Witherspoon and Beattie on the Philosophy of Common Sense Abolitionism

Origins of common sense in the thought of Witherspoon and Beattie

Writing as the minister of Beith, who sided with the ecclesiastical Popular party, Witherspoon gained national notoriety for combatting the Moderate literati from the publication of his Ecclesiastical Characteristics (1753). He satirically challenged twelve religiously unorthodox ‘maxims’ of moderatism, which extended to a thirteenth that ‘All moderate men are joined together in the strictest bond of union, and do never fail to support and defend one another to the utmost’ after they successfully acquitted Hume and Henry Home, Lord Kames from charges of atheism and heresy in the General Assembly of 1755.¹⁸ While preparing this work for the press in 1753, Witherspoon had ‘been intending for some time past…to communicate to the world a few remarks upon [Hume’s] essay on human liberty, contained in a late treatise, intitled, Essays upon morality and natural religion’.¹⁹ He could not have remarked on Hume’s racist note since the fifth edition in which it appeared had not yet been published at the time of writing to the editor of The Scots Magazine.

Witherspoon’s brief remarks published in The Scots Magazine reflected his general understanding of divinely inspired external sense perceptions, which he believed were ‘common to all men’, and a belief in the universal liberty of humankind to exercise free will as agents of change. His ‘realist’ treatment of these subjects did not significantly contribute to forming the Scottish School of common sense philosophy. The general ways in which he challenged Hume’s controversial notion of causation in the moral world and questionable views of natural and revealed religion closely resembled the thought of men associated with founding the philosophy of common sense. Following another ‘just’ objection to Hume’s philosophy published by The Scots Magazine in 1752, Witherspoon read Hume’s controversial notion of causality as an attempt to challenge the alleged illusion of liberty and shed new light on the doctrine of necessity in human affairs. According to Witherspoon, ‘[a]ll that he [Hume] offers in support of this strange compound opinion, is an argument from analogy, That there are delusive or deceitful perceptions conveyed to us by our senses in the natural world, that the representations of objects and their qualities differ from what philosophy discovers them to be’.²⁰ In opposition to scepticism of this kind, Witherspoon argued that external sense perceptions accurately testify ‘real truth, which certainly ought to be the same with philosophic truth’.²¹ Hume’s doctrine of necessity concerning causality in the moral world related to his infamous note on racial hierarchies, which favoured racialised elements of Aristotelian natural slavery in ‘Of National Characters’ (1753). Witherspoon viewed this central feature of Hume’s philosophy as a threat to the exercise of virtue.

Witherspoon did not explicitly denounce slavery as vicious neither in print nor from the pulpit during the 1750s. However, his public baptism of a black slave, James Sheddan, on 9 July 1756 suggested a belief in the universal free will to exercise virtue as a Christian.²² Since Scots Law permitted chattel slavery on Scottish soil during this time, enslaved people of colour rarely received baptisms, because religious liberties extended to civil rights under the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Treaty of Union. The practice of baptising enslaved people created obvious legal complications. Witherspoon was probably aware of George Berkeley’s Newport pamphlet published in 1731 on the question of freedom for baptised African slaves, given the generally acknowledged link between George Berkeley and Hume on idealism and necessarian causality. Berkeley believed that religious conversion and, in turn, the salvation of the soul did not necessarily result in civil rights of freedom for an African slave.²³

The legal interpretation of manumission rights for enslaved people of colour, who were baptised, was ambiguous under Scots Law when Witherspoon met Sheddan. For this reason, Witherspoon drafted a letter that certified the baptism and the surname change from the name of his enslaver (Robert Sheddan) to Montgomery, which had been the maiden name of Witherspoon’s wife, Elizabeth. The timing of this name change was probably not a coincidence since it was generally known that Montgomery-Sheddan objected to his imminent sale in Virginia. Having escaped from a ship docked in Port Glasgow that was bound for Virginia, Montgomery-Sheddan sought refuge in Edinburgh before being apprehended and imprisoned in Edinburgh Tolbooth. He died in prison while waiting for a decision from the Court of Session on the first case that questioned the legality of chattel slavery in Scotland.²⁴ The Montgomery case closed without a ruling and Witherspoon moved from Beith to Paisley shortly thereafter. On the question of liberty, which concerned human bondage, Witherspoon expressed hope that Hume was a ‘man of virtuous dispositions, and means no harm to the cause of virtue; but I have met with very few who think that this essay has contributed any thing [sic] to its support’.²⁵

