John Witherspoon

Princeton University President

John Witherspoon, a Scottish minister, was recruited in 1768 to become president and head professor of the College of New Jersey in Princeton, later known as… well, you know what it was later known as. The school was by no means a powerhouse of higher education. Its academics were pathetic, it had essentially no admissions criteria, the library was pitiful, and the school was too broke to do anything about any of it.

But Witherspoon was a gifted rainmaker, tapping donors both locally and in Scotland. He gave hundreds of his own books to the library. He instituted a Scottish-style rigorous academic structure. And he imposed admissions requirements that at least made a pretense of separating incoming wheat from chaff. The school quickly took its place among the leading New World academic institutions. Among Witherspoon’s lasting contributions to American culture: he referred to his college’s bucolic setting as a “campus,” introducing the word into the American lexicon.

Being Scottish, Witherspoon had only a limited amount of patience for the English crown and was deeply involved in the American Revolution. He was a member of the New Jersey delegation to the Continental Congress and was both the only clergyman and the only college president to sign the Declaration of Independence. One slightly weird personal detail: at the age of sixty-eight Witherspoon married a twenty-four-year-old woman and had two more children on top of the ten he’d had with his first wife.*

So: a man of the cloth, fine college president, interesting fellow (a bit of a cradle robber, yes, but—dude!), important Revolutionary-era American. But if you’ve been with us so far, you probably know what comes next. Here we go. (Throat-clearing noises.) At his death in 1794, the inventory of John Witherspoon’s possessions included two slaves, “valued at a hundred dollars each.” That’s right. This Protestant minister kept slaves while he was president of What Would One Day Be Princeton.

And here is either his defense or a blanket condemnation of the early leaders of Princeton. Witherspoon was the college’s sixth president. The five before him and the two who followed also owned slaves. As did many of the trustees.

We’ll go with blanket condemnation. And it’s no excuse to say “Everyone did it.” If everyone jumped off a moral cliff, would you jump off, too? So there you go. Thank you, and good night.