Another founding father to be cancelled

The Daily Wire reports:

Princeton University has formed a committee to determine the fate of an on-campus statue of influential Founding Father John Witherspoon, who also served as the sixth president of the school.

No doubt he will be toppled in due course.

Witherspoon was born in Scotland in 1723 before he moved to New Jersey in 1767 to take the job as president of Princeton, where he taught classes and also served a Presbyterian minister. Before dying in 1794, Witherspoon had established himself as an intellectual, statesman, and had the distinction of being the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.

During his tenure teaching moral philosophy among other subjects at Princeton, Witherspoon would lecture to many future leaders in the early American republic, including  39 congressmen, 21 senators, 12 governors, nine Cabinet members, and three Supreme Court justices.

Like many of the founders, Witherspoon’s record on slavery was mixed. While he did own two slaves, he also supported and participated in the education of freed slaves. One slave he baptized while in Scotland gained freedom because of the baptism. He also considered slavery “unlawful,” but believed that it would soon die out in New Jersey.

It really is crazy to judge people who lived in the 1700s, on the basis of society today.