John Witherspoon and the Abolitionist Travail

Abstract

The historian Benjamin Quarles emphasized that comprehending American slavery's history requires recognizing the concurrent rise of the antislavery movement. This connection between John Witherspoon and slavery necessitates examining his involvement in the broader context of the transformative antislavery revolution during the era of Atlantic democratic revolutions.

I

The pioneering historian Benjamin Quarles once wrote that to understand the history of American slavery requires “careful attention to a concomitant development and influence—the crusade against it.” ¹ Following Quarles's insight, to understand fully the connection between John Witherspoon and slavery requires examining the connection between Witherspoon and antislavery.

Amid the age of Atlantic democratic revolutions, the antislavery revolution was the most radical. Slavery had existed, in one form or another, for millennia, virtually unchallenged by non-slaves, and deemed essential to the natural (meaning, for many, divinely inspired) social order. A profound moral transformation among non-slaves beginning in the late seventeenth century challenged those adamantine assumptions. Unlike the American Revolution of 1776, however, or the French Revolution of 1789, the antislavery revolution had no classical examples on which to draw, either about how to destroy slavery or how to envisage a world without it. Antislavery advocates, themselves divided over how best to achieve slavery's demise, faced far greater opposition than others, coming not just from proslavery royalists but from powerful elements inside the democratic-republican ascendancy. The road to abolition was crooked; blazing it was a travail, not least in the place where the Atlantic antislavery revolution began in the 1760s, the British North American colonies that would become the United States.

Witherspoon had much less to do with these developments than he did as a leader in the struggle for American independence. Quite apart from his work in theology and moral philosophy, Witherspoon's vital contributions to the American Revolution as agitator, congressman, signer of the Declaration of Independence, drafter of the Articles of Confederation, patriot chaplain, and more, have secured what has long been his impressive reputation. By comparison, his connection to antislavery politics was slight. Still, even slight connections, read historically, can throw fresh light on the lives and careers of important figures, especially regarding the history of slavery and abolition, long recognized by historians as crucial. Where did Witherspoon fit in with the abolitionist travail?

Before examining Witherspoon, three points need clarification. First, prior to the American Revolution, slavery and abolition were matters of state and local concern with ultimate control resting in London. The Revolution, and then the US Constitution, created a new nation and established a federal government empowered to halt slavery's growth in areas under its direct purview. Authority over slavery inside the original thirteen states, however, was left up to those states. Hence, antislavery politics were initially organized on a state-by-state basis. The first national abolitionist organization did not form until 1794.

Accordingly, the politics of slavery and antislavery played out very differently in different regions and subregions of the country. Even north of the Mason–Dixon line, antislavery politics varied greatly, in ways that were sometimes highly idiosyncratic. In northern New England, for example, where slavery had its shallowest roots, efforts to pass immediate and gradual abolition laws failed repeatedly, yet by the mid-1780s, a kind of immediate abolition came anyway through courtroom judgments and constitutional stipulations. By contrast, New York, where a substantial slave-based economy persisted in and around Manhattan, Long Island, and the Hudson River Valley, actually did pass a gradual abolition law, although not until 1799. Slowest of all, meanwhile, was New Jersey, where formidable proslavery forces prevented enacting gradual abolition until 1804, ten years after John Witherspoon died.

Second, rejecting immediate abolition was not the same thing as rejecting abolition, and rejecting gradual abolition was not the same thing as rejecting antislavery. Outside of northern New England, where something like immediate abolition succeeded, organized abolition meant gradual abolition, leading to the enactment of gradual abolition laws in five states, the first of their kind in modern history. Everywhere outside the lower South, meanwhile, there were antislavery advocates who backed reforms other than outright abolition, such as halting the importation of enslaved persons, as the most effective strategy to undermine the institution. Although not heavily involved with the issue of slavery and abolition, Witherspoon was, as we shall see, an antislavery advocate who sympathized with the ends and legitimacy of gradual abolition. Indeed, on the latter point, as a New Jersey legislator, he dismissed the proslavery case that gradual abolition was unlawful and allowed for the possible necessity of a gradual abolition law in future.

Third, and most important, there was a crucial divide over the legitimacy of slavery's abolition. Proslavery advocates, who prevailed even in the North for most of Witherspoon's lifetime, insisted, as their main line of defense, that vested property rights prohibited either immediate or gradual abolition. Their insurgent abolitionist and antislavery opponents, on the contrary, repudiated the validity of property rights in human beings. Although they might differ over strategy and tactics, slavery's adversaries agreed that abolition was legally valid. Witherspoon not only upheld this pro-abolition view, he acted on it.