The professoriate of Marischal and King’s colleges in New and Old Aberdeen shared Witherspoon’s concerns about the vicious consequences of Hume’s philosophy.²⁶ Founded by Thomas Reid (regent at King’s), George Campbell (principal of Marischal), John Gregory (mediciner at King’s), and John Stewart (Duncan Liddel professor of mathematics at Marischal) in 1758, the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, known as the Wise Club, set forth new trains of thought in experimental philosophy as an alternative to modern philosophical scepticism with a particular focus on Hume. They sought

to comprehend, Every Principle of Science which may be deduced by Just and Lawful Induction from the Phenomena wither of the human mind or of the material World; All Observations & Experiments that may furnish Materials for such Induction; The Examination of False Schemes of Philosophy & false Methods of Philosophising; The Subserviency of Philosophy to Arts, the Principles they borrow from it and the means of carrying them to their Perfection.²⁷

Their 137 philosophical discourses and 126 inquiries for discussion followed the ‘noble map of science delineated by Lord Bacon’ in Novum Organum (1620) and sustained the established use of Newtonian empiricism in the Scottish Enlightenment.²⁸ The emphasis on exposing the errors of ‘False Schemes of Philosophy’ targeted the mitigated scepticism of Hume.

The use of ‘common sense’ to describe ‘mother wit’ or self-evident beliefs provided a novel foundation for the study of metaphysics, natural history, language, rhetoric, and medicine.²⁹ Campbell applied ‘common sense’ to a Nominalist notion of rhetoric, Gregory explored ‘common sense’ medical practises, and Reid shed new light on the operation of internal and external sense perceptions in the science of the human mind. Hume characterised Campbell as ‘certainly a very ingenious man, though a little too zealous for a philosopher’.³⁰ Yet he had a more favourable opinion of Reid’s ability in ‘a Piece so deeply philosophical’.³¹ Reid reworked his philosophical discourses into a draft manuscript on principles of common sense by early 1763. Having knowledge of Hume’s feedback on Campbell’s Dissertation on Miracles (1762), Reid sent their mutual friend Hugh Blair, who Witherspoon had targeted in Ecclesiastical Characteristics (1753), an introductory letter along with a partial draft of his unpublished manuscript for Hume’s consideration. His letter informed Hume that:

Your Friendly Adversaries Drs Campbel & Gerard as well as Dr Gregory return their Compliments to you respectively. A little Philosophical Society here of which all the three are members, is much indebted to you for its Entertainment…If you write no more in morals politicks or metaphysicks, I am afraid we shall be at a loss for Subjects.³²

The ways in which Campbell and Reid challenged Hume’s philosophy ‘without bitterness’ contrasted sharply with the criticism from ‘that bigoted silly fellow’ James Beattie, according to Hume.³³

Elected as a member of the Wise Club in 1760 and then professor of moral philosophy at Marischal, Beattie mingled poetical allusion with ‘common sense’ moral philosophy. Beattie engaged with the science of mind as shown in his first discourse concerning the operations of the human mind in the Wise Club on 7 October 1761. And he addressed his preferred interest in criticism in a discourse on ‘The Characters of Poetical Imagination’ on 26 February 1765. In a fortunate ‘accident’, Beattie changed the question he prepared on ‘Whether Music, Painting or Poetry gives the greatest scope to Genius’ to asking ‘What is the difference between Common Sense and Reason’ at a meeting on 10 December 1765.³⁴ Given this sudden change, perhaps Beattie sincerely wanted Wise Club members to explain the nature of common sense. Yet they encouraged him refine his own understanding of ‘common sense’ applied to poetry. In 1766, Gregory wrote to Beattie:

I beg you will take some pains about our Philosophical work, and likewise about these Critical Discourses you read to the Club, which I think would do you honour. I want you to be known to the world in another light than that of a poet, because I think you one of the very few who have united a truly philosophical with a poetical genius.³⁵

The four philosophical discourses concerning principles of common sense that Beattie read before the Wise Club eventually resulted in An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (1770).

