John Witherspoon,the Scottish Common Sense School,and American Political Philosophy

Abstract

This article thus argues that we should interpret Witherspoon's relationship to slavery through the lens of his philosophical commitments. Perhaps John Witherspoon's most lasting contribution to American political culture was his introduction of Scottish Common Sense philosophy into American life. This body of philosophical thought that Witherspoon brought over from Scotland soon became dominant in American seminaries and universities. It helped shape the language of the Patriot cause during the American Revolution and seems to have, in concrete ways, influenced the Constitution. Scottish Common Sense philosophy helped to undergird much of the early anti-slavery movement. In this sense Witherspoon contributed significantly to the foundations of early American abolitionism. As the anti-slavery movement radicalized, though, decades after Witherspoon's death, Common Sense philosophy proved less useful, and generally faded as a source of anti-slavery commitment.

John Witherspoon spoke and wrote relatively infrequently about slavery and anti-slavery. In the thousands of pages of his writing that have been preserved, the institution of American chattel slavery is mentioned only a handful of times. But he is a crucial figure in American intellectual history because of his introduction of Scottish Common Sense philosophy into American culture. This body of thought that Witherspoon brought over from Scotland proved to be of nearly incalculable importance to American intellectual and political culture up until the Civil War. It would have a close and intimate relationship to the development of American democracy and the articulation of anti-slavery ideas during the early decades of the American Republic. Common Sense philosophy helped to undergird a moderate but real opposition to slavery during the American Revolution and during the early years of the American Republic.

Witherspoon is a strange Founder. Those of us around Princeton are familiar, of course, with his many roles: President of Princeton, member of the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence. In comparison to Jefferson, Adams, Washington, or Franklin, he is relatively unknown to the public. So I’m not sure there has ever been a popular biography of Witherspoon (or certainly no Broadway musical!). But despite his low profile, he plays an incredibly important role in the history of American ideas. In many ways, his political roles pale in comparison to his contributions to American intellectual life. He plays a major role in the work of a number of prominent intellectual historians—including the work of Gary Wills, Henry May, James Kloppenberg, Daniel Walker Howe, and Mark Noll. ¹

These scholars tend to emphasize the crucial role that Witherspoon played shaping American intellectual culture. A shockingly large number of his students themselves became important politicians or intellectuals. To give a sense of Witherspoon's tremendous influence consider the following: 13 of his students became college presidents, 114 became clergymen, 12 served alongside him in the Continental Congress, 5 helped write the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention, 28 were senators, 49 Congressmen, 3 were supreme Court Justices, and 1 was president. ² James Madison was the most prominent, of course, of his students. This is partly why Garry Wills calls Witherspoon “probably the most influential teacher in the history of American education.” ³

This scholarship rarely discussions Witherspoon's relationship to slavery. Instead scholars have overwhelmingly looked at him as a philosopher, theologian, educator, and political leader. A search of “John Witherspoon” and “Slavery” in JSTOR, for instance, did not turn up any relevant academic articles. One of the most recent academic studies of him—2017's John Witherspoon's American Revolution by Gordon Mailer—in nearly 400 pages only mentions slavery briefly, basically on one page, saying that he maintained a “relative silence” on the question and mentions that he owned slaves but calls this fact “not entirely congruent with the few statements in which he queried the validity and morality of slavery.” ⁴ Still, I hope to show how his philosophy is related to question of slavery and democracy, albeit indirectly.

Instead the scholarship overwhelmingly focuses on the fact that Witherspoon taught what is now often referred to as Scottish Common Sense philosophy at Princeton. It is this role in the history of American philosophy that makes Witherspoon of interest beyond his local role in New Jersey and Princeton, and has cemented his national intellectual influence. Henry May, in his canonical study, The Enlightenment in America, claims that “Witherspoon began the long American Career of Scottish Common Sense.” ⁵ One scholar writes that Witherspoon's introduction of Scottish philosophy “helps mark him as the greatest educator of his age, or perhaps any American age. During the quarter century, he was at Princeton, Witherspoon provided concepts and modes of expression that helped to create a common moral language during the founding.” ⁶ He is often credited individually with introducing Common Sense philosophy to America. As early as 1803, in Samuel Miller's Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, one of the very first works of history written in the new republic, declared that the arrival of Witherspoon was “among the events which contribute to the advancement of literature and science in our country … [because he was] the first man who taught, in America, the substance of those doctrines of the human mind, which Dr. Reid afterwards developed with so much success.” ⁷ One graduate of Princeton who became the provost of the University of Pennsylvania—Frederick Beasley—in 1822's A Search for the Truth in the Science of the Human Mind, wrote of his time at Princeton, “I, together with all those graduates who took any interest in the subject, embraced without doubt or hesitation the doctrines of the Scottish School.” ⁸ This idea still holds. One academic study of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, published just last year, marks the origin of Scottish Common sense philosophy in America to be 1768, when Witherspoon was elected president of Princeton. ⁹

