considerable village. In 1756 the new buildings were virtually completed
and the college was transferred to its future home. Notable men from
throughout the State and from the cities of New York and Philadelphia
became interested in the new seat of learning. More noteworthy still
were those who taught and those who studied in it. Within a decade after
the completion of Nassau Hall the names of Burr, Edwards, Witherspoon,
of Livingston, Rush and Ellsworth, of James Manning, Luther Martin
and Nathaniel Niles became Princeton names. The stream of influential
patronage once started continued to flow until long after the Revolution.
It included men from New England on the one hand, and from the South on
the other, with, of course, a powerful element from the Middle States.
[Illustration: A VIEW OF THE FRONT CAMPUS.]
Princeton College is the child of Yale. But the parting was not
entirely amicable. Theological controversy grew very fierce, even for
the Connecticut Valley, in the days of Whitefield’s preaching. The
conservatives or Old Lights held the reins and were not kindly disposed
toward the innovators or New Lights. The trouble culminated in the
expulsion from Yale of David Brainerd because, defying the Faculty’s
express command, he attended New Light meetings and would not profess
penitence for his fault. This occurred in 1739; thereafter an even
stronger feeling of discontent smouldered among the liberal Calvinists
until finally the way was clear for founding a new training-school for
the ministry and the learned professions on broad and generous lines.
Brainerd became a most successful and famous missionary. He was betrothed
to the daughter of Jonathan Edwards and died at her father’s house,
a victim of his own laborious and devoted life. This was less than a
year after the College of New Jersey had been founded by a body of
liberal-minded men of all orthodox denominations, under the influence
of a few leaders who sympathized with both Brainerd and the Edwards
theology. The first charter was granted by an Episcopalian governor to
four Presbyterian clergymen, and one of the original trustees was a
Quaker. Governor Belcher, who enlarged the charter and made the College
“his adopted daughter,” was a man of the most catholic feeling. Fourteen
of the trustees under the permanent constitution were Presbyterian
clergymen, an arrangement corresponding to the similar one whereby the
majority of the governing body of Yale was composed of Congregational
ministers. This wise guardianship has kept the two universities true to
their traditions, and the flourishing condition of both is the strongest
proof anywhere afforded that temporal affairs do not necessarily suffer
when committed to the charge of spiritual advisers. Considerable sums
of money were raised in England by the personal solicitation of Tennent
and Davies, two clergymen sent out for the purpose by the Trustees. The
ten laymen of the first Princeton board represented various orthodox
denominations, including Episcopalians and Quakers. There is not a
syllable in the charter concerning creeds, confessions, or religious
tests. It is very significant of the vast improvement in public morality
that a college founded under such auspices a hundred and fifty years ago
was partly endowed and supported by lotteries authorized and drawn both
in Connecticut and New Jersey.
From the day when the College was installed in its grand new home,
history-making went on apace in Princeton. Nassau Hall was a majestic
building for those days; distinguished foreign visitors to America all
noted its dimensions and architecture in their written accounts of
travel. Indeed, even now, with the tasteless alterations of chimneys,
roofs and towers made necessary by fire and carried through with ruthless
economy, it may be considered one of the great monumental college
buildings in America. It is, however, far more than this; we assert
without fear of contradiction that it has no peer as the most historic
university pile in the world. This contention rests on the fact that
it saw the discomfiture of the British at the ebb-tide of the American
rebellion, harbored the Government of the United States in its critical
moments and cradled the Constitution-makers of the greatest existing
republic. No other university hall has been by turns fortress and
barrack, legislative chamber and political nursery in the birththroes of
any land comparable to our land.
