Abstract
The controversy surrounding the statue of John Witherspoon on Princeton's campus has revolved largely around his contentious stance on the gradual abolition of slavery and his presumed ownership of at least two slaves for some indeterminate period. This article is intended to shift the focus to Witherspoon's pedagogical legacy as the more appropriate measure of his place on campus.
I
Scholarly articles are rarely prompted directly by petitions. In this case, a petition calling for the removal of a statue of John Witherspoon from Princeton University's central campus plaza owing to his presumed, if indeterminate, ownership of two slaves, led to a series of consultative discussions with faculty and students, which in turn led to the organization of a colloquium on various aspects of Witherspoon's life and tenure as president of the College of New Jersey, as Princeton University was then known. It was only fitting that the organizer, herself an eminent historian, should have invited fellow historians, themselves specialists on the period in question, to address the facts of Witherspoon's life and career, as best as these can be known, and to offer more context for any appraisal of his current place on campus.
As I said on the day of the colloquium, it was less obvious that I, a classical philologist, should have been asked to speak alongside my Americanist colleagues. By way of an explanation, I offered an account of how John Witherspoon's teaching of classical rhetoric and oratory here at Princeton came to figure on the syllabus for a lecture course I teach about the history of political oratory titled “Rhetoric & Politics.” As I had noted at the initial consultative session, I thought this pedagogical history should inform any decision about the significance of the statue, especially as it bears on the need to be at once honest and humble about the history of the privilege we enjoy as students and faculty at Princeton. What follows is a somewhat expanded version of my remarks, more akin to an essay than a piece of scholarship in any sense I would normally vouch for in my own fields of expertise. Nevertheless, the experience of teaching Witherspoon's most famous political sermon, “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men,” as well as his years-long instruction of Princeton students in classical rhetoric and oratory during a formative period in the college's and the country's history, seemed especially pertinent to the question that would be used to decide the fate of his standing on campus, both literally and figuratively.
Unlike some who also disagreed with the petitioners, I did not think that it was Witherspoon's unquestionably important participation in Revolutionary politics that merited a statue in his honor, courageous and politically significant though his involvement was. However, it was not Witherspoon the political activist I saw being commemorated in the statue, so much as the university president and professor who established the college's reputation as a leading institution of learning, with all the benefits and advantages that have accrued to its alumni and faculty in the interim. But allow me to go back slightly and describe what prompted a classicist to develop an interest in John Witherspoon in the first place, for the answer goes some way in explaining my view of the controversy surrounding Witherspoon's iconography on Princeton's campus. The answer also helps restore a dimension of Witherspoon's historical profile, namely his teaching, which ought to be especially relevant when discussing his place at the university he had such a vital hand in shaping. 1
As I noted, I teach a course titled “Rhetoric & Politics” in which we study the rhetorical underpinnings of political persuasion. As you might expect from a classics course, the syllabus is anchored in Greco-Roman antiquity as the wellspring of western political oratory. We begin with Homer and make our way through Plato, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Cicero, to name but the more familiar works. After a brief stop in the Middle Ages in order to assimilate the sermon as a Christian contribution to classical oratory, we move in the second half of the semester to justly celebrated British and American political speeches, including William Wilberforce, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Patrick Henry, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to mention some of the better-known and influential political orators, so that the students may parse the various rhetorical elements without the obstacle of translation.
The overarching aim of the class is to grapple with how the form of political oratory enables its ideological content. An ancillary aim, call it self-interested, if you will, is to showcase the enduring relevance of classical rhetoric as both a subject of instruction and as a formative feature of western political history. While putting together the syllabus, I wondered whether and how long ago rhetoric had been taught at Princeton. It took some digging—more than it should have—to discover that the subject of “eloquence,” as it was then known, had flourished under the transformative tenure of the college's sixth president, John Witherspoon. Until then, like many, the only thing of note I knew about Witherspoon, besides his having served as president of the college in its early days, was that he had famously been the only clergyman to have signed the Declaration of Independence. Of his wider pedagogical imprint on the college, I knew close to nothing.