By the early years of the nineteenth century, nearly every American university had followed Witherspoon's lead and began teaching some version of Common Sense principles in their philosophy departments. At Harvard, for instance, between 1795 and 1845 the two books checked out of the Harvard library most were two works of Scottish philosophy. ¹⁰ This was partly because of the influence of Levi Hedge, who taught logic at Harvard from 1795 to 1832 and was “devoted” to the Scottish philosophers. ¹¹ In addition, prominent members of Harvard's faculty such as Francis Bowen, Andrews Norton, and James Walker also taught Common Sense philosophy. At the University of Pennsylvania, Beasley was the provost and professor of moral philosophy. At Brown, Francis Wayland's influential system of moral philosophy drew from eclectic sources, but the “major portion of his ‘system’” was derived from Scottish Common Sense. ¹² Wayland was perhaps the most influential academic philosopher of the antebellum years, with his Elements of Moral Science selling over 200,000 copies. ¹³ Eliphalet Nott—who served as President of Union College for a shocking sixty-two years—based his moral philosophy on the Scottish School. ¹⁴ Although he later came to prefer German thought, Yale's professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics—Noah Porter—taught Scottish Common Sense well into the 1850s. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, in other words, there were few prominent alternatives to the Common Sense philosophy that Witherspoon had introduced. Ministers and teachers educated at these and other colleges fanned out across the nation. In small town parishes, academies, and colleges throughout the nation, and in the words of prominent politicians, Americans found their religious, philosophical, and political culture framed by the language and assumptions of Scottish Common Sense philosophy.

Witherspoon, in other words, was extraordinarily influential in the transmission of ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment into America and thus the shaping of American intellectual culture. Even purely at the level of symbolism, the fact that Witherspoon took over the presidency of Princeton that had belonged to Jonathan Edwards, president of Princeton until 1758—seems to symbolize the optimistic Enlightenment replacing dour Puritanism as the face of American ideas. If nothing else, Witherspoon was a major innovator, adopting philosophers and ideas decades before rival American colleges did. His association with the American Revolution helped to impart a patriotic glow to the philosophy. I want to emphasize how important Witherspoon is to the history of American philosophy, to the introduction of ideas that would be dominant in philosophy and theology departments for generations.

Scottish Common Sense Philosophy

Scottish Common Sense philosophy was an attempt to reform John Locke's philosophy in order to address some criticisms that had come in the fifty years after Locke's death and to provide a greater space within the Lockean framework for moral and religious belief. I’m thinking not about Locke's political philosophy, but his epistemology, his theory of how we gain knowledge. Locke had argued, in his 1689 Essay on Human Understanding, that humans were a tabula rasa—a blank slate—and that we gained knowledge from our five senses. This idea, at the time, was revolutionary and would become one of the foundational beliefs of the Enlightenment. It encouraged people to put aside a priori abstract beliefs and simply go out into the world and observe what they saw. As the eighteenth-century progressed, people began radicalizing Locke, demonstrating that this seemingly humble method of gaining knowledge led to strange places. People like David Hume and some French philosophers seemed to suggest that Lockean principles could lead to moral and epistemological relativism, calling into question the stability of moral judgements, free will, the existence of God, even causality itself.

Scottish philosophers, then, sought to pull back—to preserve Locke's empirical method (which was so useful for scientists and the Enlightenment) while avoiding these materialist and skeptical positions that seemed to give rise to atheism. Among its famous thinkers are Francis Hutchinson, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith. In a sense they sought to preserve the spirit of Enlightenment observation while also making space for religious and moral truths. They did this in a couple of ways.