The building was designed to be complete in itself; it contained lodgings
for a hundred and forty-seven students, with a refectory, library and
chapel. The class which entered under Dickinson, the first president,
had six members, of whom five became clergymen. His untimely death a
year after his election made his administration the shortest but one in
the College history. During the ten years of Burr’s tenure of office
(1747-1757) the total number of students was a hundred and fourteen;
half of them entered the ministry. The short presidency of Jonathan
Edwards lasted but a few months. It gave the glory of his name, that of
America’s greatest metaphysician, to the College, the sacred memories
of his residence to the venerable mansion now occupied by the Dean, and
the hallowed custody of his mortal remains to the Princeton graveyard, a
spot to which thousands have made their pilgrimage for the sake of his
great renown. In this enclosure he lies beside his son-in-law, the Rev.
Aaron Burr, who was his predecessor. At his feet are the ashes of the
brilliant and erratic grandson, the Aaron Burr so well known to students
of American history. President Davies, who followed Edwards, held his
office for only two years, and was succeeded by Finley who presided for
five. Under the latter the number of students present at one time rose
to one hundred and twenty. All told, a hundred and thirty sat under his
instruction, and of these less than half, fifty-nine, became clergymen.
[Illustration: JOHN WITHERSPOON.]
This tendency to send fewer and fewer men into the ministry is highly
significant. It reached its climax under the next president—the great
Scotchman whose name is among the most honored in the history of his
adopted country—John Witherspoon. His incumbency was coincident with
the Revolutionary epoch, lasting from 1768 to 1794. In those twenty-six
years four hundred and sixty-nine young men graduated from the College;
of these, only a hundred and fourteen, less than a quarter, became
clergymen, an average of between four and five a year. This phenomenon
was due to the fact that Witherspoon, though lecturing on Divinity
like his predecessors, was vastly more interested in political than in
religious philosophy. So notorious was this fact that many a pious youth
bent on entering the ministry passed the very doors of liberal Princeton
to seek the intense atmosphere of Yale orthodoxy, while many a boy
patriot from New England came hither to seek the distinction of being
taught by Dr. Witherspoon.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS AT ROCKY HILL, N. J. (NEAR
PRINCETON.)]
The first eight years of Witherspoon’s presidency embraced the period
of political ferment in the Colonies which ushered in the War of the
Revolution. From the very beginning of his residence in America, the
new president espoused the Colonial cause in every conflict with Great
Britain; he was soon accounted “as high a son of liberty as any man in
America.” Not content with enlarging and improving the College course,
he collected funds throughout the Colonies from Boston to Charleston,
and even laid Jamaica under contribution to fill the depleted College
chest. From the pulpit of the old First Church his voice rang out in
denunciation of the English administration, until in his native land
he was branded as a rebel and a traitor. The spread of the Reformation
was more largely due to the fact that Luther was a professor in the
University of Wittenberg than to any other single cause; the adherence
to the Revolution of the powerful Scotch and Scotch-Irish element in the
Colonies was chiefly if not entirely secured by the teachings of John
Witherspoon from his professor’s chair in Nassau Hall. To him and John
Dickinson, author of the _Farmer’s Letters_, belongs the credit of having
convinced the sober middle classes of the great middle Colonies that the
breach with England was not merely inevitable, but just and to their
interest.
[Illustration: MORVEN.]
But Witherspoon was more than a teacher, he was a practical statesman.
His country-seat was a farm on the southern slope of Rocky Hill, about
a mile due north of Nassau Hall. Its solid stone walls still bear the
classic name which he gave it, of Tusculum. In his hours of retirement
at that beloved home he seems to have brooded more on the rights of man
than on human depravity, more on law than on theology, more on Providence
in His present dealings with men than on the remoter meanings of God’s
Word. In the convention which framed the constitution of New Jersey, he
amazed the other delegates by his technical knowledge of administration
and led in their constructive labors; he assisted in the overthrow of
William Franklin, the royal governor; was elected to the Continental
Congress, and in the critical hour spurred on the lagging members who
hesitated to take the fatal step of authorizing their president and
secretary to sign and issue the Declaration of Independence. With solemn
emphasis he declared:
“For my own part, of property I have some, of reputation more.
That reputation is staked, that property is pledged on the
issue of this contest; and although these gray hairs must soon
descend into the sepulchre, I would infinitely rather that they
descend thither by the hand of the executioner, than desert at
this crisis the sacred cause of my country.”