Profiles of Witherspoon's legacy as president of the college that would one day become Princeton University invariably cite the remarkable number of former students who went on to positions of consequence in American society, including both a president and vice-president of the United States, nine cabinet officers, twenty-one senators, thirty-nine congressmen, three justices of the Supreme Court, and twelve state governors; as well as a great many educators and future college presidents. Nine of the twenty-five college graduates who took part in the Federal Convention had attended the College of New Jersey, and six of those had been students of Witherspoon. The disproportion and prominence of Princeton's alumni in such posts stemmed, in part, from the gradual reorientation under Witherspoon of the college's mission “from preparation for the ministry to preparation for civic leadership.” 2 This was achieved, in no small part, by means of a curriculum intended to inculcate a classical ideal of the morally enlightened, public-spirited, and not least, rhetorically proficient and thereby highly articulate alumnus.
From the beginning, Witherspoon had set out to educate for broader purposes, and the attention he lent to subjects such as classical rhetoric and oratory dovetailed with, and even fueled, some of the very same political changes that saw more and more of the college's graduates seek roles in elected government and the courts, to name but the more obvious examples. As the best-known chronicler of Princeton's early history, T.J. Wertenbaker, observed, “it was not by accident that Princeton had such a large contingent in the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia.” 3 Eloquence, or compelling oratory, was the calling card of Witherspoon's most accomplished students. Thus V.L. Collins recounts how Samuel Stanhope Smith and his younger brother, John Blair Smith, both former pupils of Witherspoon (the first of whom would become his son-in-law), acquired a reputation as “orators of the first order” in their defense of religious liberty, with at least one of them producing writings on the subject which helped shape Thomas Jefferson's historic ideas on the matter. 4 James Madison, perhaps Witherspoon's best-known student, is widely acknowledged as having played a prominent role in drafting the First Amendment, especially the protections granted freedom of speech. Less often mentioned is the formative rôle of Madison's education in classical oratory, a condition for which was the right to articulate opposition and dissent in a bid to persuade.
It is hard for us today to match the exalted title of college president with the teaching responsibilities Witherspoon's appointment entailed. Even making allowances for the relatively modest scale of the college's enrollment in its first decades, the president's classroom responsibilities spanned the entire curriculum, from divinity to the still rudimentary science curriculum. Witherspoon shored up the existing course of study, even as he introduced some innovatory subjects, among them the study of history, which, despite its venerable classical pedigree as edifying literature, had only just begun to find a place in college curricula. In keeping with the spirit of inquiry he had himself imbibed in Scotland, he also procured some of the college's earliest scientific instruments, though his lessons on natural science reflected his imperfect grasp of the emerging subjects. The subjects that made Witherspoon's reputation as a college professor and which may be said to have left their stamp on the alumni and, by extension, the country during this politically febrile period, were moral philosophy and classical rhetoric or “eloquence,” as it was then known. Since my colleague Peter Wirzbicki has addressed the sometimes overlooked reverberation of Witherspoon's philosophical teaching, I can safely limit myself to that part of his college instruction that prompted my inquiry in the first place, namely, rhetoric and oratory.
II
If someone had asked any graduate of the College of New Jersey during Witherspoon's tenure to identify the single most prominent subject, the pillar, as it were, of the curriculum, he would almost certainly have referred you to the constellation of courses assumed under the broad heading “eloquence,” including the close study of Latin and Greek texts, grammar, diction, style, and not least, composition of speeches for a variety of occasions. The study of ancient Greek and Roman texts eclipsed all other subjects on the curriculum because it was deemed most conducive to the habits of mind and speech an educated man should aspire to. Already at its founding, the college had set as an admission requirement the ability to “render Virgil and Tully's [i.e., Cicero's] Orations into English” and to translate “any part of the four Evangelists” (the Gospels) into Latin or English. 5 This, however, was the bare minimum. 6 In a letter published in 1780, Witherspoon noted that once students “ill-founded in classic learning” enter college, little could be done to help them catch up. Indeed, among the factors that finally persuaded Witherspoon to emigrate and take up the presidency of the College of New Jersey was the preparatory school that had been established alongside the college in order to shore up the learning of promising students whose study of Greek and Latin had been hampered by the quality of education they had received. Witherspoon remained committed to this school throughout his presidency.