On the question of morality, they often argued that Locke actually had missed something. He had claimed that we gained knowledge from our five senses, but, they argued, Locke had missed that we actually have moral and social senses, that allow us to perceive others’ pain and pleasure. They meant this literally: we have a sensory ability to feel with others, to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine their experiences. It was this ability to empathize and feel each others’ pain that our sense of right and wrong developed from. It also suggested a less individualistic and buffered vision of the human self. The Scottish School tended to imagine an inner self that was porous, open to the experiences and feelings of others. In his lectures at Princeton, Witherspoon gave a snappy version of this. All humans, he argued, have “a sense of moral good and evil, is as really a principle of our nature, … written upon our heart, … previous to all reasoning.” ¹⁵ In other words, humans have a sort of pre-rational ability to recognize and empathize with the pleasure and pain of others. This idea played a large role in the creation of what is sometimes called the “cult of sentiment” or the “man of sensibility,” the eighteenth-century idea that cultivated gentlemen should have heart as well as head, should be able to imagine and to feel the suffering of others.

It was very important that this was a common sense. All people had this moral capacity: educated and uneducated, Christians and non-Christians. Not only did all people have this moral ability, but many Common Sense philosophers were actually struck by how sometimes the best-educated people were capable of convincing themselves of the stupidest things. Thomas Reid, an important Scottish philosopher, for instance argued that the “clown” was often wiser than the “professor” because “it is genius … that adulterates philosophy and fills it with error and false theory.” ¹⁶ Education—if it wasn’t grounded in a moral and religious sensibility—ran the risk of alienating people from each other, making good and simple moral judgements harder. They noted that, all too often, philosophical learning simply provided people with a sophisticated language that allowed them to justify their self-interest. Hence, they give us the popular meaning of “common sense,” as the sort of wisdom contained in the untheorized and the everyday.

On questions of knowledge, Scottish philosophers tended to be realists. They argued that we can just take certain things—such as our sense that we are continuous and consistent selves, that cause and effect are real, that our senses don’t deceive us—for granted. God isn’t trying to deceive us but instead has provided us with the mental tools to understand nature and to live in a society. Whether we could prove things like causality and the permanence of the self were besides the point; they were so ingrained in our consciousness that we needed to assume them in order to make sense of the basic facts of existence itself. It might make for good dorm-room discussion, but we aren’t brains in a vat, they thought. They were skeptical, thus, of the flights of metaphysical speculation that some philosophers engaged in, preferring the tangible, the knowable, and that which is in front of our eyes. Partly because of this, their politics tended not to be radical or utopian—in part because they didn’t trust any visionary who was imagining a world that had not yet existed. Thus Adam Smith, famously, preferred the social structures that developed organically without external control to the utopian schemes designed by what he called the “man of system,” who sought to impose some abstract plan over society. This was why, when it came to politics, Scottish philosophy tended to be anti-utopian. For better and worse, they are part of the reason by the American Revolution wasn’t as radical or comprehensive as the French Revolution.

This broad philosophical outlook was extraordinarily influential on the people who founded the American Republic. Some historians have argued that, for instance, when Thomas Jefferson used the term “self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence, this wasn’t just a rhetorical flourish, but he was referencing the specific language of Thomas Reid. ¹⁷ John Adams and Benjamin Franklin both read and cited Scottish philosophers. Franklin, in fact, during his time in England, befriended Adam Smith. Of course, the most famous political pamphlet of the period was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a nod to the philosophy. In fact, it was the Patriot Benjamin Rush who had recommended the title to Paine, and Rush (who had recruited Witherspoon to Princeton) went on to apply Common Sense philosophical principles to his medical practice. ¹⁸ As we’ll see, James Madison seems to have been trying to put into practice some of Witherspoon's ideas about political science when he wrote the Constitution. As we’ve seen, by the turn of the century, basically every philosophy department in every university and seminary in the nation taught Common Sense philosophy. Thus one of the greatest intellectual historians of early America—Perry Miller—has declared that Scottish philosophy “constituted what must be called the official metaphysic of America,” for the first fifty years of the nation's existence. ¹⁹

Crucially, Americans tended to read Scottish Common Sense philosophy as justifying the expansion of democracy. Consider a fascinating letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787 to his nephew, Peter Carr, where he advises Carr to read Scottish philosophers and then draws out the political consequences of their thought. The “moral sense,” Jefferson explains, is “as much a part of [humankind's] nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling” and that because of that a “ploughman” will often reason about moral question better than a “professor” will. Professors are “led astray by artificial rules,” whereas everyday people can see a moral question clearly with their own original moral sense. ²⁰ This idea that there is a universal moral sense went a long way in convincing people like Jefferson that common everyday people could be trusted with suffrage.