The word “God” occurs but once in that famous document. Jefferson wrote
it with a small “g.” Witherspoon was the solitary clergyman among the
signers; neither he nor his neighbor, friend, and supporter, Richard
Stockton, of Morven, who was a member of his church, set their hands the
less firmly to sign the paper. Finally, Witherspoon was a member of the
secret committee of Congress which really found the means of moral and
material support for the war down to its close. He was chosen in the
dark hours of November, 1776, to confer with Washington on the military
crisis; he was a member, with Richard Henry Lee and John Adams, of the
committee appointed that same winter to fire the drooping spirits of the
rebels when Congress was driven from Philadelphia to Baltimore. He was
a member, too, of the boards of war and finance, wrote state papers on
the currency, and framed many of the most important bills passed by the
Continental Congress. It was not unnatural that when, at the close of the
war, Congress was terrified by unpaid and unruly Continentals battering
at its doors in Philadelphia, it should seek refuge and council, as it
did, in John Witherspoon’s college.
Thus it happened that Nassau Hall became one of the hearthstones on
which the fires of patriotism burned brightest. From 1766 to 1776 there
were graduated two hundred and thirty young Americans. What their temper
and feeling must have been may be judged from the names of those among
them who afterwards became eminent in public life. Ephraim Brevard,
Pierrepont Edwards, Churchill Houston, John Henry, John Beatty, James
Linn, Frederick Frelinghuysen, Gunning Bedford, Hugh Brackinridge, Philip
Freneau, James Madison, Aaron Burr, Henry Lee, Aaron Ogden, Brockholst
Livingston, and Wm. Richardson Davie. Those ten years produced twelve
Princetonians who sat in the Continental Congress, six who sat in the
Constitutional Convention, one President of the United States, one
Vice-President, twenty-four members of Congress, three Judges of the
Supreme Court, one Secretary of State, one Postmaster-General, three
Attorneys-General, and two foreign ministers. It may well be supposed
that the clergymen who were their comrades in those days of ferment
were, like their great teacher, no opponents of political preaching. The
influence of such a body of young men, when young men seized and held the
reins, was incalculable.
“We have no public news,” writes James Madison from Princeton on July 23,
1770, to his friend, Thomas Martin,
“but the base conduct of the merchants in New York in breaking
through their spirited resolutions not to import; a distinct
account of which, I suppose, will be in the Virginia
_Gazette_ before this arrives. The letter to the merchants in
Philadelphia, requesting their concurrence, was lately burned
by the students of this place in the college yard, all of them
appearing in their black gowns and the bell tolling.... There
are about 115 in the College and in the Grammar School, all of
them in American cloth.”
“Last week, to show our patriotism,” wrote in 1774 another Princeton
student, Charles Beatty,
“we gathered all the steward’s winter store of tea, and having
made a fire in the campus we there burnt near a dozen pounds,
tolled the bell, and made many spirited resolves. But this was
not all. Poor Mr. Hutchinson’s effigy shared the same fate with
the tea, having a tea-canister tied about his neck.”
[Illustration: RICHARD STOCKTON
“THE SIGNER”.]
With such a nursery of patriotism at its very hub, the temper of the
surrounding community can easily be pictured. The proposition for a
provincial congress came from Princeton. John Hart, a farmer from
the neighboring township of Hopewell, and Abraham Clark, a farmer’s
son from the neighboring county, were associated with graduates from
Princeton College and delegates from Princeton town in conducting its
deliberations. Both were made delegates to the Continental Congress
and both, along with Witherspoon and Stockton, were signers of the
Declaration of Independence. Even Francis Hopkinson, the fifth signer for
this State, a Philadelphian in reality, though a temporary resident of
Bordentown, was, as the friend and co-worker of Freneau and Brackinridge,
intimately associated with Princeton influence. When rebellion was
finally in full swing, the Committee of Safety for New Jersey held its
sessions here, probably in Nassau Hall, possibly in the famous tavern. It
is well known that neither the Continental Army nor the people of the
United States at large were profoundly impressed by the Declaration of
Independence. This was not the case in Princeton, for the correspondent
of a Philadelphia paper wrote that on July 9, 1776, “Nassau Hall was
grandly illuminated and independency proclaimed under a triple volley
of musketry, and universal acclamation for the prosperity of the United
States, with the greatest decorum.”
