Witherspoon as Liberal

Throughout history, the English word liberal has had several non-​political meanings. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the term came to be used in a political sense.¹

One of the first to use liberal in an identifiably political sense was the Scottish historian William Robertson. Robertson wrote in 1769 of “liberal ideas concerning justice and order” and “liberal ideas concerning the nature of government.”² In 1776, Adam Smith expounded, in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation” and “the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.”³ A bit later, Dugald Stewart wrote of “the liberal principles which, according to Mr. Smith, ought to direct the commercial policy of nations.”⁴ It appears that Hayek was largely correct: the political use of liberal seems to have derived not from the Spanish liberales but “from the use of the term by Adam Smith.”⁵

To be liberal in Smith’s sense of the term is to hold that individuals count equally, in ethical terms, and to presumptively support individual liberty within a set of conventions of property and contract. Smith arguably called his perspective “liberal” because liberal suggests liberty and because his perspective entails a generous—and hence liberal, in a pre-​political sense of the term—view of the human person and of the possibilities of peaceful human cooperation.⁶

Before Smith and Stewart, though after Robertson, another Scottish man of letters used liberal in the new way: John Witherspoon, the influential churchman, educator, and statesman.⁷

Witherspoon’s career had two distinct phases: one in Scotland where he served as a cleric, and one in America where he served both as president of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and as a New Jersey statesman.

A theologically orthodox minister in the Reformed tradition, Witherspoon devoted much of the Scottish phase of his career to opposing modernizing reform efforts in the Church of Scotland. These efforts were sponsored by the so-​called Moderate Party within the Church, which was led by Witherspoon’s former classmates at the University of Edinburgh, including Hugh Blair, William Robertson, and Adam Ferguson.⁸ But despite his opposition to their theology and ecclesiology, Witherspoon largely concurred with the “Moderate men” when it came to politics and especially political economy.⁹

In the American phase of his career, the theologically conservative Witherspoon helped transmit politically liberal sensibilities from his native Scotland to the young American republic. Liberal sensibilities are apparent in many of Witherspoon’s public addresses, sermons, and publications from his time in America. They are on display in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy—notes from a senior capstone course he taught regularly at Princeton to young men who would go on to serve as public officials, congressmen, and, in one case, president (James Madison).

Some scholars have perceived a tension between the theological orthodoxy displayed in the Scotland phase of Witherspoon’s career and the liberal sensibilities conveyed during his time in America. Richard Sher commented:

Others have pushed beyond Sher’s perception to suggest a “Witherspoon problem” parallel to the “Adam Smith problem.”¹¹ In this view, the theological orthodoxy of the Scottish Witherspoon cannot be squared with the political liberalism of the American Witherspoon.

Perceptions of a “Witherspoon problem,” like those of an “Adam Smith problem,” are misguided. As Daniel Howe has pointed out, the various tensions that modern scholars have identified between “Calvinism” and “republicanism” and “liberalism” really “did not much bother people in the late eighteenth century.”¹² Witherspoon did not believe there to be a fundamental discontinuity across the phases of his career. He could disagree with Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith, and the “Moderate men” generally on theological dogma and church politics but agree about many desirable political—and especially economic—reforms. Political economy had become, by the late eighteenth century, a highly ecumenical creed.

Speaking more generally, there is no good reason to think that there exists a necessary tension between Christian orthodoxy and classically liberal political sensibilities. The perception of a tension today says much more about our impoverished perceptions of liberalism—and freedom generally—than anything else.

Witherspoon’s liberal sensibilities build from his conviction of the mutual benefits of peaceable cooperation. This conviction, in turn, builds from his education in natural jurisprudence and, ultimately, his view of divine providence. God has ordered the universe in such a way that human interactions, so long as they are guided by the rules of morality, serve the good of the immediate actors and simultaneously the larger communities in which they are embedded.

In the early nineteenth century, the American Francis Wayland, part of the group described by Henry May as the “clerical laissez faire,”¹³ proposed that “every benefit is mutual; and we cannot, in the one case, any more than the other, really do good to ourselves, without doing good to others; nor do good to others, without also doing good to ourselves.”¹⁴ Witherspoon reached the same basic conclusion more than fifty years earlier, and he made similar assertions across his work, even describing such a viewpoint on occasion as “liberal.”

