Witherspoon, John (1723–94)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.J. Fechner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Academic Philosophy

John Witherspoon, Scottish-American clergyman, political leader and educator, was born at Gifford, East Lothian, educated at Edinburgh University and ordained Presbyterian minister. In his mid-forties he went to America as president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. He held political office for New Jersey and played a major role in organizing the Presbyterian Church in America and improving the College at Princeton. Witherspoon was representative of eighteenth-century Scottish and American Calvinists who tried to reconcile their orthodox theological doctrines with the Enlightenment’s philosophical currents of empiricism, scepticism, and utilitarianism by harmonizing reason and revelation. Although Witherspoon was a philosophical eclectic, Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense philosophy was the major source of his utilitarian ethics and republican politics. Witherspoon was not an original thinker, but his popularization of Scottish common sense and moral sense philosophy through his forceful personality and effective teaching laid the foundation for its dominance of nineteenth-century American academic philosophy.

scholarly journals Scottish Common Sense and Nineteenth-Century American Law: A Critical Appraisal

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mikhail
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
American Law ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Mind

One overriding concern I have with Susanna Blumenthal's insightful and stimulating article, “The Mind of a Moral Agent: Scottish Common Sense and the Problem of Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century American Law,” is whether there is anything sufficiently distinctive about Scottish Common Sense philosophy that justifies the role Blumenthal ascribes to it. In a representative passage, she writes:Common Sense philosophy left would-be “moral managers” with a puzzle. If rational and moral faculties were innate and universal, what explained the great conflicts among men concerning matters of belief, manners, and morals … leading some to commit acts that were … patently irrational or downright evil? And to the extent that therewasa common sense about the dictates of reason, propriety, and moral sense, why did some individuals act in defiance of them?

American Presbyterian Missionaries, Enslavement, and Anti-Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Gabon

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Cinnamon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Southern Cameroon ◽  
French Colonial

When American Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries arrived in the Gabon Estuary in the 1840s, they entered a world marked by vibrant commerce; violence and inequality; widespread slavery and slave-trading; British, French, and U.S. Anti-Slavery Patrols; and incipient French colonialism. This article draws on the published accounts by two U.S. missionaries, John Leighton Wilson, who served in Gabon from 1842 to 1851, and Robert Hamill Nassau, who worked on Corisco Island, the Gabon Estuary and Ogowe River, and the southern Cameroon coast from 1861 to 1906. Together, their writings provide insights into early colonialism and especially the long decline of enslavement and slave trading. While Wilson witnessed the establishment of Libreville in the 1840s, Nassau encountered slave trading first on Corisco and later on the Ogowe during the period of French colonial exploration. Both men, shaped by their African experiences as well as their respective social locations in the United States, held strong views on African domestic slavery and the slave trade. Wilson, from the South, was an ambivalent abolitionist who railed against the Atlantic Slave trade while hesitating to denounce slavery and racial inequality in his native South Carolina. Nassau, from New Jersey and educated at conservative Princeton University, was prompted above all by the missionary impulse. He sought to convert and “uplift” formerly enslaved Africans while nevertheless underlining their “servile” characters and benefitting from their labor as docile, socially vulnerable mission workers.

scholarly journals "A More Accurate and Extensive Education than is Customary": Educational Opportunities for Women in Early-Nineteenth-Century New Jersey

2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
New Brunswick ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Access To Education ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Female Seminary

This article examines the variety of educational opportunities available to New Jersey women in the first half of the nineteenth century. While largely ignored in the national historiography on women‟s education, numerous groundbreaking schools for women were established throughout New Jersey in the early nineteenth century. The Newark Academy offered instruction to women since the late eighteenth century; its successor, the Newark Institute for Young Ladies, referred to its curriculum as “collegiate” decades before women were admitted to colleges. In the 1830s, the Bloomfield Female Seminary maintained a reputation for scholarly excellence; throughout the 1840s, the Mount Holly Female Seminary offered a course of study for women seeking to become teachers. By the 1840s, schools could be found in various cities and towns, including Bloomfield, Bordentown, Burlington, Freehold, Lawrenceville, Newark, New Brunswick, Rahway, and Raritan. The New Jersey schools examined in this essay shed light on both local and national practices of women‟s education. As women‟s access to education expanded, so did debates about the appropriate uses of education. While many men supported women‟s education, women understood that they could be subject to criticism from those who feared the consequences of their intellectual pursuits. Analysis of the forms, purposes, and uses of women‟s education, as evident in these New Jersey case studies, illustrates both the opportunities and challenges that teachers, students, and supporters faced as they sought to expand women‟s institutional access to education

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document