Upon entering the college, the students could expect sustained immersion in classical literature. As one student wrote to his brother who was hoping to join him there, “[t]he studies you will be examined on … are Virgil, Horace, Cicero's Orations, Lucian, Xenophon, Homer.” “Try to accustom yourself,” he went on, “to read Greek and Latin well as it is much looked to here.” 7 Even when the curriculum began to be expanded under Witherspoon, enrollment in what were still developing science classes was a privilege granted to students who had made good progress in their freshman and sophomore study of Latin and Greek literature. As Wertenbaker observes in his chronicle of the college's evolving curriculum, “it would have been unthinkable [in Witherspoon's day] to confer a degree upon a young man who had not read his Homer, his Xenophon, his Cicero, his Ovid—all of which was thought not only essential to mental discipline but the key to theology, philosophy … and other basic studies.” 8
The dependence of early American education on the received classical curriculum, as well as the abiding appeal of classical culture and aesthetics broadly, has been much studied. 9 With the fading of classical education from the college curriculum beginning in the late nineteenth century and progressing steadily throughout the twentieth, wider awareness of that past has also subsided. Today's university students are thus surprised to learn just how classically laden not only the curriculum but much of cultural life was in Witherspoon's day. It has to be pointed out to them that classicism permeated early American political life, as may be seen in everything from the nomenclature of the nascent country's constitutional arrangements (such as the creation of a senate) to the iconography and mottos of its national seal (with the Virgilian tags Novus ordo seclorum/Annuit cœptis on the reverse of the better-known, though not strictly “classical” E pluribus unum on the obverse); or the ubiquitous Greco-Roman architectural orders on the buildings commissioned by the young Republic.
Brought over by the remarkably large number of Oxford and Cambridge graduates among the early colonists, the classical curriculum proved ideologically unpredictable, radical even, when transplanted in American political soil. Thus the Federalist and Anti-Federalist positions would be presented to the public under such pseudonyms as Publius, legendary co-founder of the Roman republic; or Cato and Brutus, reflecting the ideological tendencies symbolized by these venerable ancient figures. Of course this kind of performative classicism would also find expression later on in the murderous theatrics of a John Wilkes Booth, who is said to have shouted out the Virginia state motto Sic semper tyrranis (“such is always the fate of tyrrants”) as he leapt to the stage after shooting Lincoln.
At the risk of seeming presumptuous, I would disagree with the great historian of early America, Bernard Bailyn, who characterized the classicism of the colonial period as ideologically “superficial.” 10 Yes, no small share of classical culture among well-educated colonists could seem affected and offered a thin veneer of venerable and thus legitimizing Greek and Roman ideals. The same could be (and has been) said, however, of either Byzantine or early Renaissance classicizing culture. But this is to judge classical influence on ideas principally through content, at the expense of form. What the revolutionary generation took from its classical training was not so much the particular political arguments found in the ancient texts, important though these could sometimes be, but the habits of mind and especially of expression instilled by the systematic study of the classical syllabus. This helps account for why the curriculum at the College of New Jersey, like its peer institutions, was so heavily skewed to classics. Which, in turn, helps us understand why the study of classics, especially under Witherspoon, was so heavily skewed to rhetoric and oratory.
III
British education broadly, and the so-called Scottish Enlightenment more specifically, regarded the study of rhetoric as foundational. The school of Scottish moral philosophy Witherspoon became an exponent of saw no meaningful division between ethical perception and persuasive expression. Leading rhetoricians of the day, including Hugh Blair, whose writings on rhetoric proved very popular with American educators, made the case that aesthetic form and moral content sprung from a common source. As one historian has written, rhetoric for Witherspoon and his contemporaries constituted “a social phenomenon, deeply rooted in human relationships and capable of significantly affecting … the structure of those relationships on the level of individuals as well as on the level of social and political organization.” 11 This view translated rather easily into a belief that rhetoric was not only necessary for bringing about political change but was also a vital component in their effort to forge a new republic of liberty and virtue. Witherspoon himself did not take an instrumentalist view of rhetoric. He saw it as the effective voice of one's moral and political sentiments. This helps us appreciate why he taught “eloquence” as a subject inseparable from moral philosophy and the rest of education.
