Oil on canvas; copy after Charles Willson Peale; 76.2 x 64.8 x 3.8cm (30 x 25 1/2 x 1 1/2"). National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian), Washington, DC.
Reverend John Witherspoon (1723—94) was president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
The disarrayed condition of the colonies in 1764 — economies and societies in flux with changes wrought by war, governments trying simultaneously to adjust to international peace and cope with the effects of Indian insurrections — helps explain how the colonists reacted to British efforts to reform imperial relations.… But the single most significant factor was the depression that by 1764 had fastened a clammy grip on trade in every colony, and which would not fully release it until the decade had ended.