Benjamin Rush’s Story
By Robert Curry
The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.......... John Adams
The people of the thirteen colonies had to break free of the idea that they were subjects in order to become citizens. To declare, as the Founders did, that the people are sovereign was to think and feel in a new way. After all, at that time “the sovereign” was the chief of state, that is, the king or the queen.
How Benjamin Rush became a revolutionary provides an interesting example of how that change occurred. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and surgeon general in Washington’s army, Rush was an early agitator for independence who wrote of “the absurdity of hereditary power.”
He also had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. For example, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of John Witherspoon’s role in the Founding--and it was Rush, while studying in Scotland, who persuaded Witherspoon to accept the invitation to become the president of Princeton. It is equally difficult to overestimate the importance of Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Rush urged Paine to write it, supplying many of the ideas and convincing Paine to use that title.
Rush was what we would today call a networker. He knew everybody, and everybody knew him. What is remarkable about his talent for networking is the story it tells about the Founding. His network of contacts is a who’s who of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Founding. So it was that he knew David Hume and George Washington.
Given Rush’s talent for networking, this came about in the most natural way. In the colonial era, Scottish universities were generally recognized as the world’s best, and Edinburgh was considered the world’s foremost medical school. After graduating from Princeton, Rush studied at Edinburgh from 1766 until 1769 under William Cullen, the medical school’s star attraction. Cullen was one of the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the other luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment were Cullen’s patients and friends. Typically, Rush had landed in the center of the action.
By the time he returned to Pennsylvania he was a committed republican, but when he had arrived in Scotland he thought and felt very differently: “I had been taught to consider [kings] nearly as essential to political order as the Sun is to the order of our Solar System.” When he visited the House of Lords, he “felt as if I walked on sacred ground. I gazed for some time at the Throne with emotions that I cannot describe.” It is interesting to note that the change in mind and heart that we think of as characteristically American happened while he was studying in Scotland.
Witherspoon, William Small and the other Scottish educators who came to the colonies helped their pupils make the inner revolution that made them into American citizens, and as we can see from Rush’s story many who traveled from the colonies to Scotland for their studies were helped in much the same way.
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