Finally, by the late 1780s, a combined upsurge of American abolition and antislavery reform convinced many Americans that slavery was in serious trouble, doomed to disappear completely from America in a generation or so. In retrospect, this thinking might seem naïve, wishful, or even bizarre. At the time, it seemed perfectly sensible to perfectly sensible people, including abolitionists, Black and White.

II

Slavery and abolition were not primary intellectual let alone political preoccupations of John Witherspoon's before he left Scotland to take up his post in Princeton in 1768. This is not surprising, given that only a handful of enslaved persons, fewer than one hundred, lived in Scotland. Still, Witherspoon did not completely escape contact with slaves and slavery, in part because his two long-term ministerial residencies were in towns close to Glasgow, a port involved in the Atlantic slave trade. ² In 1756, meanwhile, while ministering in Beith, Witherspoon became caught up in a case involving a Black man, Jamie, whom a congregant, Robert Shedden, was claiming as his runaway slave. The day before Jamie had been due to be sent to Glasgow for shipment back to Virginia, which prompted his escape, Witherspoon, publicly baptized him as James Montgomery in front of the Beith congregation. (The choice of surname may have been related to the fact that it was the same as the birth surname of Witherspoon's wife, Elizabeth, which, in conjunction with Witherspoon's Christian name, would have carried symbolic importance.) Having previously given the young man religious instruction, Witherspoon also provided him with a certificate of Christian conduct. ³

It had been widely and well understood for more than a century that to baptize an enslaved person was to declare him or her a Christian and, therefore, a free person in the eyes of God. Conversely, denial of recognition of Christianity was essential to legitimizing slaves’ bondage. There was, however, some theological dispute in England over whether baptism freed enslaved persons’ bodies as well as their souls. Montgomery and his counsel claimed that the religious instruction from and baptism by Witherspoon rendered his client a free man, entitled to “the rights and privileges of the King's other subjects.” Shedden responded, without material evidence or corroborating testimony, that Witherspoon had repeatedly told Montgomery that baptism did not free him. The court also heard that the certificate of Christian conduct indicated an expectation that Montgomery would go forth a free man. ⁴

Montgomery died in the pestiferous Edinburgh jail while awaiting trial, ending the affair before judgement was rendered and leaving the issue of baptism and slavery undecided. Three things, however, are evident. First, Montgomery believed that Witherspoon's actions, and particularly the certificate—“which calls him Jamie Montgomerie, signed, John Witherspoone Minis,” Shedden carefully noted in his advertisement seeking Montgomery's capture—set him free. ⁵ Second, there is no evidence, apart from the enslaver Shedden's unsubstantiated claims, to confirm Witherspoon believed that by baptizing Montgomery, he was merely saving his soul, not freeing him from slavery. Third, although the evidence supporting the claim that Witherspoon intended to free Montgomery is circumstantial, at the very least he knowingly put his standing on the line, performing a rite and signing a certificate widely perceived as tantamount to declarations of freedom—acts that could easily have thwarted one of his congregants. And though he was hardly free to choose simply to liberate James Montgomery if he so desired—as if history is made by unconstrained rational actors—as far as the resisting slave saw it, he came as close as he possibly could.

Regarding broader conceptions of freedom, meanwhile, as the historian Christopher Leslie Brown has shown, stalwart opposition to slavery and the slave trade in mid-eighteenth-century Britain among non-slaves amounted to little more than the activities, remarkable as they were, of a single person, Granville Sharp; and Sharp only got started in earnest in 1772. That Witherspoon, despite his brushes with slavery, did not ponder it more than he did before he arrived in America is unsurprising. His saying and doing more would have made him an imposing figure in the history of slavery and abolition, which he was not. ⁶

Witherspoon settled in Princeton just as serious antislavery protests in the colonies were beginning, melding earlier antislavery currents and touching off the political assault on Atlantic slavery. There is no specific record of Witherspoon reading any of these protests or the proslavery rebuttals they elicited, yet he clearly paid attention to them. He wrote very little on the subject, but what he did write, with his usual careful wording, was distinctly antislavery.

