John Witherspoon achieved major distinction as a church leader, revolutionary statesman, and college president and teacher. A leading Scottish minister, later the spokesman for the American Presbyterian church, he was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. As president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), he revitalized the institution, increasing the endowment and student body, while introducing reforms that shifted the college's emphasis from preparation for the ministry to thorough training for civic leadership. In his sermons and writings, as in his political and educational career, he consistently applied his conservative theology and commonsense realism to the pressing issues of the age. He gave those views a voice and a relevance in the critical years around his adopted nation's birth.

Witherspoon was born to James and Anne Walker Witherspoon, in the Scottish village of Gifford--just east of Edinburgh--in Yester parish, where his father...