An early expression of his liberal views came in a letter, recovered and published only after his death, submitted to the Edinburgh periodical Scots Magazine concerning migration. After his arrival in America, Witherspoon became involved in networks and organizations (such as the St. Andrews Society of Philadelphia) devoted to the settling and integration of new Scottish emigrants. In 1772, he joined with a Glasgow merchant named John Pagan in a venture to relocate poor Scottish families to land in Nova Scotia along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Witherspoon did not gain much financially from the venture, and he seems to have genuinely desired to assist his fellow Scots. But this is not how matters were perceived by the Scottish press. Witherspoon was portrayed there, in periodicals including Scots Magazine and the Edinburgh Advocate, as working to line his pockets at the expense of poor Scottish families, all the while draining his home country of a much-​needed supply of low-​skilled laborers. Incensed at the attack on his character and his Scottish patriotism, Witherspoon drafted a letter defending his conduct.¹⁵

The draft proposes that much of the controversy stems from differing views on the costs and benefits of migration. “The accusation,” Witherspoon writes, “I think may be reduced to the following argument—Migrations from Britain to America, are not only hurtful but tend to the ruin of that kingdom; therefore, J. W. [John Witherspoon] by inviting people to leave Scotland, and settle in America, is an enemy to his [home] country.”¹⁶ The bulk of Witherspoon’s response consists in a rejection of the premise.

Witherspoon proposes that migration from Britain to America will likely benefit both places. To support his proposition, Witherspoon first references Montesquieu to make the point that migration is of very little consequence for prosperity when compared to “the spirit and principles of a constitution,” which he believed to be fundamentally sound on both sides of the Atlantic.¹⁷ He proceeds to argue that movements in population from Scotland to America will benefit those who leave and many of those who stay. Scottish laborers arriving in America will have the opportunity to participate in an economic “scene that is new in the history of mankind” that promises to increase “in a proportion that no political calculations have yet been able to understand or lay down rules for.”¹⁸ Those workers who stay behind will enjoy a slight boost to wages and a slight dip to rents, allowing them to “marry and multiply the faster.”¹⁹

The only group that would suffer—and only minimally—from the movement of workers to America would be Scottish landholders who would be forced to compete for fewer workers. The losses felt by landholders would be more than compensated by the immediate gains to workers and the long-​term economic gains to Scottish and American societies. The losses do not provide a sufficient reason to oppose migration. To favor the good of a select few over the good of the many violates our basic moral intuitions and is manifestly not liberal:

What Witherspoon describes here as a liberal way of thinking points in the direction of the sensibilities underneath Adam Smith’s “liberal plan” in which each is free to “pursue his interest his own way.”

John Robertson has argued that the Enlightenments in Scotland and Naples were “dedicated to understanding and publicizing the cause of human betterment on this earth, [and that] in both cases, the terms in which this objective was articulated were those of political economy.”²¹ Robertson understands the burgeoning discipline of political economy to have supplanted the traditional language of theology in which conversations about the good had been conducted for much of European history. He builds his case with attention to anti-​religious figures such as David Hume. Even religious philosophers, however, increasingly employed the terms and logic of political economy. Many assumed that, as Edmund Burke wrote, “the laws of commerce” are an aspect of “the laws of nature … and consequently the laws of God.”²² The regularities that reveal themselves in commercial life indicate something about the character of God’s providence and the proper way of organizing society, for the glory of God and the love of neighbor. Such a perspective finds expression across Witherspoon’s writings.

In the American phase of his career, Witherspoon’s works, in the words of his twentieth century biographer Varnum Collins, came to be “strongly marked by [the economic] angle of approach.”²³ “Economic causes in his vocabulary,” Collins commented elsewhere, “were synonymous with providential design.”²⁴ The providential dimension of Witherspoon’s economics comes across in what proved to be one of the most influential political sermons of the Revolutionary War, “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men,” preached on May 17, 1776. Witherspoon there pointed to American economic prosperity as evidence of God’s will for American independence.

He further elaborated this point in another work, published alongside “Dominion” in a single volume in the early winter of 1777, his “Address to the Natives of Scotland.” In his “Address,” he attempted to persuade Scots residing in America of the justice of the American cause. He used economic analysis to argue that American independence would serve the common good of Britain and America. He argued that the American colonies were far too expensive for Britain to profitably maintain and that the exclusive access that Britian claimed to the colonial trade was less advantageous than it seemed. He proceeded to argue that since all trade is “founded upon interest,” America will be “as open to [the British] as ever” after peace is settled.²⁵ Hence, American opposition to the “unjust claims of Great Britain” is “rational and liberal”—and consistent with the plans of providence.²⁶ To support America for Witherspoon is to support “the great principles of universal liberty” and to reason upon “liberal principles.”²⁷ Incidentally, it is curious that in the 1776 works and all subsequent works, Witherspoon never mentions Adam Smith.

The recurrence of liberal in Witherspoon’s “Address to the Natives of Scotland” connects his perspective there back to his 1772 letter. In the “Address,”Witherspoon develops his “liberal way of thinking” (although he doesn’t use that exact phrase again) in the context of international trade. He asserts that “the independence of America will, in the end, be to the advantage of Great Britain.” He goes on:

The asterisk indicates Witherspoon’s footnote, which references David Hume’s 1758 essay “Of the Jealousy of Trade.” The approving reference to Hume is remarkable because Witherspoon took great issue with Hume elsewhere in his writing. In his 1756 Essay on Justification, Witherspoon describes Hume as “worthy of the highest contempt,” a man “beyond the reach of conviction by reasoning.”²⁹ In his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Witherspoon continues to single Hume out as an example of impiety and philosophical error.

