Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822 by Mark A. NollReview by: Mary R. MurrinJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 80-81Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3123282 .

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80 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

deliberate opaqueness; students will give way to confusion and swear to never take another history class; the general reader will long for a narrative and pick up the next volume by Page Smith with a sigh of relief. Without the name "Handlin" on the cover, would Harper & Row have published this chaotic and unformed work?

Emory University Michael A. Bellesiles

Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822. By Mark A. Noll.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi, 340. $35.00.)

In this excellent book, Mark Noll traces the development of the

College of New Jersey under three of its presidents, John Witherspoon, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Ashbel Green. Most of the book is devoted to Smith; the discussion of Witherspoon's and Green's presidencies serve as context for Smith's. In Witherspoon's time, the college nurtured statesmen and ministers, and he assumed that religious orthodoxy and republican politics were

complementary. The choice of Witherspoon's son-in-law, Samuel Stanhope

Smith, as his successor seemed to confirm Witherspoon's ideas on education. Noll provides a succinct outline of British philosophical trends and how Witherspoon and Smith fit into the general picture. He believes that Smith's success was his undoing. His synthesis of moral sense philosophy, classical republicanism, and Christian faith found a receptive audience, but eventually the college trustees found the man wanting.

Smith believed both in scripture and the scientific method as the avenue to truth. Both moral and natural science (the working out of the precepts of natural law) demonstrated the truth of religion. Natural law was created by God and theology was simply the study of divine truth. In the early years of Smith's presidency, he had

ample support and the college grew and prospered along with the nation. Smith's troubles began with a suspicious fire in 1802 and

grew worse with a student rebellion in 1807. In part, student unrest coincided with the growth of factions and political parties in the

young nation. The college was Federalist; much of its southern student body was Jeffersonian. In addition, the students chafed under the rigid classical curriculum. For their part, the trustees were alarmed both at student disorder and the declining production of

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BOOK REVIEWS 81

ministers. Their uneasiness coincided with a substantial turnover in their membership. By 1807 one quarter of Smith's board members were gone. Their place was taken by men who shared Ashbel Green's belief that the college should be producing more ministers and promoting the role of the Presbyterian church. Ministerial education, revivals, and mission societies, not revolutionary idealism, would save the new nation.

Increasingly, for the board, the disorders at the college were proof of the failure of Smith's presidency. Since moral relationships were assumed to be scientifically predictable, student unrest demonstrated that there was something dreadfully wrong with Smith's leadership. Ironically, the unhappiness of many Princetonians with the state of affairs at the college led to the establishment of the Princeton Theological Seminary. Ashbel Green and his adherents managed to force out Smith, impose their view of education on the college, and establish a seminary designed to produce the ministers necessary to lead the nation on the correct path, all at the same time.

Noll's examination of the educational theories of the Princeton circle and the role of the college in the years of the American Revolution and the early republic is precise and well argued. In addition, he provides an extremely useful bibliography. Noll's book joins a number of other recent works that describe in detail the story of an important institution in the new nation.

New Jersey Historical Commission Mary R. Murrin

The Public Life of Aedanus Burke: Revolutionary Republican in Post- Revolutionary South Carolina. By John C. Meleney. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Pp. 303. Illustration. $35.00.)

At first sight Aedanus Burke might seem an inviting figure for a biography. He was a colorful, eccentric character who played a number of apparently important roles during the formative years of his adopted state and nation: soldier, legislator, publicist, and, above all, judge. Historians now remember him as a pamphleteer, a committed "republican" ideologue, a determined enemy of privilege, and a firm Antifederalist; and the larger than life portrait that still hangs in the Hibernian Society of Charleston reinforces the impression that somehow he must have been a person to be reckoned with.

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