Following the example of their British peers, eighteenth-century American colleges put a premium on oratory, a prerequisite for both the clergyman in the pulpit and the elected representative in the colonial legislature. In the words of one scholar of early American classicism, “virtually every dimension of the political life of early America bears the imprint of a classical conception of public discourse.” 12 This prominence of classically anchored oratory proceeded from “the perceived relationship between the virtue of eloquence and the national commitment to political freedom.” 13 The assumption would become an axiom of American ideology, linking political oratory to free speech, thereby continuing to underwrite the study of classical rhetoric well into the nineteenth century. “The only birth place of eloquence,” John Quincy Adams would write in the following generation, “must be a free state,” for “eloquence is the child of liberty.” 14 It should not surprise students as much as it does that a country whose deliberative bodies were inspired by those of ancient Athens and especially Rome should have modeled its political oratory on that of classical antiquity. Caroline Winterer, the doyenne of scholarship on American classical influence, explains that, “after 1750, oratory flourished as an essential element of civic life in America,” making “the benefits of a classical education … especially obvious in oratory.” 15
As an example, Witherspoon's students, like their peers at other colleges, read authoritative classical treatises, above all Cicero's De Oratore, as a kind of vade mecum or handbook of the aspiring legislator. A staple of American college curricula, Cicero's treatise provided a kind of common political vocabulary for the early republic. 16 A word about Cicero is perhaps in order here. By way of answering once more the slightly feigned hypothetical question “What's a classicist doing on a panel about John Witherspoon?” on the day of the colloquium, I drew the audience's attention to the books stacked up at Witherspoon's feet on the pedestal of the statue outside East Pyne. Beginning from the bottom, the first two have the names “Hume” and “Locke” inscribed on their spines, both readily familiar luminaries of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment; the third has its spine turned away from the viewer, its anonymity perhaps intended to invite the viewer to think of unnamed but plausible texts; the fourth alone bears a title, “Principia,” testifying to the fame of its author; but thickest of all, and set conspicuously askew to the others, “Cicero” sits high atop the pile. Whether knowingly or not I cannot say but the sculptor, Alexander Stoddart, got this element of the curricular iconography historically right.
I say this because the part of the curriculum “Cicero” stands for, namely, rhetoric, was disproportionate to the other subjects; and because Witherspoon frequently cited Cicero as a model of effective oratory, as well as an authority on its teaching. 17 “There are some fine examples of address and delicacy in Cicero,” he advises in his Lectures on Eloquence, though Witherspoon was not without reservations regarding what he deemed the celebrated orator's ostentatious style. 18 The wider lesson was as much about Cicero's Latin, long held up as a paradigm of correct as well as compelling usage, as it was about the archetype of the model citizen-orator who employed persuasion on behalf of Republican Rome's interests. 19
It was the pursuit of this ideal that explained why of all the subjects in the college's revolutionary-era curriculum, none was studied and practiced with greater regularity or persistence over the four years than rhetoric, or “eloquence,” joined to oratory. From freshman until senior year, students moved through a series of graduated exercises in public speaking or “declamation,” as it was then known. These were set speeches, often taken from classical orators—mostly Latin, one presumes, since these could be delivered in the original with some presumption of intelligibility—as well as excerpts from English authors, principally prose but occasionally verse, as well. Most days, recitation from classical authors took up the better part of the students’ morning. Such recitations rewarded the students with the confidence of nimble delivery of speeches, a self-assurance sure to prove useful for young men entering the public sphere. Witherspoon himself made a habit of attending freshmen and sophomore recitations in the Classics and there is at least one account of him inviting the sophomores then studying Xenophon to his estate, “Tusculum,” named in homage to Cicero, in order to continue practicing their delivery. 20
Besides a studied ease of delivery, the aim of rhetorically structured declamation at this stage was to acquaint students with the styles of argument or narrative most apt to a given situation or matter at hand. This was thought to be best achieved through exposure to illustrious examples, drawn primarily from classical Greek and Roman literature. By Junior year, a weekly course on disputation, or formal debate (disputatio), was intended to sharpen the students’ persuasive skills and served as preparation for the public disputations seniors delivered on Sundays, often on religious subjects. It was not until senior year, however, that this long course of oratory culminated in a capstone rhetorical exercise, “oration day,” in which students had to deliver original speeches. The topics on this occasion tended to broader ethical or, under Witherspoon, political questions that admit of various points of view and thus might require effective persuasion. These were, by definition, controversial topics, intended to place the onus on the orator. The exercise called on the students to draw on their accumulated rhetorical and broadly philosophical resources. The exhibition of such skill was a much-anticipated part of commencement exercises, as graduating seniors performed Latin debates and speeches before an audience of their peers and other assembled guests. Today's salutatorian speech conducted in Latin preserves a faint memory of this once important display of classical oratorical prowess.
