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self-censoring to John Page, his close companion from their days at the College of William and Mary and now, along with Pendleton, a member of Virginia’s Committee of Safety; Madison had the equivalent outlet in Princetonclassmate William Bradford, the son of a prominent Philadelphia printer.
    The Bradford firm was the official printer to the Continental Congress, which first met a short time after Madison had concluded a visit to Philadelphia and sampled the political spirit there. He and Bradford exchanged animated, occasionally extravagant letters, each prompting the other with patriot logic. Bradford railed against the “corrupt, ambitious & determined” British ministry. Madison elaborated on “the Characteristics of a free people,” attested to the warm sentiments his fellow Virginians felt for Boston’s patriots, and praised “American ardor” in opposing the “secret enemies” of good and generous government. He saw little chance that the Crown would deliver justice and was opting for a continental defense against possible attack. 13
    What had shaped his mind? At Princeton, Madison was exposed to a wide variety of subjects, and though he never had any intention of becoming an attorney, he began the study of law in late 1773. His real intellectual passion lay with arguments in favor of religious and civil liberty. Here Reverend John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton, was his guide. A stout man with a Scottish accent as pronounced as his satirical bent, Witherspoon exposed Madison to the Scottish philosophes as well as the powerful Presbyterian critique of religious oppression. The Scots’ contribution to the Enlightenment was their particular emphasis on sympathy and sociability—how to nourish manners on a national scale and improve the human condition.
    Revolutionary ideas were already in the air at Princeton during Witherspoon’s presidency, and he was subsequently elected to the Continental Congress. He would, in fact, be the only ordained minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. The great majority of those who took his classes became avid supporters of the patriot cause.
    Passionate about liberty, Witherspoon believed that every human being had a natural inclination to behave morally in pursuit of temporal and eternal happiness alike. But he also believed in sin and human depravity: the moral sense was blunted whenever selfishness—an unjust authority, within or without—took over. Resistance to that authority through acts of virtue preserved liberty of conscience. In Witherspoon’s words, conscience set bounds to authority by saying: “Hitherto shalt thou go, but no further.”
    Believing that liberty of conscience was uniquely a Protestant endowment, he reviled the Catholic Church. “Unjust authority is the very essence of popery,” he wrote. The Church of Rome was distant, hierarchical, andoppressive, “making laws to bind the conscience” and punishing those who called its authority into question. Yet he held Protestants responsible for similar abuses, because all human institutions, religious and political, were prone to corruption, bias, and human error. The Church of England itself had an embarrassing history of persecuting Quakers, Presbyterians, and other dissenting sects on English soil.
    As tensions built between America and England, Witherspoon saw in the British ministry a replication of these abuses. If the pope was fallible, then so were the British king, his council, and the members of Parliament. In short, London had become another Rome. Its distance from America had generated error, persecution, and the faulty claim that it could make laws “to bind us in all cases whatsoever.” In 1776, in one of his best-known published sermons (dedicated to John Hancock, who was then president of the Continental Congress), Witherspoon said that the central aim of American independence was to protect civil and religious liberties. His logic was formidable, and his robust