The College of New Jersey of 1769 was “a provincial carbon copy of Edinburgh,” concludes Douglass Adair, a specialist in the intellectual history of the founders.34 The resemblance was in large part attributable to one dynamic man, John Witherspoon, the Scottish-born president of the college. Witherspoon in just a few years, states one of Madison’s biographers, had “remade the college into a major outpost of the Scottish enlightenment.”35