Beattie developed his philosophy of common sense in An Essay on Truth through objections to Hume’s epistemological theory of impressions that led to ideas. He challenged Hume’s belief

That every idea should be a copy and resemblance of the impression whence it is derived;—that, for example, the idea of red should be a red idea; the idea of a roaring lion a roaring idea; the idea of an ass, a hairy, long-eared, sluggish idea, patient of labour, and much addicted to thistles; that the idea of extension should be extended, and that of solidity solid;—that a thought of the mind should be endued with all, or any, of the qualities of matter,—is, in my judgement, inconceivable and impossible. Yet Mr Hume takes it for granted; and it is another of his fundamental maxims. Such is the credulity of Scepticism!³⁶

In opposition to Hume’s mitigated scepticism, Beattie argued that all forms of truth must conform to common sense as a ‘fixed and invariable standard’.³⁷ ‘In a word,’ he wrote that

the dictates of common sense are, in respect to human knowledge in general, what the axioms of geometry are in respect to mathematics: on the supposition that these axioms are false or dubious, all mathematical reasoning falls to the ground; and on the supposition that the dictates of common sense are erroneous or fallacious, all truth, virtue, and science, are vain.³⁸

Beattie advanced the truth of abolishing human bondage and racial hierarchies as acts of common sense. While Aberdeen Enlightenment thinkers discussed the questions of ‘what is the origine of the blacks’ on 13 March 1764 and ‘[w]hether Slavery be in all cases inconsistent with good Government’ on 24 November 1761, Beattie was the only member of the Wise Club to explicitly challenge Hume’s racist note as a common sense abolitionist. Afterwards, Witherspoon advanced a strikingly similar version of Beattie’s common sense abolitionism at Princeton.

Teaching common sense abolitionism

Shortly after arriving as the sixth president of the College of New Jersey, Witherspoon delivered an inaugural address in Latin on 17 August 1768 that explained his Scottish Enlightenment value of combining piety and scientific inquiry.³⁹ The union of Presbyterian evangelicalism and the empirical study of natural and moral worlds underpinned how Witherspoon reformed the curriculum at Princeton.⁴⁰ It also featured prominently in his critical support of American revolutionary principles concerning self-evident religious, political, and civil liberties. Two months before signing the American Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon informed Princeton students that

the ambition of mistaken princes, the cunning and cruelty of oppressive and corrupt ministers, and even the inhumanity of brutal soldiers, however dreadful, shall finally promote the glory of God, and in the mean-time, while the storm continues, his mercy and kindness shall appear in prescribing bounds to their rage and fury…if your principles are pure—and if your conduct is prudent, you need not fear the multitude of opposing hosts.⁴¹

The widely distributed publication of this sermon became an influential view of the American revolutionary pursuit of political sovereignty.⁴² Gideon Mailer argues that the combination of evangelicalism in Scottish ecclesiastical politics as well as Anglo-Scottish unionism informed the treatment of divinely inspired liberties in John Witherspoon’s American Revolution (2017).

Witherspoon’s emphasis on the providential design of self-evident or common sense American revolutionary notions of liberty also reflected his consistent critique of moral sentimentalism associated with Hutchesonian and Humean thought. His appeal to Francis Hutcheson’s moral philosophy at Princeton did not directly inform his view of abolitionism, although it became a significant source for other abolitionists.⁴³ Having removed Berkeley’s idealism from the curriculum, he introduced students to the writings of Reid and Beattie in his course of lectures on moral philosophy. Witherspoon taught:

Some late writers have advanced with great apparent reason, that there are certain first principles of dictates of common sense, which are either simple perceptions, or seen with intuitive evidence. These are the foundation of all reasoning, and without them, to reason is a word without a meaning.⁴⁴

Like Beattie, he stressed the divine origin of inductive reasoning from the belief ‘that the whole of Scripture is perfectly agreeable to sound philosophy; yet certainly it was never intended to teach us everything’.⁴⁵ For this reason, Witherspoon informed the graduating Princeton class of 1775 that

It hath been generally a favourite point with me, to recommend the union of piety and literature, and to guard young persons against the opposite extremes. We see sometimes the pride of unsanctified knowledge do great injury to religion; and on the other hand, we find some persons of real piety, despising human learning, and disgracing the most glorious truths, by a meanness and indecency hardly sufferable in their manner of handling them.⁴⁶

While Witherspoon introduced a ‘common sense’ union of piety and reason to Princeton, questions emerged concerning the imperial management of racialised chattel slavery.

