History has largely neglected John Witherspoon (1723–1794). The neglect is unwarranted, for Witherspoon played important roles in the Scottish Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the formation of the American republic. This article provides a short sketch of Witherspoon’s life and career before introducing and then reproducing the full text of a remarkable but little known letter he drafted to George Washington in 1778, during the Continental Army’s encampment at Valley Forge, on the evils of price controls.
Rise to Fame in Scotland
Born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, John Witherspoon began the first phase of his career as a cleric. He was licensed to preach in 1743, and in 1745 he secured his initial appointment at the Scottish parish of Beith. A supporter of the Hanoverian succession, he led volunteers from Beith against the invading Jacobite army in 1745. He was captured in 1746 by Jacobites at the Battle of Falkirk and briefly imprisoned. He became the minister in Paisley in 1758 and held the appointment until he moved to America in 1768.
Witherspoon gained notoriety in 1753 in debates within the Church of Scotland on ecclesiastical patronage. The practice of patronage permitted nobles to appoint qualified candidates for clerical vacancies in their parishes. The practice predated the Reformation, but it had been mostly repealed in 1690 to vest greater power in church elders. Patronage was renewed, however, by British Parliament in 1712, after which it continued to be a subject of controversy.
Patronage had traditionally pitted church elders against nobility (the patrons). The practice was seen as controversial in that it allowed clergy to secure appointments without the full approval of the church eldership. In the eighteenth century the controversy deepened with the rise within the Church of Scotland of the Evangelical (or Popular) Party, the members of which asserted that the whole congregation had the right to participate in clerical elections. Patronage was perceived by its opponents as subverting the integrity of church governance and, by members of the Popular Party, as depriving church congregants of their voice.
Several of Witherspoon’s former classmates from Edinburgh University—including William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and Alexander Carlyle—sought to moderate and modernize church teaching and governance (Sher 2015), and they supported patronage for precisely this reason: it opened possibilities of securing appointments for Moderate and even heterodox clerics irrespective of their popularity with church congregants and standing with the elders. Witherspoon—who, incidentally, on his mother’s side was a descendant of the great Scottish reformer John Knox—vigorously dissented from the Moderate program. He believed the Moderates’ emphasis in preaching on polite virtue over dogma, along with their attempts to blend Christianity and Stoicism, betrayed orthodox Christian commitments (see discussions in Mueller 2023). He organized opposition to patronage and to the Moderate Party more generally. His opposition led him to publish a series of influential polemical works, beginning with his anonymously published satire Ecclesiastical Characteristics in 1753.
Witherspoon’s polemical defenses of Christian orthodoxy, along with several more serious philosophical and theological treatises, raised his reputation in Scotland and beyond. As a result, in 1759 he received an offer to lead the influential Scottish church in Rotterdam, which he declined. In 1764 he was given an honorary doctor of divinity degree from the University of St. Andrews. Two more