In other words, the idea that there was a universal moral sense—one that did not require education or religious conversion to use—was extraordinarily important to ideas of democracy. At a purely intellectual level, Scottish optimism about universal human moral capacity answered the anti-democratic theories of Thomas Hobbes—whose absolutism had been premised on the belief that in the state of nature humankind was incapable of anything but self-centered action. In a broader sense its cultural celebration of moral sensibility contributed to the humanitarian impulse. Its idea that everyday people were capable (maybe more capable) of good moral judgements encouraged the more populist of the American Founders. ²¹

Witherspoon's own career as a minister involved in the American Revolution nicely reflects another crucial legacy of the Common Sense philosophy: that it seemed to allow Americans to combine Enlightenment science, republicanism, and religious piety without feeling like these three things were in conflict. It “provide[d] a scientific avant garde worldview, grounded in morality and principle that enabled old-time religion to be modern and allied with republican virtue at the same time.” ²² At an abstract level this can be seen in its attempt to preserve Locke's observational methods but with a greater attention to moral and religious truths. For instance, Witherspoon, despite being a minister, invested significantly in the natural sciences at Princeton. For instance, he spent a shockingly large amount of money on a mechanical model of the solar system that David Rittenhouse designed (which is now on display in Princeton's Peyton Hall). In his lectures, Witherspoon argued that “the noble and eminent improvements” made in science have “far from hurting the interest of religion; on the contrary, they have greatly promoted it.” ²³ Of course, his sermons in defense of the Patriot cause during the early years of the Revolution went a long way to producing a discourse that blended republican and Presbyterian language. This is in contrast to, say, France where the forces of democracy and the Enlightenment tended to be arrayed against the forces of religion, a major reason why democracy was so unstable in the nineteenth century. People who graduated from Witherspoon's Princeton tended to have a confident belief that Protestantism, republicanism, and scientific enlightenment were intertwined and mutually beneficial.

By far the most important contribution that Witherspoon's philosophy made to American democracy was his role helping to shape the American Constitution. A number of scholars have suggested that the American Constitution's preference for balancing power, rather than expressing democratic energy, its realist acceptance of humankind's imperfection, owes something to the philosophical tenor of Scottish philosophy. ²⁴ Obviously, this is partly because it was Witherspoon's prize student, James Madison, who drafted the Constitution and then helped to defend it in the Federalist Papers. ²⁵ In particular, Witherspoon's emphasis on the importance of balancing powers (“every good form of government must be complex, so that the one principle may check the other,” he had told his Princeton students) seems to have been a major influence on the Constitution's famous separation of powers. ²⁶ In addition, Daniel Walker Howe has suggested that Scottish philosophy's “concern with unintended outcomes” was central to why the Framers of the Constitution explicitly created a system that could be managed even by self-interested and limited men. ²⁷ After all, as Madison warned in Federalist Papers 10, “Enlightened Statesmen will not always be at the helm.”

Scottish Philosophy and Slavery

Any abstract philosophy is capable of multiple political interpretations. There were, not many, but some, people who explicitly embraced Scottish Common Sense philosophy and were pro-slavery. I’m not aware of any thinkers like this during the American Revolution, Witherspoon's time. By the 1850s there were some southern philosophers, like the Presbyterian minister James Thornwell, who sought to synthesize Common Sense philosophy with pro-slavery doctrine.

Generally, historians argue that the main thrust of Scottish philosophy was to build support for the abolitionist movement and to undermine justifications for slavery, particularly during the eighteenth century. Thus one 2020 book claims that “By mid-eighteenth century, … adherents of Scottish commonsense philosophy, had demolished the moral underpinnings of support for slavery.” ²⁸ Another writes that “wedding the empiricism and cosmopolitan civil vision of the Scottish philosophy to the spiritual fervor of evangelicalism … galvanized a radical northern opposition to slavery and contributed to an ideological crises within the southern planter class.” ²⁹ “Almost every major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment,” a third historian points out, “condemned slavery on moral, philosophical and economic grounds.” ³⁰ Adam Smith's critiques of slavery were particularly important—and would be quoted and cited by many later abolitionists.