Seven days previous to this demonstration, the Provincial Congress,
sitting at Trenton, had adopted a new State constitution; nine days later
the first Legislature of the State assembled in Nassau Hall—the College
library room—and chose Livingston governor. They continued more or less
intermittently in session until the following October after the invasion
of the State by British forces. Before the invaders they fled to Trenton,
then to Burlington, to Pittstown, and finally to Haddonfield. After the
battles of Princeton and Trenton they promptly returned to their first
seat and resumed their sessions.
* * * * *
The storm of war broke upon Princeton early in December of the same year,
1776. The British Army, landed from Howe’s fleet in New York Bay, had
entirely worsted the American forces. Brooklyn, New York, Fort Washington
with Fort Lee had been successively abandoned, and Washington in his
memorable retreat across this State reached Princeton on the first of
December. Stirling, with one thousand two hundred Continentals, was
left as a rear-guard, while the Commander-in-Chief with the rest, one
thousand eight hundred, and his stores, pushed on to Trenton, whence he
crossed in safety to the right bank of the Delaware. On the seventh,
Cornwallis entered Princeton at the head of six thousand Anglo-Hessian
veterans, driving Stirling before him. The invaders were quartered in
the College and in the church. Both Tusculum and Morven, the estates of
the arch-rebels Witherspoon and Stockton, were pillaged, and the new
house of Sergeant was burnt. All the neighboring farms were laid under
contribution for forage.
Popular disaffection followed in the course of Washington’s retreat.
Large numbers of the people and many of the State officials accepted
the English offers of amnesty. The patriots were compelled to abandon
their homes and flee across the Delaware. Two regiments were left by
Cornwallis in Princeton as a garrison. The rest of his troops were
established in winter quarters at New Brunswick, Trenton and Bordentown.
Washington’s thin and starving line stretched along the Delaware from
Coryell’s Ferry to Bristol. Congress fled to Baltimore. Putnam, with no
confidence in Washington’s ability even to hold his ground, was making
ready for a desperate defence of Philadelphia.
There was as yet no French alliance, no adequate supply of money raised
either at home or abroad, no regular or even semi-regular army,—nothing,
apparently, but a disorderly little rebellion; for the first promise of
constancy in New England and of regular support for a considerable force
of volunteers had had as yet no fulfilment. The English felt that the
early ardor of radical and noisy rebels would fade like a mist before
Howe’s success; Canada was lost; New York as far as the Highlands was
in British hands; so also were New Jersey and Long Island, which latter
virtually controlled Connecticut. Howe believed the rebellion was broken;
Cornwallis had engaged passage to return home.
[Illustration: HALL IN THE MORVEN HOUSE.]
While the British were lulled into security, Washington and the patriots,
though desperate, were undaunted. A well considered and daring plan for
a decisive sally from their lines was formed and carried to a successful
issue. On Christmas night two thousand four hundred men were ferried over
the Delaware nine miles above Trenton; the crossing was most dangerous,
owing to the swollen waters and the floating ice; the ensuing march was
made in the teeth of a dreadful storm. The affair at Trenton was scarcely
a battle, it was rather a surprise; the one thousand two hundred Hessians
were taken unawares and only a hundred and sixty-two escaped; nearly a
thousand were captured. What made it a great event was its electrical
effect in restoring courage to patriots everywhere, together with the
inestimable value to Washington’s troops of the captured stores and arms.
He did not occupy the place at all, but returned immediately to his
encampment on the other shore to refit.
The ensuing week was certainly the most remarkable of the Revolution.
