Art and Slavery at Princeton

Originally a Presbyterian clergyman in Scotland, John Witherspoon served as the sixth president of Princeton University, then known as the College of New Jersey, from 1768-94. During his tenure as president, Witherspoon was instrumental in improving finances after the Revolutionary War, increasing enrollment and revolutionizing the curriculum. Witherspoon was the only clergyman and college president to sign the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon had a complicated relationship with slavery. In Scotland, he baptized an enslaved man named Jamie Montgomery, who later used this baptism as grounds for his own freedom, and while at the College of New Jersey, privately tutored three freed slaves, Yamma and Quamine in 1773 and John Chavis in 1792. He believed in the importance of religious education for both freed and enslaved Africans. However, Witherspoon owned two slaves who worked on his estate. In 1790, Witherspoon oversaw a committee to abolish slavery in the state of New Jersey, although the committee eventually decided that slavery as an institution would not be in existence for long and therefore they did not vote to immediately abolish slavery. In one of his lessons on morality at the College, Witherspoon stated that while slavery was “unlawful,” he did not see the “necessity… to make them free to their own ruin.”