Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon—a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America’s most influential and overlooked founding fathers. Witherspoon was an active member of the Continental Congress and was the only clergyman both to sign the Declaration of Independence and to ratify the federal Constitution. During his tenure as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Witherspoon became a mentor to James Madison and influenced many leaders and thinkers of the founding period. He was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of politics, religion, and education during the crucial first decades of the new republic.
Morrison locates Witherspoon in the context of early American political thought and charts the various influences on his thinking. This impressive work of scholarship offers a broad treatment of Witherspoon’s constitutionalism, including his contributions to the mediating institutions of religion and education, and to political institutions from the colonial through the early federal periods. This book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in American political history and thought and in the relation of religion to American politics.
“In this brief but thoughtful study, [Morrison] asserts that John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, has been overlooked as an important founder of the American republic. Indeed, Jeffry H. Morrison's book is not a full-length biography. It is an analysis of Witherspoon's political thought from his arrival in America in 1768, when he became the president of the College of New Jersey, to his role in supporting the Constitution in 1787.” —Historian
Jeffry H. Morrison is associate professor of government at Regent University and a faculty member at the federal government’s James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is co-editor of The Founders on God and Government.