In his early lectures at Princeton, for example, later collected as Lectures in Moral Philosophy, Witherspoon taught that “it is certainly unlawful to make inroads upon others, unprovoked, and take away their liberty by no better right than superior power.” He thought slavery lacked moral validity, remarking that “it is very doubtful whether any original cause of servitude can be defended, but as legal punishment for the commission of crimes.” To these broad antislavery statements, he added a direct refutation of proslavery spokesmen, whom he cited but left unnamed. By the 1770s, a stock proslavery argument held that Africans were better off, spiritually and materially, enslaved in Christian America than living as free persons in their benighted heathen homeland. Witherspoon dismissed the claim. “Some have pleaded for making slaves of the barbarous nations,” he wrote, “that they are actually brought into a more eligible state, and have more of the comforts of life, than they would have in their own country. This argument may alleviate, but does not justify the practice. It cannot be called a more eligible state, if less agreeable to themselves.” ⁷

More revealing was a statement by the May 1787 meeting of the Presbyterian Synod of New York and Philadelphia, coincident with the Federal Constitutional Convention—a statement which, if Witherspoon did not write it, certainly had his approval. Antislavery sentiment, having originated a century earlier among Pennsylvania Quakers, had begun making headway among Presbyterians, and an antislavery memorial prompted the synod to address the issue. The gathering did not go as far as to discipline slaveholding members, let alone bar them from membership, as the Pennsylvania Quakers had done in 1776. But the synod did encourage giving the enslaved property as well as education, to prepare them for freedom. More strikingly, it stated that it shared “the interest which many of the states have taken … [toward] the abolition of slavery.” It then recommended to all under its care to use every prudent and lawful means possible “to procure, eventually, the final abolition of slavery in America” (italics original). That the political as well as spiritual leader Witherspoon endorsed these words just as delegates, many of them his colleagues and friends, had begun drafting the US Constitution in Independence Hall—five blocks away from the church in Philadelphia where the Synod was meeting, less than a ten-minute walk—made them even more significant. ⁸

Although he deemed slavery indefensible, Witherspoon was blind to—or he blinded himself to—some basic realities of slavery as experienced by the enslaved. In his Description of the State of New Jersey, published in 1785, for example, he wrote of how, in his adopted home state, “the negroes are exceedingly well used, being fed and clothed as well as any free persons who live by daily labour.” ⁹ Witherspoon never wrote about the inner experience of slavery and its devastating effects on slaves. Such complacency—expressed just as he himself was, in sketchy circumstances, the temporary owner of two household slaves—may explain why he did not express any moral imperative to end slavery as soon as possible, although in this regard, he did not stand apart from most abolitionists, who backed gradual abolition. Yet Witherspoon's quietude never compromised his conviction that slavery should be extinguished.

Concerning what might be done about slavery, Witherspoon did not support immediate abolition. In line with what was becoming a gradual abolitionist position, he believed that it was not necessary or even advisable immediately to free people already enslaved, as it would “make them free to their own ruin.” ¹⁰ Nor, although he was interested in and even sympathetic to gradual abolition, did he take up that cause in any public way. He would have been too old to join the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, which was only founded eighteen months before his death, by which time Witherspoon had been blind for two years. But he was evidently uninvolved in earlier organized antislavery efforts, dating back at least two decades. His lectures, with their fleeting remarks on slavery, only appeared posthumously. He did not contribute to the intense debates over slavery and abolition that roiled the New Jersey press.

Witherspoon was nothing like his abolitionist predecessor, the Presbyterian pastor, Jacob Green. A 1748 trustee of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), Green also served as the college's acting president for eight months following the death of Jonathan Edwards in 1758. A firm supporter of the Revolution, his sharp antislavery opinions appeared in sermons, newspaper articles, and at least one pamphlet. Most famously, in 1776, he declared it “a dreadful absurdity … that a people who are so strenuously contending for liberty, should at the same time encourage and promote slavery.” Green also followed the example of Pennsylvania's Quakers and barred slaveholders from membership in his congregation, Hanover Presbyterian Church in Morris County, while he eagerly admitted Blacks. For his efforts, he earned opprobrium, on one occasion fending off with sweet reason what his son, Ashbel Green, called “a company of slaveholders” who angrily stormed into his home. ¹¹

John Witherspoon was no Jacob Green. Yet he did correspond and collaborate comfortably with leading abolitionist thinkers and activists. In 1783, as part of his unceasing efforts to raise money for his college, he traveled to England where he visited with Granville Sharp, whose continued antislavery work was on the verge of creating a genuine British antislavery movement. Witherspoon and Sharp had some common theological and ecclesiastical concerns, but their talk naturally turned to slavery and abolition. A few months later, Sharp sent Witherspoon a collection of antislavery tracts “as I promised.” Among the tracts was Sharp's Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God, which included (Sharp pointed out in his cover letter) “a mode of gradual infranchisement [i.e., emancipation] leading to abolition” ¹² (see Appendix III). How much, if at all, Sharp pushed Witherspoon in the direction of a plan for gradual abolition is unclear, but the topic certainly came up. The Princeton faculty, meanwhile, established a prize for the student who wrote the best dissertation on slavery and antislavery.

