As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, celebrations of America’s history are building to a crescendo. With the Fourth of July just a scant week away, I thought I would return to a question I posed some years ago: Who is the most unfairly neglected American Founding Father? You might think that none can be unfairly neglected; so many books about that distinguished coterie have been published lately. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington—whom have I left out? It has been a literary festival of Founders these last few years, and a good thing, too. But there is one figure, I believe, who has yet to get his due, and that is John Witherspoon (1723–94). This Scotch Presbyterian divine came to America to preside over a distressed college in Princeton, New Jersey, and wound up transmitting to the colonies critical principles of the Scottish Enlightenment, and helped to preside over the birth and consolidation of American independence.
Jeffry Morrison’s brief book, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (2006), both testifies to and partly redresses the neglect Witherspoon has suffered. Modern scholars, Morrison points out, “have not made much out of Witherspoon one way or another.” For example, a standard text called The Forgotten Leaders of the American Revolution (1955) omits Witherspoon entirely. But during his lifetime, Witherspoon enjoyed a very high reputation not only as a clergyman but also as a public intellectual and man of affairs. He commanded immense prestige both in his native Scotland and, even more, in America.
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