Those who perceive a “Witherspoon problem” might take the approving reference to Hume in the Address as an indication of a shift in Witherspoon’s thinking. Might Witherspoon’s embrace of the economic principles of the great infidel signal a lapse in theological orthodoxy? Might it not signal that he came to prioritize an “apparently humanistic moral philosophy”?³⁰ Perhaps. But a simpler story is that Witherspoon was broad-​minded enough to credit Hume with having some penetrating insights in political economy that in fact accorded with Witherspoon’s broader Christian worldview. Witherspoon believed that Hume’s understanding of international trade should inform our feelings about the economic progress of our neighbors. Just and generous sentiments applaud the wealth of one’s trading partners for, as Adam Smith argued in March 1776, the wealth of trading partners supports the wealth of the nation.

The liberal implications of Witherspoon’s Christian worldview are developed at greater length in the Lectures on Moral Philosophy and then in Witherspoon’s most substantive work in political economy, An Essay on Money, as a Medium of Exchange, with Remarks on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Paper Admitted Into General Circulation. Across these works, he elaborates his conviction that society builds through families and voluntary associations; that economic development proceeds through the market process, which political agents lack the knowledge to superintend; and that the state should aspire mostly to protect the property and private activities of its citizens. Social order is not a creature of the state but a providential consequence of God’s design of the human frame. When we cooperate with God’s design by keeping his moral code, which we can discern through moral intuition combined with reason, we become instruments of God’s provision for our own good and that of our neighbor.

In his Lectures, Witherspoon focuses on a key feature in God’s design: private property, which is “essentially necessary, and founded upon the reason of things and public utility.”³¹ Borrowing from Francis Hutcheson, Witherspoon explains how property incentivizes industry and facilitates the productive cultivation of the earth. Without the exclusive claims to the fruits of their labor, individuals will work less and produce less. Property further enables charity and generosity. Without property, individuals have nothing to give. Charity, moreover, is best meted out by property-​owning individuals in their local contexts, for the government lacks knowledge and capability to distribute goods according to desert. In a passage that bears more than a passing resemblance to David Hume’s essay “Of Refinement in the Arts,” Witherspoon then proclaims that the benefits of a free government, in which property is protected, “chiefly consists in its tendency to put in motion all the human powers. Therefore, it promotes industry, and in this respect happiness,— produces every latent quality, and improves the human mind.—Liberty is the nurse of riches, literature, and heroism.”³²

The benefits of property are clarified in Witherspoon’s speeches and pamphlets on economics, for which he became well known. He, in fact, earned a reputation as a political economist among the American founders. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Robert Morris, among others, consulted Witherspoon for advice on matters of personal finance and national economic policy. Witherspoon’s economic analysis corroborates the intuitions of his liberal way of thinking—the good of the individual serves the good of the whole—by illustrating the workings of the market process.

One important work is a letter drafted—but never sent—to George Washington in 1778, responding to an announced plan by the Continental Army to hold a market in Valley Forge. The prices for goods were to be set in advance. Witherspoon maintained this would be counterproductive. His letter is a concise and decisive takedown of the logic of price controls, which have, he says, “increased the evil [they were] meant to remedy, as the same practice has done since the beginning of the world.” Prices are a function of “demand on the one side, and the plenty and scarcity of goods on the other,” and will fix themselves “by the consent of the buyer and seller, better than can be done by any politician on earth.” Lawgivers must recognize that “there are some things that are not the objects of human laws.”³³

Witherspoon does not, in the letter to Washington itself, explicitly connect his price theory to his wider liberal sensibilities. But the connection is apparent. The basic insights of price theory for Witherspoon illustrate the fundamental tendency toward order that obtains among a free people in a society in which each is allowed to pursue his own interest his own way. The tendency toward order—and the potential for government intervention to distort the tendency—featured again in Witherspoon’s 1786 Essay on Money, which, in essence, develops a theory of money to sustain the proposition that legal tender laws are “a most ludicrous inversion of the nature of things.”³⁴

“However old-​fashioned some of his views,” Daniel Howe wrote, “on the subject of economics Witherspoon seems thoroughly modern. He shared the outlook of his famous countryman and contemporary, Adam Smith, and endorsed free enterprise as a means to facilitate commerce.”³⁵ I would recast Howe’s statement as follows: Cautious to preserve his theological orthodoxy, Witherspoon shared a wide set of liberal political and economic perspectives with many of his contemporaries, their disagreements about theological matters notwithstanding. The case of Witherspoon illustrates how classical liberalism, like classical political economy, enjoyed broad ecumenical support in the eighteenth century. Rather than a set of presuppositions about the good, the right, and the beautiful, classical liberalism emerged as a shared set of sensibilities, which were supported in many corners of Christianity, about the harmfulness of many government interventions and the desirability of political liberty.