The Ambiguity of ‘Union’ and the Development of rhetoric in Scottish-American Higher Education: provincial anxiety in John Witherspoon’s language and syntax

Abstract

On March 17 1777, while British cannons were firing just metres away from his window in Nassau Hall in the College of New Jersey, John Witherspoon sat down to write a letter to his son David in Scotland. As a former Scottish divine, Witherspoon had moved to America in 1767 in order to assume the presidency of the College of New Jersey, later to be called Princeton. Before writing the letter to his son, he had become the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. 1 His influence is suggested by a British officer who, writing to Major General Sir Guy Carleton in 1783, pointed to 'Dr Witherspoon … the political firebrand, who perhaps had not a less share in the Revolution than Washington himself. He poisons the minds of his young students and through them the Continent'. 2 Indeed, alongside teaching one President (Madison, B.A. 1771) and one Vice-President (Burr, B.A. 1772), forty-nine US representatives, twenty-eight U.S. senators, three Supreme Court justices, one secretary of state, three attorney generals and two foreign ministers, Witherspoon was also a delegate to the Continental Congress, a member of three standing committees during the Revolutionary War and of more than one-hundred-and-twenty Congressional committees. 3 Witherspoon, however, did not immediately mention any of these activities in his letter to David. Instead, rather bathetically, in the first words of the first paragraph, he stated that 'it gratifies me exceedingly that you and Fanny [Witherspoon's daughter] are so punctual on writing, and that your letter is well written & quite free from bad spelling so that I hope by pains and practise you will write a good & fair and current hand … I do assure you that