Of course, Witherspoon was not the first or the only college professor to marshal classical oratory to the curriculum. He embraced the practice adopted by one of his predecessors, Samuel Davies, of having the students deliver regular orations, in English as well as Latin, before the whole college in order to hone their skill at public speaking. But whereas Davies had merely extended the school exercise of adapting speeches from ancient authors such as Demosthenes or Cicero on remote subjects, Witherspoon encouraged his students to compose their own orations on topics of contemporary interest and urgency. To that end, he broadened the curriculum to include lectures and readings by such early modern luminaries as the Dutch philosopher Grotius, the German jurist Pufendorf, the political theorists Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and Montesquieu; and of course leading Scottish thinkers such as Adam Ferguson and David Hume, the last of whom he sometimes disagreed with but nevertheless taught. There are important lessons here, as well. Witherspoon nourished the appetite of students for debate and dissent, sometimes in opposition to his own ideas. 21 He stocked the library with books by authors he himself disputed, thereby setting an example of the free inquiry the so-called Scottish Enlightenment had come to represent. This was necessarily of a piece with the teaching of persuasive oratory.
Classical rhetoric was thus joined to contemporary theories of rights and broadly political and philosophical ideas. Thus it was that one of Witherspoon's students was inspired to compose a speech, in Latin, on the proposition that “All men by law of nature are free”; while another, addressing the audience in English, proposed that the non-importation agreement that had caused much controversy in the colonies “reflected glory on the merchants and was a noble exertion of self-denial and public spirit.” Witherspoon's own son, who graduated in 1770, defended his thesis, again in Latin, on the necessity of British subjects “to resist their king and defend their liberties if he ignored the laws of the state or treated his subjects cruelly.” We should not fail to note the irony of a campaign to distance the college from the president who helped foster the very spirit of open dissent and debate that the petitioners in this case take for granted.
One would not expect the dour-faced figure standing on the plinth outside East Pyne to have been as intellectually liberal and encouraging a teacher as Witherspoon in fact was. Rigorous, rather than reactionary, he sought to retain the most salutary elements of the received curriculum, while expanding its scope and purpose. In his Lectures on Eloquence, he recalls the recent contest between the Ancients and the Moderns, in which partisans for the literary standards of Greco-Roman antiquity squared off in polemical tracts against proponents of more recent aesthetic taste. A pedagogue rather than a polemicist, Witherspoon appreciated the enduring merits of classicism while acknowledging the need for rhetorical styles apt to the evolving sensibilities of the modern age. The oratory Witherspoon had students at Princeton practice assiduously, and the politics of persuasion it engendered, had few precedents in Europe outside Great Britain and its deliberative political institutions. The emphasis on classically rooted eloquence was more than the showcasing of cultural capital, as we are wont to interpret it nowadays. It amounted to a “liberal” view of public debate and participatory politics, however limited the franchise remained but without which the franchise could never have expanded.
This became all the truer once Witherspoon took charge of young men whose upbringing could only be partially moored in European tradition, in a colony about to become a country. Witherspoon thus expanded the repertoire of compositional styles in order to allow for greater independence of taste. He broadened the theoretical readings on matters of style to include, besides Longinus’s On the Sublime, the best-known ancient treatise on the subject, Crousaz’s Traité du beau, William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, as well as Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste. This pluralism of perspectives on the subject of literary and rhetorical styles reflected the increasingly measured deference to classical authorities.
