On this Fourth of July much of American Presbyterianism recalls the 12 Presbyterians who eventually signed the document remembered on this day, and particularly the Rev. John Witherspoon, the only ordained clergy to sign.
While Witherspoon was ordained in the Church of Scotland, that alone was not his ticket into the Continental Congress. In 1768 he had been induced to leave Scotland and become the President and head professor at a small Presbyterian college, the College of New Jersey. In 1896 it changed its name to Princeton University. Witherspoon did much to raise the status and visibility of the institution to what was expected of an top-tier institution of higher learning. William Bennett wrote in a book chapter:
Princeton built on this foundation with solid bricks. The school’s leaders intended to produce students able to think for themselves, and those leaders had strong ideas about the curriculum best suited to the task. First-year studies… were classical: “reading the Greek and Latin languages, especially Horace, Cicero’s Orations, the Greek Testament, Lucian’s Dialogues, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.” Second-year students continued with Greek and Latin, especially Homer and Longinus, and started upon the modern “sciences, geography, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics.” The junior year centered about ethics, metaphysics, and history, as well as mathematics and science. Seniors found themselves “entirely employed in reviews and composition, improving parts of the Latin and Greek classics, parts of the Hebrew Bible, and all the arts and sciences.” This final undergraduate year became its own school of public discussion; students appeared on stage before their peers, giving speeches and participating in debates over the best of past and contemporary thought.
But beyond the book learning there was moral thought. Bennett continues:
Princeton’s curriculum was not unusual; its rigor was the rule rather than the exception for the colleges of colonial America. But the school’s administration understood that education does not end with a student’s reading list. They realized that an institution committed to the importance of ideas cannot long afford to neglect the moral difference between good ideas and bad ones. And since free institutions of learning draw their life’s blood from a distinct and precious set of good ideas-democratic ideas-Princeton’s leaders refused to stand neutral before the principles of liberty and justice at a time when contemporary politics decided the future of those principles as a part of our heritage. The school’s pedagogy was not “value-free.” Princeton did its best to instill in its charges a love for ideas, and in particular a love for the ideas that would soon buttress the modern world’s first republican government.
It was into this environment that James Madison entered in 1769, having advanced to the second year by examination on the first year topics. Madison would fulfill the undergraduate curriculum in three years and stick around as a tutor and graduate student under Witherspoon an additional two years.
As noted above, Witherspoon’s curriculum, and make no mistake about it but he controlled the school’s instruction, not only had the grounding in the classics but was not neutral on moral thought. As James Commiff writes in his paper “The Enlightenment and American Political Thought: A Study of the Origins of Madison’s Federalist Number 10“:
Witherspoon’s central philosophical concern was to reconcile revelation with the knowledge discoverable by human reason. This he accomplished by maintaining that revelation stands above reason but not in contradiction to it; therefore, the central doctrines of Calvinism do not violate reason but rather supplement it. There is, then, nothing in worldly wisdom that constitutes a danger to true belief, and one may study secular topics without fear of being misled into religious error. This blending of faith and reason allowed Witherspoon to both defend religion against its rationalistic and deistic critics and to admit whatever seemed of value in Enlightenment philosophy into the course of study at Princeton.
Much more is written about Witherspoon’s methods, and the citizens those methods produced, but one indication is the makeup of the Constitutional Convention. In his paper “Common sense deliberative practice: John Witherspoon, James Madison, and the U.S. constitution,” Terence S. Morrow writes:
James Madison was not the only Witherspoon-trained participant in the Constitution’s creation. The Constitutional Convention “must have looked like a reunion of Princetonians” from Witherspoon’s classes (Wills 19). Nine Princeton graduates, six of whom studied under Witherspoon, were among the fifty-five delegates. Their training in Scottish Common Sense-Ciceronian humanism is evident. ‘Trained in law and religion, these are some of the men who would identify with and protect the values of society as they saw them, who would take it upon themselves as a right and a duty to adjudicate social and moral issues. They would speak of literature, politics, society, and man with a common-sense clarity derived in large part from the Scots they had studied” (Martin 7). But it is James Madison, whose greatest public accomplishments occurred during the Constitutional formulation and ratification, who takes pride of place among these Witherspoon graduates.
It is helpful to know that Madison was raised in an active Anglican home. The Anglican Church was the established church of Virginia and a young James Madison had experienced the state, with the backing of the church, persecuting and driving out groups of Baptists that gathered in his county. As a youth he was tutored by a Presbyterian minister and many consider this a strong influence on his decision to go to the College of New Jersey.
While my purpose here is not to dissect Madison’s religious beliefs, but to suggest the Presbyterian influence on his body of work as a whole, interesting comments are made by two writers. First, Morrow makes these observations about different viewpoints during the ratification process. [Any analysis about how this played out in American politics is left as an exercise for the reader.]
Whereas John Witherspoon and James Madison promoted a federalist model of representation and deliberation in which delegates exercised prudential rationality independent of their constituents’ control, Patrick Henry argued for the antifederalist vision of a more democratic, local-minded mode of representation. For Henry, as for Madison and the federalists, human nature was innately corrupt. The latter, however, believed that the Constitutional plan’s qualification requirements for office and the electoral process would issue forth sufficient numbers of representatives who would exhibit the hallmarks of Common Sense-Ciceronian deliberation. The antifederalists shared little of this federalist faith. Henry articulated this pessimism during Virginia’s ratification convention in June, 1788 as he argued that the national representatives would be prone to pursue “their personal interests, their ambition and avarice.” Members of Congress would not be “superiour to the frailties of human nature. However cautious you may be in the selection of your Representatives, it will be dangerous to trust them with such unbounded powers.” Henry thus pointedly rejected Madison’s reliance upon the “possible virtue” of the representatives, for prudence, reason, and experience revealed the federalists’ contention to be chimerical.
In essence, Patrick Henry countered Madison’s invocation of rationality born of education and extensive knowledge with a pastoral version of communal sense. According to Henry, for Madison to hope that representatives’ “genius, intelligence, and integrity” would ensure the passage of laws that protect individual rights, states’ interests, and the country’s security, violated the prevailing presumption of man’s proclivity towards vice. Early in Virginia’s ratification convention, Henry chastised Madison and the other federalists for supposing that elected officials would be honest. The Constitution, by transmitting unlimited powers to Congress, exacerbated the dangers attendant upon Madison’s “hope.” Henry continued that it would be “distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad,” for in every instance in which such faith was rested in the representatives, liberty was lost. “Did we not know of the fallibility of human nature, we might rely on the present structure of this Government.—We might depend that the rules of propriety, and the general interest of the Union would be observed. But the depraved nature of man is well known. He has a natural biass (sic) towards his own interest, which will prevail over every consideration, unless it is checked.”
Maybe what is most striking to our modern ear in this extended passage is the comment at the beginning that both sides considered human nature to be “innately corrupt.” The disagreement is over how best to construct a political system that brought out the best in people and allowed for checks and balances to allow for the nation to be best governed under these circumstances.
As a side note, reflections on the Presbyterian form of government can be seen in this debate as well.
Two articles I read take a close look at James Madison’s religious views – Ralph Ketcham’s “James Madison and Religion – A New Hypothesis,” and Joseph Loconte’s “Faith and the Founding: The Influence of Religion on the Politics of James Madison.” From this we can probably sum everything up succinctly, including this post, with the line from Garry Will’s biography of Madison:
“Madison’s views on religious freedom are the inspiration for all that was best in his later political though.”