More consequential connections developed between Witherspoon and his fellow clergymen Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles. Hopkins, based in Newport, Rhode Island, was the chief enunciator of the so-called New Divinity, a doctrine based on an expansive idea of disinterested benevolence quite different from Witherspoon's more conventional, if enlightened, Scots’ Calvinism. He was also a former slaveholder who was quickly emerging as one of the most outspoken American immediate abolitionists, author of the enormously influential pamphlet A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, published in 1776. Stiles, also in Newport, represented “Old Light” Congregationalism in opposition to Hopkins's “New Light” theology; although also opposed to slavery he owned a slave (whom he would free in 1778); he then served as the president of Yale College and, in 1790, the first president of the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom. In 1792, the society would petition Connecticut lawmakers in favor of the total abolition of slavery in the state, leading, two years later, to a forceful if finally unsuccessful effort inside the legislature. ¹³

In 1773, Hopkins and Stiles, overcoming their theological differences, hatched a plan to train Black missionaries and send them to coastal Africa, in part to counteract the effects of the slave trade and in part to bring Christianity to the Africans. Once they had recruited two volunteers, formerly enslaved men named Bristol Yamma and John Quamine, Hopkins and Stiles wrote a fundraising prospectus letter that pointedly tied their effort to hastening the end of “the great inhumanity and cruelty of enslaving so many thousands of our fellow men every year.” Funds began arriving from as far away as Scotland and London. Phillis Wheatley, having just published her first collection of poems—the first book written by a Black woman in America—sent a message of moral support. After discarding the idea that Yamma and Quamine might be trained in Newport, Hopkins and Stiles decided late in 1774 to send them, Stiles wrote in his diary “to reside sometime at Jersey College under the Tuition of President Witherspoon.” ¹⁴

The sources are silent on exactly why Yamma and Quamine ended up at Princeton. Both Stiles and Hopkins had met Witherspoon, whose intellectual prowess, high standards, and conscientiousness, despite theological differences, surely played a part in their decision. Tasked with preparing the two men for missionary work, on a separate track from the rest of the college, Witherspoon found enough time and energy despite his intensifying involvement in patriot politics to oversee as well as instruct. “They are becoming pretty good at reading and writing,” he reported to Hopkins in February 1775, encouraging but strict, “and likewise have a pretty good notion of the principles of the Christian religion.” ¹⁵ The instruction was cut short after eight months, evidently because of financial difficulties; and amid the disruptions of war that began at Lexington and Concord in April, Hopkins and Stiles abandoned the project. Still, they had counted on Witherspoon as a sound and reliable collaborator; and Witherspoon saw fit to participate in an educational project explicitly designed to undermine slavery.

III

The episode that most fully revealed Witherspoon's settled position on slavery and abolition was no more than an episode, and it occurred late in his life. ¹⁶ In 1779, at age 54, Witherspoon took up residence at a country estate, Tusculum, which included 500 acres of arable land, located about two miles from Nassau Hall. It was at this point that the reticent tax record of his temporary ownership of one slave, then two, and then none began. He would not have been, by any means, the only person with antislavery views who at some point owned a slave; some of the most outspoken and courageous abolitionist leaders were at least nominal holders of many more than two slaves, even after they took up abolitionism. In the absence of additional evidence, any further connection between what the record shows and Witherspoon's relation to antislavery ideas and politics would be purely speculative. What we do know is that as he approached his declining years, Witherspoon kept busy, even following the sorrowful death in 1789 of his first wife, Elizabeth, after forty-one years of marriage. Still president of the college but no longer as active as he once was, he became something of a political elder statesman, elected to the New Jersey General Assembly in 1783 and again in 1789, and named as a delegate to the New Jersey convention that considered and approved ratification of the US Constitution in 1787. ¹⁷

In May 1790, during the second session of the second of his terms in the Assembly, a petition arrived from Essex and Morris Counties “praying the Legislature to take measures for the abolition of slavery” ¹⁸ (see Appendix IV A). Witherspoon was appointed to a three-member committee to consider the matter. Two days later, on behalf of the committee, Witherspoon delivered its report (see Appendix IV B).