The most obvious way that Scottish philosophy impacted the anti-slavery crusade was in the “cult of sensibility” that I mentioned, encouraging a cultural formulation where people were supposed to put themselves in the shoes of others. Its particularly common to link Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin to Scottish influences both because of its famous sentimentalism and because we know that Stowe read some Scottish philosophers as a young woman, in part because her father, the incredibly influential evangelical minister Lyman Beecher, was strongly influenced by Common Sense philosophy. ³¹ Harriet's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was perhaps the best-known preacher in Civil War-era America, famous for his anti-slavery radicalism and for his sentimental theology that focused on a loving Christ, rather than a stern patriarchal God.

As an example of how this Scottish philosophy's emphasis on empathy could influence real abolitionist radicalism, consider the introduction to another crucially important piece of abolitionist propaganda, Theodore Weld's 1839 book American Slavery as It Is. Weld was a leader of the evangelical abolitionists and as radical as they came. “Is slavery, as a condition for human beings, good, bad, or indifferent?,” he asked his readers in the introduction. “You have common sense, a conscience, and a human heart, pronounce upon it. You have a wife, or a husband, a child, a father, a mother, a brother, or a sister—make the case your own, make it theirs, and bring in your verdict.” ³² Following this was a searing and uncompromising attack on southern slavery. You can see the politicization of the Scot's appeal to a common moral empathy here—you don’t need to be a professor or a constitutional scholar, any one can just ask whether they would be OK with their own wife or husband being enslaved and they will immediately, intuitively, understand why slavery is unjust.

There were Black proponents of the Scottish philosophy. For instance, William Whipper in an 1828 speech before the Philadelphia-based Colored Reading Society, argued that Black men should study “Scotch Philosophy.” Whipper was drawn to the Scottish school because he saw it as encouraging black men “to exercise, and by exercising to improve the faculties of the mind.” ³³ Others have argued that Frederick Douglass was influenced by Scottish Common Sense philosophy. This definitely seems true of Douglass's friend, the African-American doctor James McCune Smith, who studied at the University of Glasgow, and cited prominent Common Sense philosophers in his arguments against racial science. ³⁴

That said, we shouldn’t paint too rosy a portrait. There is a strong case to be made that the sort of anti-utopian realism of Scottish Common Sense philosophy was, in some ways, better suited for the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth century than of the nineteenth century. Its notable that many of the white gentlemen educated in Common Sense philosophy at all these Northern colleges in the 1820s and 1830s were anti-slavery, but often in a sort of tepid and non-confrontational way. As the abolitionists radicalized—as they came to believe that slavery was not just an unfortunate relic of backwards times but a heaven-defying sin—they tended to reach for philosophical grounding in other sources. Its notable that John Brown's backers, for instance, were philosophers and theologians who tended to appeal to Romanticism, German Idealism, and Transcendentalism, rather than Scottish Realism, as the foundation of their beliefs. This isn’t to discount Scottish influence on the moderate anti-slavery position, but it is to say that as the nineteenth century progressed, its moderation appeared less and less able to address the important political questions of the day.

When we think of Witherspoon's own position—someone who disapproved of slavery and wished its eventual demise, but (as very typical of the American revolutionaries) wasn’t willing to risk national unity or social stability to abolish it—I think it’s possible that that reflects both the promise and limitations of the moderate philosophy that he plays such an important role introducing into American culture.

To summarize, John Witherspoon's relationship with slavery and anti-slavery should be understood through the lens of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy that he introduced to America. He played an extraordinarily important role bringing it to America and imparting a patriotic and pious reputation to it. Because this philosophy would play such a central role in American higher education for the next two or three generations, it helped to shape the anti-slavery movement in the North during that period. Its influence was strongest during the early years of the American Republic, when the anti-slavery movement tended to be gradualist and reformist. Later, years after Witherspoon's death, as the anti-slavery movement became more radical and uncompromising, the influence of the Scottish School faded.