Still, much that Witherspoon taught under the rubric of “eloquence” would now be deemed branches of linguistics, literary criticism, or evanescent forms of philology. The published lectures, which amount to a distillation of Witherspoon's teaching and not a systematic treatise on the subject, include a kind of potted history of the origins and development of language, as well as scattered observations about the evolution or “perfection” of Hebrew or the relative age of Greek. The principal theme of the Lectures, however, is “Composition, Taste and Criticism,” the holy trinity of classical rhetorical instruction. The Lectures on Eloquence are, paradoxically, rhetorically lackluster. Witherspoon himself rationalized this inconspicuous style as appropriate to instruction, which he thought distinct from occasional oratory, whether in the pulpit or the legislature. His attention to rhetoric was nevertheless robust. He was convinced of the promise and consequences of persuasive address in an emergent polity that looked to its English parliamentary inheritance as well as to more ancient antecedents of political oratory.
Today, Witherspoon's systematic survey of oratory or eloquence appears so unfamiliarly archaic that we may fail to note the premise we continue to hold dear: namely, the value of a persuasively articulated point of view. Perhaps no subject in the curriculum of his day was as explicitly and intentionally public and political in purpose. The productive link between Witherspoon's instruction in rhetoric and the emerging political temper was noticed by opponents, as well. Some worried that his teaching prematurely enlisted young men in politics. After attending the commencement of 1772, one person wrote to The Pennsylvania Chronicle to voice his dismay upon hearing the graduating class discuss “the most perplexing political topics.” “I could almost have persuaded myself,” he went on to write, “that I was within a circle of vociferous politicians at Will's coffee-house, instead of being surrounded with the meek disciples of wisdom, in the calm shades of academic retirement.” It was largely this campus culture fostered by Witherspoon's teaching that led to the political lore that had Princeton serving as a “seedbed” of revolution.
Witherspoon's unrelenting emphasis on “eloquence,” his ability to hone the rhetorical skills of his students through sustained imitation and recitation of model texts, produced an unusually talented cohort of graduates during his tenure. “[F]acility in the art of [public speaking] was a characteristic of the men who graduated under Witherspoon,” wrote his biographer, V.L. Collins. 22 It is not hard to see why such an education proved especially conducive to the formation of so many alumni who would go on to assume public office at a time when political oratory was held at a premium and being well-spoken was a political asset almost on a par with wealth or birth in a country where talent could compete with status.
Even as the College of New Jersey drew a considerable share of its student body during this period from some of the emergent nation's most prominent families, Witherspoon, himself of relatively humble origins, made a point of raising sufficient funds to be able to educate young men from families of modest means. 23 Arguably, these were the students most likely to benefit from the emphasis of the curriculum on classical oratory and the cultivation of proficiency in public speaking. While they might polish their skills in college, the scions of the Randolphs of Virginia or the Stocktons of New Jersey would not lack for exposure to the kind of political eloquence required to advance in the colonies. Young men without such social pedigree might benefit disproportionately from classically informed recitation and attention to rhetoric or compositional style as they tried to make their mark in the world. This benevolent tendency was of a piece with the insufficiently touted enrollment of free Black students, such as John Chavis, who would go on to a successful career as a schoolmaster and preacher in North Carolina, as well as three young Native American men from Delaware who were enrolled in Witherspoon's classes.
IV
To mark Witherspoon's death, the college commissioned a funeral oration, much as remains the custom for deceased members of its faculty today, albeit on a scale and of a substance no longer seen in commemorative tributes to colleagues. The eulogy dwelt at some length on Witherspoon's contribution to the transformation of the once fledgling College of New Jersey. He was credited with having secured the college's future through his fundraising and able administration. It was his reputation as a teacher that was praised as having assured the reputation of the college. His eulogist emphasized that the “[t]he numbers of men of distinguished talents … who have received the elements of their education under him, testify his services to the college … and to his instructions, America owes many of her most distinguished patriots and legislators.” 24 Benjamin Rush, who had studied at the College of New Jersey prior to Witherspoon's arrival and could thus testify to the changes wrought by the college's sixth president, submitted that Witherspoon “gave a new turn to education and spread taste and correctness throughout the United States,” making it possible, in his view, to identify his former pupils whenever they wrote or spoke. Again, while allowances should be made for some exaggeration in any encomium, what matters is the particular focus of the praise: Witherspoon's teaching, especially of “eloquence.”
