The Minister Who Signed

The assembly room is hot, the tall windows shut against the street, and the green cloth on the long table is crowded with inkstands and parchment. One by one the delegates come forward to set their names to a paper that calls its truths self-evident. A man in plain clerical black, the only minister in the room, steps up and takes the pen.

It is 1776.

He does not just cross an ocean for a pulpit. He leaves Scotland in 1768 to lead the small College of New Jersey at Princeton, rebuilds its course of study around the Scottish Enlightenment, and turns a struggling college into a forge for the new nation’s leaders.

He does not just teach Latin and logic. He trains a young James Madison and a young Aaron Burr, backs his students when they burn the college’s winter tea in protest, and makes Princeton known as a nursery of Revolutionary thought.

He does not just preach about liberty. He is sent to the Continental Congress in 1776, arrives in time for the independence debates, and signs the Declaration of Independence, the only active clergyman and college president to put his name to it.

He does not just declare that all men are created equal. He owns enslaved people at his own farm outside Princeton, argues for gradual rather than immediate emancipation, and carries in a single life both the promise of the words he signed and the limit his nation set on them.

His Spark of Liberty was the schoolroom that armed a revolution with ideas.

He believed a free people had to be a taught people, and he spent his life making the minds that would govern. He also held men and women in bondage while he wrote and signed of equality, and the distance between those two things is the country’s own.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in East Lothian, Scotland, on February 5, 1723, he trained for the ministry at the University of Edinburgh and preached in Scotland before emigrating in 1768 to become president of the College of New Jersey. There he remade the curriculum, taught a generation of future statesmen including James Madison, and served as a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress from 1776 to 1782, signing the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. He reopened the college after British troops had occupied and damaged it during the war. Records of the Princeton and Slavery Project document that he owned at least two enslaved people at his farm, Tusculum, and favored gradual emancipation. He died there on November 15, 1794, having stayed on as the college’s president even after he went blind.

His name was John Witherspoon.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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