Location

Princeton, New Jersey

Princeton's importance in the founding era lay in the unusual convergence there of battlefield recovery, republican education, and confederation government. On January 3, 1777, George Washington's army defeated British forces at the Battle of Princeton after the daring movements that had already produced the victory at Trenton, and the result restored morale at a moment when the Revolution had appeared near collapse. The town's College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, also stood at the center of Revolutionary intellectual life because John Witherspoon used it to educate and influence a generation of public men who thought carefully about liberty, representation, and the moral foundations of republican government. Witherspoon himself signed the Declaration of Independence, linking the college directly to the national cause. Princeton gained another layer of significance in 1783 when the Confederation Congress briefly met at Nassau Hall after mutinous troops in Philadelphia exposed the weakness of national authority under the Articles. That episode made plain how insecure the Confederation government remained even after victory in war, since it could not depend on reliable protection from the states. Princeton mattered to constitutional history because it joined the military revival of the Revolution to the political education of republican leaders and to one of the many reminders that the Articles of Confederation were failing to sustain an effective national government.