The petition was hardly the first antislavery protest in New Jersey, and a close examination of the background is essential to understanding it as well as to understanding Witherspoon's actions in 1790. Regarding slavery and abolition, New Jersey was more like two states than one, just as it had actually been two provinces before the Revolution. West Jersey consisted of the southern portion of the state as well as some portions of Sussex, Morris, Middlesex, and Monmouth counties. Heavily settled by Quakers, with a gravitational pull toward Philadelphia, it leaned toward antislavery and was the source of most abolitionist protests. East Jersey, however, with its gravitational pull toward New York, was home to a much larger proportion of slaveholders and produced most of the proslavery resistance. (Princeton lay right on the border, marked by what is, today, Province Line Road.) East Jersey proslavery advocates had long held the upper hand in state politics, even during the long governorship of the avowed abolitionist, William Livingston.

In 1773–74, West Jersey Quakers initiated New Jersey's first major display of antislavery politics by deluging the colonial assembly with antislavery petitions. Inspired in part by earlier abolitionist campaigns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the Quakers took additional encouragement from the publication, in Burlington, of a tract that explained “the expediency of abolition,” co-authored by the great abolitionist Anthony Benezet's pupil, William Dillwyn. ¹⁹ The petitions followed Dillwyn's gradualist logic and pressed for a prohibitive duty on the slave trade and an easing of manumission laws. Remarkably, they were so numerous that the assembly was forced to suspend its rule of entering all petitions in its official journal. ²⁰

Stymied in the legislature—in part because of hastily prepared proslavery petitions from East Jersey—the Quakers resumed their campaign the following year. Among their petitions was a so-called “monster” memorial that advocated the emancipation of every slave in New Jersey, signed by three thousand persons and carried to Trenton by Dillwyn himself. Once again, though, resurgent proslavery East Jersey lawmakers, their power concentrated in the upper house of the legislature, suffocated the proposed reforms. ²¹

The outbreak of the Revolutionary war turned much of New Jersey into a vicious battleground, “the cockpit of the Revolution,” as one historian called it. ²² With respect to slavery and abolition, the most dramatic scenes surrounded the flight of thousands of enslaved persons to British lines. Some, most notably a formidable former slave from Monmouth County known as Colonel Tye, enlisted in His Majesty's forces, then spread terror among East Jersey Whites and caused significant patriot losses. The British, however, no abolitionists, would prove only partially reliable liberators. Abolitionist efforts, by contrast, persisted on the American side, despite the wartime chaos. Governor William Livingston, working with the Quakers, tried unavailingly to get the new patriot legislature “to lay the foundation for [the slaves’] manumission.” ²³

Then, in the wake of the passage of Pennsylvania gradual abolition law in 1780, petitioners called upon New Jersey legislators to enact an equivalent measure; the assembly politely accepted the petition, but quickly killed it with a crushing majority. Proslavery advocates, now proclaiming their cause, registered their central objection, that any form of abolition, immediate or gradual, was an illegitimate assault on their property rights—“a solemn act of publick ROBBERY, OF FRAUD,” as one proslavery writer put it. ²⁴ The defeat, however, only aroused abolitionist opinion further, which led to a furious war of words in the New Jersey press that expressed every conceivable opinion on slavery and abolition. It was the most intense public debate of its kind over slavery and abolition anywhere in revolutionary America, and perhaps the most extensive before the 1830s. ²⁵

IV

Abolitionist efforts in New Jersey fared better after independence, although with considerable frustration as well. In 1785, Quaker abolitionists, with strong public support from Governor Livingston and several legislators, presented a new petition calling for gradual abolition along with an effective prohibition of the importation of slaves. The legislature disappointingly approved a greatly watered-down anti-importation bill and rejected gradual abolition. ²⁶

Three years later, though, again with Governor Livingston's support, the Quakers picked up the fight and prepared a draft bill for numerous antislavery reforms, including gradual abolition. Once the bill reached the legislature, the Quakers’ leader David Cooper recalled, “it was pulled to pieces and the most essential parts left out,” specifically gradual abolition. Yet as Cooper went on to observe, something had shifted dramatically inside the legislature since the last fight, moving it in a conspicuously antislavery direction. The law that was finally enacted in fact secured many of the reforms short of abolition that the abolitionists had long championed, some of them as preludes to slavery's elimination. Most auspiciously, it prohibited participation in the Atlantic slave trade, long a key New Jersey abolitionist demand. It also outlawed removing enslaved persons out of state without their consent, and granted all Blacks, free and enslaved, the same procedural rights in court as Whites. “The disposition of the Assembly is exceedingly changed and softened,” Cooper remarked. “So that I have little doubt that a law to the Friends’ liking may before long be obtained.” ²⁷

