and (2) his leadership to get the Presbyterian Church’s 1787 adoption of a resolution for the abolition of slavery. Under Witherspoon, he notes, Princeton awarded the British abolitionist Newton an honorary degree in 1791. As to the renowned British opponents of the Atlantic Slave Trade, DeYoung importantly observes, “If Witherspoon had been seen as a friend of slavery and an enemy of abolition in his own time it is unlikely that Newton and Wilberforce would have thought of him so highly and praised his work so unreservedly.” DeYoung’s detailing of that 1787 Presbyterian resolution is further below.
How can the Project assert that Witherspoon “both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey” and that “in his life and career, Witherspoon also contributed to the United States becoming a cradle of slavery from its very founding”? I argue that these errant claims arise from the Essay’s faulty analysis of Witherspoon’s advocacy of a gradual elimination of slavery and his related opinions and actions not to press for immediate legislative abolition of slavery. (See DeYoung’s “John Witherspoon: President and Patriot.”) The Essay fails to address these different approaches to the end of slavery on their respective merits for Witherspoon’s time. Instead, it wrongfully implies that not championing immediate legislative abolition of slavery was tantamount to molding America into a “cradle of slavery.”
Further, the Essay claims that the failure of the New Jersey legislative committee Witherspoon chaired in 1790 to approve a bill for immediate legislative abolition “allowed slavery to continue in New Jersey largely undisturbed until 1804.” This conflates the committee with the entire legislature, whose action would have been required to pass any such ban. Moreover, such approval was highly unlikely in 1790, as by the Essay’s own recounting, it took until 1804 – ten years after Witherspoon’s death – for the enactment in New Jersey even of a “gradual emancipation law.”
Another historical inaccuracy present in the essay is its characterization of “the United States [as] becoming a cradle of slavery from its very founding.” Slavery was not new to the human experience in 1776. It was well-established among the colonies before the Revolution. Moreover, the young United States – under both the Articles of Confederation (1777) and the Constitution (1787) prohibited the practice of slavery in the Northwest Territory after 1800 through acts culminating in the Northwest Ordinance (1787). Slavery in America preceded both Witherspoon and the United States.
The Essay is also misleading in its discussion of Witherspoon’s tutoring of the “two free African men” Yamma and Quamine. It states that “Witherspoon did not appear to see a conflict between the relationship he had with Yamma and Quamine and the practice of slaveholding.” This statement is misleading because the Essay’s preceding sentence dates Witherspoon’s teaching of these free men as beginning in 1774 (and, according to another Project entry, ending in early 1775). The Essay three sentences later dates Witherspoon’s ownership of slaves as beginning in 1779, four years later. As Yamma and Quamine were free when Witherspoon taught them and at that time Witherspoon had not yet become a slaveholder, there simply was no “conflict between the relationship he [Witherspoon] had with Yamma and Quamine and the practice of slaveholding.”
In addition to its misleading presentation of Witherspoon’s tutelage of Yamma and Quamine, the Essay distorts a statement by Witherspoon from a lecture of his on moral philosophy to cast him as a crass hypocrite. Here is the statement by Witherspoon: “I do not think there lies any necessity on those who found men in a state of slavery, to make them free to their own ruin.” According to the Essay, “Witherspoon’s conclusion that emancipation of slaves was not a ‘necessity’ conveniently absolved him and other slaveholders of their moral dilemma.”
Does the Essay give us a fair reading of Witherspoon’s statement? I think not. The Essay notes that Witherspoon condemned the enslavement of previously free people. But it then observes that Witherspoon “appeared to make a distinction between the act of enslaving people and holding them as property after they had already been enslaved.” Yes, he made a distinction, but for what purpose?
The Essay would have us conclude that Witherspoon sought to escape all obligation ever to emancipate any slaves he owned. But this ignores what Witherspoon himself did. We learn from DeYoung that Witherspoon himself shepherded the 1787 Presbyterian resolution calling for “the final abolition of slavery” and for Presbyterians to provide their slaves prior to their emancipation “some share of property” or to “grant them sufficient time, and sufficient means… that may render them useful citizens.” Moreover, according to DeYoung, Witherspoon emancipated his own slave Forton Weatherspoon.
I submit that Witherspoon’s statement about making slaves “free to their own ruin” refers to the difficult problem that countless others then faced during Witherspoon’s time: how to succeed in the transition from a life of slavery to newfound freedom. Witherspoon did not see it as sufficient simply to declare such slaves free and abandon them without preparation for a meaningfully emancipated life. To do the former without the latter courted their “ruin.”
In her remarks at the 2017 Princeton & Slavery Project Symposium, Harvard Professor Danielle Allen ’93 highlighted the need “as we bring the truth to light” to tell the revelations “with gentleness and empathy.” The Essay too often fails this wise standard. It distorts Witherspoon’s words and actions to fit its tendentious Procrustean bed.
It also fails the “rigorous academic standards” President Eisgruber heralded in an announcement regarding the Project’s findings preceding that Symposium. Why the Project published this flawed and damaging essay to begin with and allowed it to stand uncorrected for over five years, I leave to President Eisgruber to explain. An institutional failure of this magnitude, duration, and gravity cannot be dismissed as the result of a single individual’s mistakes. Princeton must address this fiasco of profound proportion.
My appeals to President Eisgruber are earnest. He should bring to bear all in his power for an investigation to understand how this failure happened and persisted. He should provide the University community and general public an explanation for this failure. And further, he should provide a public report detailing the measures instituted to ensure the effective maintenance of “rigorous academic standards” by the Princeton & Slavery Project. We Princetonians should strive that such a failure in our University never happens again.
I know not whether the University will remove the presently controversial statue honoring John Witherspoon. If it remains, I do anticipate that the University will add some reference to the base of the statue about Witherspoon and slavery. Further, our era of QR codes and the like can provide ready links to reviews and analyses of Witherspoon’s entire life.
But any such statement or referenced source must not mislead. This is vitally important – and even more so for any linked statement on Witherspoon and slavery. And any plaque or linked statement should follow the wise counsel of Professor Allen. To link to the Project’s Essay in its current form would further contribute to the tragic misunderstanding of the full measure of Witherspoon on slavery.
Mindful of the clarion summons by W.E.B. Du Bois, I now call upon the Princeton & Slavery Project to update its site on Witherspoon’s relation to slavery so that we Princetonians may be guided by “the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable.” Inviting Witherspoon scholar Kevin DeYoung to contribute an essay on Witherspoon would be a fitting first step.
The above is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
Bill Hewitt is an alumnus of Princeton in the Class of 1974. He can be reached at . He can be read at https://tigerroars.substack.com. He there provides additional examples of shortcomings by the Princeton & Slavery Project’s Witherspoon Essay.
Copyright © 2024 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.