Common Sense Nation. Robert Curry

in 1769, under the leadership of Witherspoon it had become the American university where the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment—Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and David Hume—were studied most intensely.

      Hamilton set out from the island of St. Croix to enroll at Princeton in 1772. He was sent by two sponsors who had recognized his astonishing gifts, his employer and Hugh Knox, a Scot and a Presbyterian minister who was a Princeton graduate. Upon his arrival, Hamilton met with Witherspoon and proposed that he be allowed to blaze through his studies at a rate only determined by his intellectual powers. When Witherspoon turned down his bold proposal, Hamilton made the same proposal at King’s College (today’s Columbia) and was accepted. His tutor there, Robert Harpur, was also a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, having studied at Glasgow before coming to America.

      The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were studied and hotly debated just about everywhere in colonial America. In the words of the eminent scholar Douglass Adair, “At Princeton, at William and Mary, at Pennsylvania, at Yale, at King’s, and at Harvard, the young men who rode off to war in 1776 had been trained in the texts of Scottish social science.” James Foster’s admirable book Scottish Philosophy in America states it this way:

      “The Scottish Enlightenment provided the fledgling United States of America and its emerging universities with a philosophical orientation. For a hundred years or more, Scottish philosophers were both taught and emulated by professors at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, as well as newly founded colleges stretching from Rhode Island to Texas.”

      Foster’s thoughtful and useful work provides brief discussions of the major figures from Witherspoon, Benjamin Rush, and James Wilson in the Founders’ generation to James McCosh late in the nineteenth century. McCosh, the president of Princeton for twenty years beginning in 1868, continued to work in the tradition of common sense realism throughout his long career. He published prolifically, wrote in a clear and readable style, and exerted a significant intellectual influence on American thought.

      It is well known that the Founders were on the whole remarkable for their learning. It is fair to say that by modern standards they were as a group almost unimaginably learned. They knew their Aristotle, they knew their Cicero, and they knew the Bible—and often read the texts in the original languages; Jefferson and Adams read Greek, Latin and Hebrew. They knew their Shakespeare, and they knew their Locke.

      What is not so well known is how much the Scots contributed to the Founders’ thinking. In this book we will examine some of the best known writings of the Founders. And everywhere we look, we will encounter the imprint of the Scots. If you study the American Enlightenment it is difficult to avoid recognizing the contribution of the Scots. Those who overlook the Scots’ contributions to the American Founding end up overlooking the American Enlightenment itself.

      Witherspoon is no doubt the most important example of the influence of Scottish educators. In the words of Jeffry Morrison in his biography of Witherspoon:

      “No other founder (not even James Wilson) did more to channel the Scottish philosophy into the colonies and thus into American political thought.”

      Witherspoon’s students by one count included, among many others, five delegates to the Constitutional Convention, twenty-eight U.S. senators, forty-nine U.S. representatives, twelve governors, three Supreme Court Justices, eight U.S. district judges, three attorneys general, and many members of state constitutional conventions and state ratifying conventions. Is it any wonder that the ideas and arguments of Reid and Smith and their Scottish colleagues are everywhere in the writings of the Founders?

      Witherspoon’s course in moral philosophy, which he dictated year after year in largely unchanging form and which his students copied down faithfully, is almost certainly the most influential single college course in America’s history. It borrowed heavily from Hutcheson’s A System of Moral Philosophy, and at its core were the principles of Reid’s common sense realism:

      “[There are] certain principles or dictates of common sense . . . These are the foundation of all reasoning . . . They can no more be proved than an axiom in mathematical science.”

      Henry May, in his book The Enlightenment in America, points to Witherspoon’s lectures as the source of “the long American career of Scottish Common Sense” which was “to rule American college teaching for almost a century.”

      Princeton was founded by the Presbyterians to provide a college in America for the training of its ministers for America. The American Presbyterian Church was a powerful and united religious organization in the Founders’ generation, and this was an era in which the pulpit mattered to an extent that is very nearly inconceivable to Americans today. As the de facto head of the Presbyterians in America, Witherspoon’s influence was enormous, reaching American communities far removed from college campuses.

      Beyond his enormous influence as an educator and church leader, Witherspoon was also one of the most important of the Founders. He was an early and influential champion of American independence, and much more than merely a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, he played a central role in the signing.

      When the Declaration was completed and ready to be signed, the signers-to-be wavered. For two days they hesitated to affix their signatures. To sign it, after all, was to provide the British with documentary evidence of treason, punishable by death. Witherspoon rose to the occasion, speaking in his famously thick Scottish accent:

      “There is a tide in the affairs of men, a nick of time. We perceive it now before us. To hesitate is to content to our own slavery. That noble instrument upon your table, which ensures immortality to its author, should be subscribed this very morning by every pen in this house. He that will not respond to its accents and strain every nerve to carry into effect its provisions is unworthy the name freeman.”

      His speech broke the logjam and, as we all know, the delegates then swiftly signed the Declaration.

      BENJAMIN RUSH’S STORY

       “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”

      —JOHN ADAMS

      The people of the thirteen colonies had to break free of the idea that they were subjects in order to become citizens. As Gordon Wood writes in The American Revolution:

      “Since the king, in the words of the English jurist William Blackstone, was the ‘pater familias of the nation,’ to be a subject was in fact to be a kind of child . . . [The people] had to be held together from above, by the power of kings who created trains of dependencies and inequalities, supported by standing armies, strong religious establishments, and a dazzling array of titles, rituals, and ceremonies.”

      To declare, as the Founders did, that the people are sovereign was to think and feel in a new way. After all, at that time “the sovereign” was the chief of state, that is, the king or the queen.

      Benjamin Rush provides a fascinating example of how that change in feeling and thinking occurred, and at the same time his story tells us something very important about the American Founding.

      A signer of the Declaration of Independence and surgeon general in Washington’s army, Rush was an early and influential agitator for American independence who wrote of “the absurdity of hereditary power.” Yet when he had set out for Scotland to study medicine, he was a thoroughgoing monarchist: “I had been taught to consider [kings] nearly as essential to political order as the Sun is to the order of our Solar System.” By the time he returned home to Philadelphia in 1769 he was a revolutionary committed to republican government.

      After graduating from Princeton, Rush traveled to Scotland to study medicine at Edinburgh. In the colonial era, Scottish universities were generally recognized as the world’s best, and Edinburgh was considered the world’s foremost medical school. Rush studied there under William Cullen, then the