The Somerset case of 1772 informed colonial political thought and the American Revolution. Colonialists viewed Mansfield’s decision in this landmark case that one cannot be a slave on English soil as a legal precedent that might extend to imperial management.⁴⁷ Pro-slavery concerns that the institution of chattel slavery was in jeopardy underpinned American revolutionary arguments for political and economic sovereignty. Contrary to pro-slavery revolutionaries, such as Thomas Jefferson, Witherspoon did not sign the Declaration of Independence with the preservation of slavery in mind.

This seminary of learning and cultivating principles of common sense extended to two free black students, Bristol Yamma and John Quamine, who Witherspoon personally taught at Princeton in 1775. Witherspoon reported that they ‘behave very well’ and have ‘become pretty good in reading & writings & likewise have a pretty good notion of the Prompts of the Christian Faith’.⁴⁸ Like his primary ambition for all students at Princeton, he sought to prepare Yamma and Quamine for the ministry by teaching them the ‘union of piety and literature’.⁴⁹

Beattie provided Witherspoon with an example of how to unify scripture and inductive philosophy in advancing common sense abolitionism. Having lectured on principles of common sense while developing his version of this philosophical system as a member of the Wise Club during the 1760s, Beattie diffused anti-slavery sentiments and outlined common sense abolitionism in his lecture ‘Of Economics’ concerning chattel slavery. He taught that

The duties resulting from this state [of chattel slavery] it is not the business of Philosophy to deduce, no more than it is the business of Philosophy to settle the Laws of dwelling, of Thieving or of poisoning; for notwithstanding the universality of the Practice, we have no scruple to declare it almost in every case unlawful.⁵⁰

It was self-evident or an exercise of common sense to denounce racialised slavery and, in turn, it did not require a philosophical argument to justify why it was a vicious institution. ‘That slavery is inconsistent with both Christianity and with virtue is but too evident when we consider the manners of those countries in which it prevails’, he asserted.⁵¹ It certainly prevailed at Princeton during Witherspoon’s lifetime.

Beattie’s ‘common sense’ attack on Hume’s defence of slavery in An Essay on the Immutability and Nature of Truth (1770) provided Witherspoon with an example of how to do so at Princeton. Recognising that Hume ‘inferred man’s natural and universal right to liberty, from that natural and universal passion with which men desire it’ in an appeal to Aristotelian notions of natural slavery, Beattie identified the paradox that ‘Hume argues nearly in the same manner in regard to the superiority of white men over black’.⁵² He proceeded to challenge the misinformed errors of Hume’s eurocentrism that echoed Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy of racial difference. ‘Let it never be said’, Beattie wrote, ‘that slavery is countenanced by a people the bravest and most generous on earth, and who are animated with that heroic passion, the love of liberty, beyond all nations ancient or modern’.⁵³ These concluding lines of chapter two in an Essay on Truth resonated with Witherspoon’s revolutionary principles of liberty.

Witherspoon applied self-evident liberties to his anti-slavery sentiments and a common sense approach to gradual abolitionism at Princeton. Like Beattie, he taught that ‘it is certainly unlawful to make inroads upon others, unprovoked, and take away their liberty by no better right than superior power’.⁵⁴ The question of enslaving a person as punishment for a crime, which he supported as a timeless practice, did not extend to racialised chattel slavery. His belief that there was not ‘any necessity on those who found men in a state of slavery, to make them free to their own ruin’ explicitly referred to emancipating ‘enslaved’ criminals.⁵⁵ He acknowledged that