The English in New York were thrown into consternation. Cornwallis
hastened back to Princeton, where he collected between seven and eight
thousand men, the flower of the British army. Washington’s force, on
the other hand, was reinforced with a speed and zeal bordering on the
miraculous. Three thousand volunteers came in from the neighborhood and
from Philadelphia. The term of service for nine hundred of his men would
expire on New Year’s day; these were easily induced, in the new turn
of affairs, to remain six weeks longer. Washington and John Stark both
pledged their private fortunes and Robert Morris raised fifty thousand
dollars in Philadelphia. The mourning of the patriots throughout the
Middle States was changed into rejoicing.
On the thirtieth of December the American army began to recross the
Delaware; the movement was slow and difficult owing to the ice, but was
completed the following day. On January 1, 1777, Washington wrote from
Trenton that he had about two thousand two hundred men with him, that
Mifflin had about one thousand eight hundred men at Bordentown on the
right wing and that Cadwalader had about as many more at Crosswicks,
some miles to the east. He thought that no more than one thousand eight
hundred of those who passed the river with himself were available for
fighting, but he intended to “pursue the enemy and break up their
quarters.”
Next day Cornwallis, leaving three regiments and a company of cavalry
at Princeton, set out by the old “King’s Highway” for Trenton. At
Maidenhead, now Lawrenceville, there was a skirmish between his van and
the American outposts; thence for over five miles his march was harassed
by irregular bodies of his foe, General Hand being stationed in command
of a detachment at Shabbakong creek, and General Greene about a mile this
side of Trenton. It was four o’clock, and therefore late in the short
winter day when the English General reached the outskirts of the city.
There stood Washington himself with a few more detachments, ready still
further to delay the British march through the town. Withdrawing slowly,
the last Continental crossed the bridge over the Assanpink in safety,
to fall behind earthworks, which in anticipation of the event had been
thrown up and fortified with batteries on the high banks behind.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF PRINCETON—DEATH OF MERCER.
FROM A PAINTING BY COL. J. TRUMBULL.]
The British attacked at once, but were repulsed; undismayed they pressed
on again, and again they were driven back across the narrow stream.
The spirited conflict continued until nightfall, when the assailants
finally gave up and withdrew to bivouac, hoping to renew the fight next
morning. In this affair on the Assanpink about a hundred and fifty,
mostly British, were killed. Cornwallis dispatched messengers to summon
the men he had left at Maidenhead and Princeton, determined if possible
to surround, overwhelm and annihilate Washington next day. But the battle
on the Assanpink was destined to be the only real fighting in Trenton.
Washington had in mind the strategic move which rendered this campaign
one of his greatest, if not his very greatest. He determined to outflank
his foe by a circuitous march to Princeton over the unguarded road on the
south side of the Assanpink.
The night was dark and cold; the camp-fires of both lines burned strong
and bright. Behind those of Cornwallis there was a bustle of preparation
for the next day’s battle; behind those of Washington there was a
stealthy making ready for retreat. The baggage was packed and dispatched
to Burlington; a few men were detached to keep the fires well fed and
clear; the rest silently stole away about midnight. Their march was
long, between sixteen and eighteen miles, and difficult because the
frost had turned the mud on the roads into hummocks. But at sunrise on
the third of January the head of the column had crossed Stony Brook by
the bridge on the Quaker road, and stood about a mile and three-quarters
from Princeton, awaiting the result of a council of war. They were
masked by the piece of woods which is still standing behind the Quaker
meeting-house. It was determined that Washington with the main column
should march across the fields, through a kind of depression in the
rolling land intervening between the meeting-house and Princeton, in
order to reach the town as quickly as possible. Mercer, with three
hundred and fifty men and two field-pieces, was to follow the road half a
mile farther to its junction with the King’s Highway, and there blow up
the upper bridge over Stony Brook, that by which Cornwallis’s reserve,
marching to Trenton, must cross the stream. This would likewise detain
Cornwallis himself on his return in pursuit.
* * * * *