Gideon Mailer. John Witherspoon’s American Revolution.

Abstract

John Witherspoon is a familiar character to historians of the American Revolution. He is remembered, perhaps more than he is for any of his other accomplishments, as the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence and as the mentor to several of the most influential statesmen in the early American republic. Despite these familiar accomplishments, in John Witherspoon’s American Revolution Gideon Mailer offers a fresh look at the revolutionary clergyman, his religious beliefs, his role in the politics of the Revolution, and his influence on his students at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Yet, Mailer does more than urge scholars to look at Witherspoon anew; he makes a compelling case for them to use Witherspoon’s experience as a lens through which to more accurately gauge the interplay of religious conflict and Enlightenment philosophy in the founding of the United States. Mailer identifies an important strain of exceptionalism among American colonists who justified resistance to the imperial policies of Great Britain with the deeply optimistic philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. He explains that during the latter half of the eighteenth century, “American colonists borrowed Scottish moral sensory terminology to describe their attachment to the British Empire,” but that “the same terminology came to assume a rather different political connotation in American circles during the 1760s and 1770s,” influencing “those who sought to justify their separation from imperial jurisdiction” (8). Based on such rational arguments, “some patriots defined British corruption as contrary to constitutional theories that had developed in the American colonies” (8). Witherspoon cautioned his fellow revolutionaries about the extreme implications of such reasoning and threw a metaphorical wrench into the intellectual justifications of Revolution. While Witherspoon was an ardent supporter of American independence, “he also warned that patriots might perceive their moral abilities in unrealistic terms when distinguishing their civic ideology from Westminster authority. In describing their opposition to British corruption as a predictable manifestation of their innate ethical sensibility, they risked eschewing the importance of conversion and faith in redeemed grace” (11). Thus, Mailer argues that “Witherspoon’s moral critique of patriot reasoning prefigured a civic and theological tension that several scholars have noted in the era of the early American Republic.” Mailer therefore writes that this book “uncovers the broader constitutional and civic contexts that framed Witherspoon’s critique of moral sense theory” (11).