Some have pleaded for making slaves of the barbarous nations—that they are actually brought into a more eligible state, and have more of the comforts of life, than they would have had in their own country.⁵⁶

Since he possessed a copy of Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man published in 1774, Witherspoon probably had Kames’s pro-slavery argument in mind with this example.⁵⁷ While sharing with Hume a belief that the ‘colour of the Negroes…affords a strong presumption of their being a different species from the Whites’, Kames questioned ‘who can say how far they [black chattel slaves] might improve in a state of freedom, were they obliged like Europeans, to procure bread with the sweat of their brows?’⁵⁸ He conjectured that enslaved people in Jamaica lived on par ‘if not better’ than free blacks living in West Africa.⁵⁹ Having objected to the acquittal of Hume and Kames in the General Assembly of 1755, Witherspoon certainly identified heresy in Kames’s controversial polygenic defence of human bondage. Witherspoon taught that this kind of ‘argument may alleviate, but does not justify the practice’ since it was not a ‘more eligible state, if less agreeable’ to enslaved people.⁶⁰

The socio-economic politics surrounding abolitionism complicated the antislavery convictions that Beattie and Witherspoon taught at Aberdeen and Princeton. Beattie received encouragement to publish what he taught to strengthen an emerging abolitionist campaign based in London.⁶¹ An Essay on Truth did not focus on the question of slavery; instead it resembled yet another one of his objections to Hume’s philosophy. However, his seventeen-page pamphlet On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery, Particularly that of the Negroes, which he drafted in 1778, attempted to set forth an explicit case for common sense abolitionism.⁶² The self-evident belief that universal manumission required a moral and just plan for what would become of enslavers and those they enslaved underpinned his common sense approach to gradually abolishing the institution throughout the British imperial world. Beattie did not ‘blame them [enslavers] for not giving liberty to all their slaves, when I consider, that so many savage men, set free at once, might annul the property and destroy the lives of thousands of innocent persons, and perhaps involve the whole empire in confusion’.⁶³ In other words, the Anglo-Atlantic world was unprepared to address the consequences of an immediate abolition of chattel slavery in 1778. He privately shared with fellow abolitionist and social reformer, Elizabeth Montagu, that ‘it would be better to suppress than to publish’ his pamphlet since ‘it would rather create enemies to the author, than promote justice and benevolence’.⁶⁴ Those seeking to immediately abolish human bondage as well as pro-slavery advocates would have objected to Beattie’s common sense view of gradual emancipation.

Witherspoon also applied a common sense abolitionist approach to his influence on secular and ecclesiastical politics in the early republic. Although he claimed in his ‘Description of the State of New Jersey’ that enslaved people in his state ‘are exceedingly well used, being fed and clothed as well as any free persons who live by daily labour’, the political purpose of this description was not to defend or abolish slavery.⁶⁵ He was responding to a request from the French ministry secretary, François Barbé-Marbois, for reports on ‘all what can increase the progress of human Knowledge’ from state representatives.⁶⁶ It concerned twenty-two questions, which included descriptions of historic boundaries, population, natural resources, industries, and defences. Descriptions from state representatives, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia written in 1781, sought to strengthen the Franco-American alliance towards the end of war. Condemning the institution of chattel slavery as immoral would not serve the foreign political interests of the early republic at that critical time.

Like other early American abolitionists, Witherspoon had personal experience of enslaving two people, who worked at his ‘Tusculum’ country home. His last will and testament suggested an intension to grant manumission after they turned twenty-eight years of age.⁶⁷ The circumstances surrounding if or when they were freed remains unclear. He also privately tutored a former slave, John Chavis, at Tusculum in 1792 with an explicit intention to prepare Chavis ‘for the better enjoyment of freedom’.⁶⁸ This sheds light on why he voted against immediate emancipation in 1790 as chairman of a committee on the abolition of slavery in New Jersey. This particular vote reflected a common sense belief that human bondage would inevitably fade out of practise since it was already illegal to import slaves into the state. Witherspoon had adopted the same gradual approach to abolishing slavery in ecclesiastical politics. A committee tasked with ‘overturning’ slavery in the Synod of New York and Philadelphia applied what Witherspoon taught as a religious ‘duty of those who maintain the rights of humanity…to promote the abolition of slavery’.⁶⁹ In a public-facing statement on 28 May 1787, the Synod echoed Witherspoon’s philosophy of common sense by