Cooper's view struck some as overly optimistic. The more realistic Governor Livingston, although an ardent and dedicated abolitionist, also knew the legislature well, and he read the political situation differently. “However desirous the western part of New Jersey may be” to eradicate slavery, he warned, “there are some of the northern [that is, eastern] counties whom too rapid progress would furnish with an excuse to oppose it altogether.” Progress toward abolition might now be possible in New Jersey as never before, Livingston suggested, but only if it proceeded deliberately, even cautiously. ²⁸

The Essex and Morris County petition in 1790 represented the latest abolitionist return to the fray. That it came from one county, Essex, that was firmly inside East Jersey, and from contiguous Morris County that straddled the two Jerseys, indicated that abolitionism had made progress inside slavery's strongholds. Unfortunately, the text of the petition has not survived, but from the legislators’ response, it appears that the petitioners called for nothing more specific than for the legislature “to take measures for the abolition of slavery” ²⁹ (see Appendix IV A). The legislators’ response, meanwhile, composed at least in part by John Witherspoon, was not the decisive abolitionist statement that David Cooper had hoped for. Yet the report was explicitly antislavery; indeed—most important of all—on the core political issue in the abolition struggle, Witherspoon and his two colleagues deliberately sided with the abolitionists and against the slaveholders, in ways that left open the possibility of enacting gradual abolition in future (see Appendix IV B).

The committee that produced the report was balanced across the spectrum of opinion and interest regarding slavery and abolition. It is just a guess, but it seems likely this was done to ensure a compromise that would obviate a renewed struggle inside the Assembly. At one end, John Outwater, from Bergen County in East Jersey, had been a distinguished militia officer during the Revolution and was a member of a leading slaveholding family. At the other end, Abel Clement was a Quaker farmer from Evesham (now Mount Laurel) in rural Gloucester County in West Jersey. ³⁰ Witherspoon, evidently the committee's chairman, stood somewhere in the large middle ground between them—from Princeton, symbolically on the borderline between East and West Jersey.

Although Witherspoon delivered the report to the Assembly and almost certainly wrote the final draft, the conclusions were not his alone, as some writers have assumed: they were put together by committee. The report was a political document, not a declaration of moral purpose, tied to a history of antislavery protest that dated back nearly twenty years, bowing to necessity while also heeding principles. To read it any other way is to turn it into something it was not.

Divided into four parts, the report made three points. First, it indicated that “how the law stands at present”—that is, after the legislation enacted two years earlier—enshrined major admirable antislavery reforms. Second, it noted that the state “might pass” a gradual abolition law along the same lines as the landmark Pennsylvania law in 1780, formally freeing the children of slave mothers at birth, then granting them complete freedom from service when they turned 28. Far from evading abolition, the committee purposely brought it up as commendable in its ends.

But the committee deemed the law unnecessary, which was the report's third point: that “the prevalence and progress of the principles of universal liberty” made it highly unlikely that there would be “any slaves at all among us” in 28 years. More precipitate action might do “more hurt than good” to the enslaved as well as the state in general.

The politics behind this conclusion are unclear, which makes labeling it “anti-abolitionist” especially problematic. It makes sense that Witherspoon and the others could agree that slavery was on its way out, a widely shared view at the time. Given experience, though, as well as what we know of what was to come in New Jersey—and given the abolitionist Governor Livingston's cautionary view—they also likely understood that the sitting legislature would defeat gradual abolition yet again. Unwilling to endorse a doomed proposal, they may have declined to push it while making what progress they could. What is certain is that the committee took care to conclude only that there was no need for gradual abolition legislation “at this time.” Anyone familiar with law- or rulemaking of any kind, then and now, will recognize this prudent conditional: the time might well come when gradual abolition was both necessary and expedient. If so, the report made crystal clear, it would be perfectly lawful as well as laudable. ³¹

Without question, the report marked another setback for the Quaker abolitionists. “Abolitionists drew little comfort from a document that proclaimed that the inevitable success of their principles made any action on the part of the legislature not only unnecessary but also inexpedient,” a leading scholar of northern abolition, Arthur Zilversmit, once observed, astutely, of the report. ³² The committee also glossed over shortcomings in the 1788 reforms. The loosening of manumission restrictions, for example, certainly encouraged voluntary manumissions, but how greatly they did so, and how much the manumitted slaves would benefit, was debatable. Enslavers who wished to remove their slaves out of state, most likely to sell them to the emerging domestic traffic in slaves, could, it turned out, easily enough coerce the required consent or forge a permission statement. In New Jersey as in other states, abolitionists would find themselves having to try to close these kinds of loopholes in abolition and antislavery legislation.

