Educating the Founders
by Robert Curry
Issue 113 - August 6, 2008

“At age sixteen Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton were all being schooled by Scots who had come to America as adults.” Garry Wills

This was no mere coincidence. Scholars from Scotland were held in the highest esteem in colonial America because of the preeminence of Scottish thinkers and Scottish universities at that time. The Scottish Enlightenment (1730-1790) was an explosion of creative intellectual energy in science, political theory, economics, and technological innovation. It arrived just in time to have a decisive influence on the Founders.

Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton are the architects of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and The Federalist. If we want to understand their thinking and their writings, we need to start with the fact that the Scottish Enlightenment provided their teachers.

Madison ’s tutor, Donald Robertson, was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment at its peak, but the great intellectual influence on Madison was John Witherspoon, also a Scot. When Madison entered Princeton in 1769, under the leadership of Witherspoon it had become the American university where the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment—Hume, Smith, Hutcheson, Reid, Ferguson and Kames—were studied most intensely.

Jefferson’s tutor, William Douglas, had studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh, but the great intellectual influence on Jefferson was William Small. Like Witherspoon, Small was a member in good standing of the Scottish Enlightenment. He came to America to teach at William and Mary only from 1758 to 1764—just in time to guide Jefferson’s studies there during the most intellectually influential years of his life.

Hamilton ’s tutor at King’s College (today’s Columbia), Robert Harpur, was also a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, having studied at Glasgow before coming to America.

In fact, the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were studied and hotly debated just about everywhere in colonial America. In the words of Douglass Adair, “At Princeton, at William and Mary, at Pennsylvania, at Yale, at King’s, and at Harvard, the young men who rode off to war in 1776 had been trained in the texts of Scottish social science.”

Witherspoon is perhaps the most important example of the influence of Scottish educators. In addition to Madison, his students included twenty-one U.S. senators, twenty-nine members of the House, twelve governors, and three Supreme Court Justices. Probably the most important of the lesser known Founders, he was a signer of the Declaration and an early and strong champion of American independence.

Witherspoon’s own education can help us see just how close the Founders were to the Scottish Enlightenment. Before coming to America, he studied with David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Is it any wonder that their ideas and arguments, and the ideas and arguments of their Scottish colleagues, are everywhere in the writings of the Founders?