highly approv[ing] of the general principles, in favor of universal liberty, that prevail in America; and the interest which many of the states have taken in promoting the abolition of slavery. Yet, inasmuch as men introduced into a servile state, to a participation of all the privileges of civil society, without a proper education, and without previous habits of industry, may be, in many respects dangerous to the community. Therefore, they earnestly recommend it to all the members belonging to their communion, to give those persons, who are at present held in servitude, such good education as may prepare them for the better enjoyment of freedom…And, finally, they recommend it to all the people under their care, to use the most prudent measures, consistent with the interest and the state of civil society, in parts where they live, to procure, eventually, the final abolition of slavery in America.⁷⁰

This statement was an example par excellence of Witherspoon’s view of common sense abolitionism.

Legacies of common sense abolitionism

In his opening sermon at the General Assembly of 1789, Witherspoon preached from 1 Cor. iii. 7: ‘So then, neither is he the planteth any thing, neither he that watereth: but God that giveth the increase’. The subject of this sermon reflected his consistent commitment to a self-evident belief that God created the human constitution to perceive natural knowledge for a moral purpose. His philosophy of common sense significantly informed American principles of liberty and gradual abolitionism among American Presbyterians.⁷¹ These achievements certainly rivalled the significance of Beattie’s contributions to the transatlantic abolitionist movement.

In an early issue of the Journal of Scottish Thought, published in 2009, Glen Doris argues that Beattie was too late to significantly impact the slave trade debate.⁷² His contributions to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was founded in 1787, featured prominently in Richard Anderson’s recent large-scale study of historical links to slavery at the University of Aberdeen. This project resulted in an exhibition on ‘Legacies of Slavery: Transatlantic Slavery and Aberdeen at the Duncan Rice Library between 27 March to 2 December 2023. Beattie’s petitions on behalf of Marischal College in 1788 and 1792 pressured Parliament to ‘alleviate the rigours of Negro slavery and prepare the way for its final extirpation in every part of the British Empire’.⁷³ While animating the British abolitionist movement in Aberdeenshire, Beattie informed the thought of future abolitionists as a professor of moral philosophy. Beattie wrote to Montagu in 1789 that ‘I can say with truth, that many of my pupils have gone to the West Indies; and, I trust, have carried my principles along with them, and exemplified those principles in their conduct to their unfortunate brethren’.⁷⁴ Like Beattie, the legacy of Witherspoon’s philosophy of common sense abolitionism primarily concerned how it was applied by former students in the early republic.

Witherspoon and Beattie advanced an original common sense philosophical approach to abolitionism. However, gradual abolitionism did not age well. Beattie receives praise as one of the earliest Scottish Enlightenment abolitionists while students petition to remove Witherspoon’s statue from Princeton. Of course, Beattie did not enslave people of colour while promoting the anti-slavery sentiments and notions of universal liberty, which Witherspoon did in a complicated way. Objections to memorialising a person who enslaved another did not originate at Princeton. Vandals spraypainted Witherspoon’s statue with ‘slave owner’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ at the University of West Scotland, Paisley in July 2020. It coincided with the petition to remove Hume’s name from a prominent building at the University of Edinburgh. And yet, officials at the University of West Scotland refused to remove their statue. The fate of the other twin at Princeton has not yet been decided. This public debate would benefit from a closer scholarly examination of his complex relationship to slavery. While his philosophy of common sense abolitionism might not be worthy of memorialising at Princeton, it explained how he reconciled seemingly contradictory positions of teaching and baptising people of colour, signing the Declaration of Independence, condemning the institution of chattel slavery in the classroom, and voting against immediate abolition in New Jersey while enslaving people of colour. The extent to which common sense abolitionism extended beyond the thought of Beattie and Witherspoon among their students at Marischal College and the College of New Jersey remains fertile grounds for future research. Nevertheless, Witherspoon and Beattie should be associated together in the same intellectual vein of the abolitionist movement on either side of the Atlantic.