The Story of a Statue: Placing John Witherspoon in the History of Princeton and Slavery

In November 2001, a statue of John Witherspoon, sixth president of Princeton University, was erected in the heart of campus, facing the library and chapel. The initiative for the statue had come from University of Paisley (now University of the West of Scotland), whose leadership proposed erecting twin monuments to Witherspoon in Paisley and Princeton. Witherspoon had been the preacher at Paisley since 1757, before being persuaded in 1768 to come to the North American colonies to lead what was then named the College of New Jersey. The ten-foot bronze statue, cast by Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart, is in a heroic realist style characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It stands upon a seven-foot-seven-inch plinth, designed by Princeton architect Jeffrey Clarke to resemble typical eighteenth-century pedestals. The statue was intended to commemorate Witherspoon not only for his roles as a Presbyterian leader and university president, but also for his dedication to the revolutionary cause in the colonies, being the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. The plinth thus bears three descriptive plaques: president, patriot, and preacher. So elevated, Witherspoon towers over Firestone Plaza. Visitors to campus tend to assume it is as old as the collegiate Gothic structures around it, not a recent addition. ¹

In 2013, Professor Martha Sandweiss of the Department of History taught an undergraduate research seminar aimed at investigating Princeton's connections to slavery, starting with documents in the university archives. ² Other universities were also probing their historic ties to slavery, beginning with President Ruth Simmons's investigation at Brown, which resulted in a landmark 2006 report. ³ Sandweiss's experimental class at Princeton grew into a broader and more systematic historical inquiry into the many ways the university's growth and success were related to the institution of slavery. The university's first nine presidents all owned slaves, as did trustees, students, faculty, and alumni. Researchers examined Princeton's part in the broader history of slavery in New Jersey while also excavating the long legacy of racism on campus, as seen in the exclusion of Black students and the teaching of eugenics. The project involved faculty, postdoctoral fellows, staff, and students, as well as departments, programs, and affiliated groups on campus. The results of this remarkable research effort were published as the Princeton & Slavery website (https://slavery.princeton.edu) in November 2017, representing the work of fifty authors and fifteen research assistants. Many contributors were Princeton undergraduate and graduate students. The project is ongoing and currently directed by Professor Tera Hunter, the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton. In 2018 Princeton Theological Seminary, whose history is intertwined with that of the university, began its own slavery audit.

While the slaveholding of some of Princeton's early presidents had been noted by biographers, no one had perceived the consistency of this pattern and the broader implications of slavery for these educational institutions. ⁴ In addition, the Princeton & Slavery website made its abundant historical research available to the public. As an outgrowth of her senior thesis on Witherspoon and his family, Lesa Redmond, Princeton class of 2017, contributed three entries to the Princeton & Slavery website. ⁵ Her essay on Witherspoon emphasized his complex, even contradictory, relationship to slavery: he was a man who advocated liberty, baptized an enslaved African American in Scotland, tutored two free Africans in Princeton, and yet held slaves on his large country home of Tusculum. Events in 2020, particularly the murder of George Floyd and growing protests against police brutality through the Black Lives Matter movement, raised the stakes of reconsidering Princeton's early leaders as slaveholders, in the town as well as at the university. In the summer of 2020, 1,500 residents signed a petition requesting the removal of John Witherspoon's name from the town's middle school. The board of Princeton Regional Schools voted in 2021 to make this change.

The statue drew scrutiny as well. In 2022, graduate students, faculty, and staff from the Department of Philosophy began to circulate a petition requesting the Witherspoon statue be removed and replaced by a plaque explaining the negative as well as positive aspects of his legacy. As the authors note, “we believe that paying such honor to someone who participated actively in the enslavement of human beings, and used his scholarly gifts to defend the practice, is today a distraction from the University's mission.” Authors of the petition, which was signed by more than 300 individuals, submitted it in September 2022 to the university's Committee on Naming for consideration. This committee had been established in 2016 to advise the Board of Trustees on “the naming of programs, positions and spaces at Princeton” as well as changes to campus iconography. ⁶ I served as the first chair of this committee, from 2016 to 2019, and returned to that role in 2022–23 while my successor, Beth Lew-Williams, was on sabbatical.

The Committee on Naming works under guiding principles developed and approved by the Board of Trustees in 2020–21, after Princeton's administration decided to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from its School of Public and International Affairs. The committee's deliberations about names and iconography are to be “informed by rigorous research and the appropriate scholarly expertise within and beyond the University community.” ⁷ In December 2022, I learned through a listening session with faculty that some of them were teaching about Witherspoon—and also about the statue of him on campus. It was clear that the committee should tap this local expertise as well as reach out to scholars beyond Princeton. To enable that, I convened a panel of scholars who gave papers in an afternoon-long symposium on April 21, 2023—an event that was open to the entire Princeton community. This event would focus only on the historical Witherspoon; a second symposium is being organized for fall 2023 to feature expertise on monuments, commemoration, and historical memory.

On display at the April 21 symposium was new scholarship on the two enslaved members of Witherspoon's household (by Kevin DeYoung) and Witherspoon's political role in New Jersey's consideration of abolition (by Sean Wilentz). Witherspoon was against slavery, and like most organized abolitionists at the time, argued for its gradual abolition rather than immediate emancipation. By drilling down into the specific politics about slavery in New Jersey, Wilentz showed how Witherspoon was able to move the dial towards abolition, by asserting that it would be legal for the state to abolish slavery. Yet his convictions did not prevent him from acquiring two slaves late in life (as Wilentz showed, likely through his second marriage). DeYoung found suggestive evidence, from incomplete records of New Jersey Tax Ratables, that Witherspoon may have manumitted at least one of the enslaved members of his household before his death.

Attendees also learned about how Witherspoon taught—and whom he taught. As we heard from Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Witherspoon's teaching of classical rhetoric anchored the curriculum and established the college's reputation for turning out successful graduates, including the many alumni who became legislators, judges, officers, and politicians in the new republic. For Witherspoon, effective rhetoric drew together moral urgency and eloquence, in a way that continues to characterize political activism on our campus and in the US. Lesa Redmond returned to Princeton to offer further reflections, particularly discussing Witherspoon's tutoring of eighteenth-century freed and enslaved African Americans. Unlike some North American colonists, Witherspoon viewed these Black young men as fellow Christians and intellectually capable.

Those who attended the symposium learned a great deal about Witherspoon's theology (especially from Gordon Mikoski) and philosophical formation (especially from Peter Wirzbicki). His strong Presbyterian convictions may have tempered his abolitionism. Or, as Mikoski put it, Witherspoon displayed a failure of theological imagination. ⁸ At the end of the day, attendees were left with a more nuanced understanding of his opposition to slavery and the recalcitrant fact that he held two persons in bondage. While this may not be atypical for his time, it remains an uncomfortable reality for us to confront. As Tera Hunter reminded us, the human toll of slavery was horrific. ⁹ When the statue was installed in 2001, the sculptor, Alexander Stoddart, referred to Witherspoon as among “the exceptionally brave and visionary individuals [who] saw to it that freedoms we tend to take for granted were seeded and nurtured.” ¹⁰ Twenty years later, representing Witherspoon as an advocate of freedom strikes a dissonant note.