Yet while it dismissed the abolitionist petitions, the report was, unmistakably, not just antislavery but sympathetic to the abolitionists (even with the slaveholder Outwater in the committee room). It was not, by any means, a flaccid, “moderate” call for delay. If it were, it never would have mentioned, let alone affirmed, the lawfulness of gradual abolition. By upholding the reforms finally won in 1788, no matter how flawed, it endorsed the great shift that the abolitionist David Cooper had hailed. It implied, as anyone would have understood at the time, that in the long struggle over antislavery reform going back nearly twenty years, the proslavery side had been morally wrong and the abolitionist side morally right. More significantly, in the moment, and on the all-important matter of property rights, the report repudiated the cornerstone of the continuing proslavery argument against gradual abolition and backed the abolitionists.

The report's direct mention of a specific gradual abolition plan cut to the heart of the matter. Proslavery advocates were still charging, as they long had, that even gradual abolition was an unthinkable violation of slaveholders’ property rights. ³³ That view was under attack but it evidently still prevailed inside the legislature. The committee, however, flatly rejected that claim, declaring that New Jersey lawmakers might enact a gradual abolition law if they chose to do so. Abolishing slaveholders’ hereditary property rights in slaves, according to the report, clearly fell within the legislature's authority.

The importance of that declaration—for the history of New Jersey abolitionist politics let alone for Witherspoon's reputation—cannot be overstated. For going on twenty years, the New Jersey legislature had rejected gradual abolition. Barely a dent had been made in the slaveholders’ contention that their property rights barred abolition, immediate or gradual. On this, at the core of the political struggle over slavery and abolition, Witherspoon and the committee rejected that anti-abolitionist proslavery argument, in favor of the abolitionists.

To the abolitionists, understandably, the committee's assertion that, although legally correct, an abolition law was unnecessary, was a lame cop-out. To stop there misses the point. While it halted the current abolitionist petition, the report sustained an abolitionist position that was anathema to the enslavers and their supporters. The report, building on the legislature's shift in 1788, affirmed, as never before inside the General Assembly, not only that the eradication of slavery was desirable but that a gradual abolition law would be valid.

To label Witherspoon, based on the report, as a hypocrite, let alone as an anti-abolitionist, let alone as proslavery, completely misconstrues the report and utterly misrepresents John Witherspoon. On the contrary, the report confirms what the rest of the evidence shows: Witherspoon was antislavery, sympathetic to the ends and legal validity of gradual abolition, and opposed to the proslavery forces who had long dominated New Jersey politics. In his one direct political encounter with slavery and abolition, his actions were not what the Quaker abolitionists desired but they were still, in some important ways, meritorious.

How the committee handled the political considerations that went into the report is, as noted, more difficult to discern. It is possible that Witherspoon acted as a kind of balance wheel between the slaveholder Outwater and the Quaker Clement. The committee may well have set out from the start to do its best to ratify the 1788 reforms while putting abolitionists on notice that gradual abolition was not in the cards, at least not now. How closely the report represented Witherspoon's own thinking is arguable. He may have been more sympathetic to the abolitionist petition than the report suggested, which might explain the inclusion of the direct reference to gradual abolition; he may have been less supportive but was persuaded by Clement to mention the gradual plan in the report. Knowing, perhaps through Outwater, that the proslavery legislators remained strong and united enough to block any abolition bill, he, along with his colleagues, may have opted to state gradual abolition's validity and then fall back on the argument that slavery was doomed anyway. That falling back, meanwhile, again as noted, may not have been completely an evasion: Witherspoon and others would have been in large company in 1790 in assuming that slavery was on its way out, although some who did would also have thought that a gradual abolition law would only help the process.

Working inside the limits of the evidence, though, these possibilities are only possibilities. Just as Witherspoon was willing to rest his own reputation on what the report said, so must posterity in judging his legacy.