Witherspoon has been described as the single most influential educator in the America of his time. While this is bound to strike us as hyperbole, it fairly represents the sentiment of many in the country who credited his teaching with having produced a remarkable generation of graduates. As noted above, most accounts of his tenure at Princeton offer an inventory of his pedagogical success by reciting the extraordinary number of prominent positions filled by his former students. Less often, however, is any attempt made to link Witherspoon's teaching to the success of his alumni in the public life of the new nation and, by extension, to the reputation of the college as an incubator of talent; a reputation, we should recall, which today's university community—students and faculty—continue to trade on to both our collective and individual advantage.
As part of its bid to render a recommendation concerning the fate of John Witherspoon's statue (or at least the one everyone notices), the Committee on Naming asked “whether a central part of the legacy of the namesake [is] fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University.” The question is apt. Not only does it prompt greater curiosity about Witherspoon's inestimable role in making Princeton the university we wish to be associated with, it also foregrounds what ought to be most salient when deciding whether such a tribute is warranted. It would be paradoxical, and I would argue dishonest, for us to conclude that John Witherspoon's central legacy could be at odds with the mission of the very university he had such an outsize role in shaping.
I began by acknowledging that the participation of a classicist on the panel might fairly be seen as incongruous enough to merit addressing. I end, however, confident that the single most pertinent aspect of Witherspoon's legacy in deciding his place, materially and metaphorically, on Princeton's campus, is the one I have tried to sketch out here: his pedagogical legacy, seen from the far-reaching vantage of his teaching of classical rhetoric or “eloquence.” Inspired by a liberal conception of such teaching—“liberal” in the sense that we mean when we extol “liberal arts education”—Witherspoon set the college on the course that has led us to where we find ourselves. We are happy to benefit from the prestige and privilege Witherspoon helped establish, along with the institutional reputation for service and politics he made a byword of this college. An ethicist might ask whether it is right to disavow the man while continuing to reap the advantages of his legacy. As a teacher, I ask whether it is good pedagogy to evade this important historical lesson.
Witherspoon figures on my syllabus not simply as a paragon of religiously inflected political speech, formidable an orator though he was. Unlike most of the readings that make up the survey of “Rhetoric & Politics” anchored in classical theory and practice, Witherspoon's revolutionary sermon and teaching on “eloquence” grounds our inquiry in Princeton's own history. The students, some of them anyway, come to recognize the historical ties that join the larger story of classical rhetoric to Witherspoon's teaching of it as an enabling condition of their aspiration to attend Princeton University. “But do you need the statue to do this?,” someone might innocently ask. To which I would answer, if there were no statue, perhaps not. As I said in reply to a similar question at the colloquium, we are not deliberating whether to erect a statue in Witherspoon's honor; we are debating whether to take one down. This would amount to a modern-day act of damnatio memoriae, the Roman practice of publicly denouncing a figure from the past by defacing or otherwise erasing images and statues of that person in order to demonstrate to all that he has fallen out of favor. 25
Commenting on a previous instance of such damnatio memoriae at Princeton, the columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “To enjoy an inheritance that comes from flawed men by pretending that it comes from nowhere, through nobody, is a betrayal of memory and of education in any meaningful sense.” 26 Such an ethically expedient, though hardly principled, act of public dissociation would signal the victory of politics over pedagogy and reductionism over complexity. It would weaken the proposition that we learn by engaging rather than erasing the past from our sight, in the hope that what isn’t seen cannot hurt us. Witherspoon's statue should remind us that the whole of his legacy is ours to contend with. Like his now archaizing eloquence, the statue's anachronistic aesthetic casts our complex historical relationship into conspicuous relief. It reminds us that education broadly, and education at Princeton more specifically, has a history and that we must find our place in it.