As it happened, the report received no attention in the press, overshadowed by a prolonged and furious debate over abolitionist petitions, the most radical of them signed by the aging Benjamin Franklin, that concluded two months earlier in the US Congress. ³⁴ Proslavery advocates needn’t have felt too unsettled at the snubbing of their central anti-abolitionist defense: the report had, at least, turned aside the abolitionist petition and it was, after all, just a report. It would take fourteen more years, a decade after Witherspoon's death, before New Jersey finally enacted a gradual abolition law, by which time it was becoming clear that American slavery was not going to disappear anytime soon. In line with David Cooper's optimism, abolitionist sentiment continued to grow. In the spring of 1792, abolitionists organized yet another petition campaign, this time seeking further liberalization of the manumission laws. Put off by the legislature for a year, those petitions were referred to a committee which actually reported a gradual abolition bill. The results also bore out William Livingston's cautions about moving too fast: first the legislature soundly rejected the abolition bill, then proslavery representatives regrouped and passed a bill in the Assembly making it more difficult for Blacks to win their freedom by suing their enslavers over defective property titles. ³⁵

After the upper house failed to act on the proslavery bill, the abolitionists struck again, now led by the second-generation abolitionist Joseph Bloomfield, a lawyer, former Continental Army officer, longtime trustee of the College of New Jersey (that is, Princeton), and first president of the newly formed New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. In the spring of 1794, another gradual abolition bill survived several readings in the legislature and came within a single vote of passing the Assembly. Bloomfield told the Pennsylvania Abolition Society that, although disappointed, New Jersey's abolitionists “are not discouraged, but think their labor in a short time will be blessed with their desired object.” It would take another ten years of legislative maneuvering, acrimonious debate, and setback after success after setback, before Bloomfield, having won election as governor a year earlier, signed New Jersey's abolition bill into law. ³⁶

Witherspoon, his service in the Assembly done in 1790, returned to Tusculum and married Ann Dill, a 24-year-old widow, with whom, despite his age, he would father two children. His vigor, though, was deceptive: after incurring eye injuries, he was effectively blind by 1792, and suffering from what may have been congestive heart failure. If he showed any interest in the continuing struggles over slavery and abolition, there is no record of it. He died in 1794. ³⁷

V

The known evidence concerning antislavery and John Witherspoon is meager. It reveals, though, that Witherspoon's connection with the abolitionist travail was straightforward. It only seems complex when viewed through our own preconceptions.

In the growing divide between slavery's critics and slavery's defenders, Witherspoon was on the antislavery side. He declared slavery unjustifiable. He directly refuted proslavery reasoning. He did not write about the slaves’ experience of slavery, and he thought the forms of slavery in New Jersey humane but did not turn those complacent observations into rationales for enslavement. He corresponded with some of the foremost abolitionists of his time and engaged with two of them in an explicitly antislavery educational project.

Witherspoon did not favor the immediate abolition of slavery, yet he upheld antislavery reforms. He appears to have concluded, late in life, that American slavery's demise was imminent, making gradual abolition, at least for the moment, unnecessary and possibly harmful, for the slaves as well as the wider public. Yet he remained, as he had become, sympathetic to gradual abolition—even something of a conditional gradual abolitionist, depending on what happened in future. Above all, at the crux of the abolitionist travail, he rejected the proslavery claim that gradual abolition was unlawful—the prevailing view in New Jersey politics—and he did so unequivocally as a member of the New Jersey General Assembly. The report he signed wound up helping, in a small way, to make future gradual abolition possible.

Witherspoon's connection to the travail of abolitionist politics was not dishonorable or worthy of censure. Not even close. If anything, overall, it deserves quiet praise—a concluding point that also needs emphasizing. There is a view or at least a presumption that only those who stood for immediate abolition and made it the center of their life's work deserve our respect; there is another view that anyone who failed to support wholeheartedly either immediate or graduate abolition, let alone who demurred, whatever the circumstances, was simply an anti-abolitionist, construed as virtually tantamount to being proslavery. This, however, is sectarian, not historical, reasoning. In the history of slavery and abolition, immediatists, gradualists, and antislavery reformers all played important roles. Witherspoon, in his way, played his. Absent any of them, the abolitionist travail never would have overthrown slavery, in New Jersey or anywhere else. Forgetting this can lead to numerous errors of historical judgement, mistaking diversity and disagreement for the worst kind of villainy.

In 1808, the great New York Black abolitionist Peter Williams Jr., looking back, extolled the gradual abolitionists, Black and White, who had withstood “the strong gales of popular prejudice” to assail “the dark dungeon of slavery,” fighting not as allies but as fellows in the cause of universal equality. ³⁸

John Witherspoon took relatively little interest in these matters. What interest he did take ought not to be magnified into more than what it was. But neither should his antislavery politics be judged a disgrace. To a considerable degree, and in some significant ways, they were exactly the opposite.