|
The Scottish Contribution to Freedom in Revolutionary America
BEING A SCOT IS NOT ALL KILTS AND BAGPIPES, by any means. Often inaccurately portrayed as backward romantics, the Scots in many ways laid an essential foundation for today’s intellectual, commercial and political milieu. Each place they entered around the globe—North America, Australia, India—they left their mark. Most of it seems to have been of a distinctly positive nature.
Here we focus on the contributions of Scotsmen to the culture of the United States.
BY JOHN TIFFANY
Scots and people of Scottish descent have for some reason contributed to our civilization far out of proportion to their numbers. In fact, if it were not for the Scots, there would probably be no such thing as the United States as an independent nation.
Oddly, there would probably be no British empire either; however, that matter lies outside the scope of this article.
The Scottish connection with the United States, or what was to become the United States, goes back as far as possible in our history.
Born in Scotland about A.D. 1345, Henry Sinclair became earl of Rosslyn and the surrounding lands as well as prince of Orkney, duke of Oldenburg (in Denmark), and premier earl of Norway. In 1398 he led an expedition to explore Nova Scotia and Massachusetts—90 years before Columbus discovered America. He was a Freemason, and the evidence indicates he was an heir of the tradition of the Knights Templar.
He journeyed to New England with Sir James Gunn, the Zeno brothers and others.
Officially, however, the founder of British America, the precursor of our nation, was another Scot—James Stewart by name. In 1603, when the Scottish king, known in those parts as King James VI, became James I of England as well, the first king of the United Kingdom, there was no presence to speak of in the Americas of any people of British Isles descent. (Raleigh, under Queen Elizabeth I, had tried unsuccessfully to establish a colony on these shores in 1585.)
By 1607 James’s London Company had established the first permanent British colony in the New World. It was named Jamestown, in his honor.
David Thompson, a Scot, was the first acting governor of New England and in 1623 became New Hampshire’s first settler. Scottish governors quickly followed in Rhode Island, New Jersey and North and South Carolina.
The first charitable organization in North America was a Scottish one, the Scottish Charitable Society in Boston. Scot Andrew Hamilton was appointed in 1691 the first postmaster general of the Colonies.
Meanwhile the Scottish pirate Captain Kidd (first name William) was operating out of Long Island. Having been hired by the colony of New York to get rid of pirates, Kidd wound up becoming one instead. The crew of his ship, betrayed by the king and other high panjandrums, upon discovering their betrayal threatened Kidd with death unless he turned the ship into a pirate vessel. He did not set out to be a pirate, and many historians consider him America’s first folk hero.
After 1707, and the union of the parliaments, Scots poured unimpeded into America, settling mostly south of Connecticut and in the Carolinas (previously England had made it hard for the Scots to settle in America, even though both Scotland and England were under one monarch).
Scotch-Irish people came in boatloads to New England, but mostly to Philadelphia, moving on to New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania—thus such place names as McKeesport and Gettysburg.
In the seven decades leading up to the Revolution, Scots, who had been scarce in the Colonies, became the most numerous minority in many places, and were (in general) financially successful. The pioneer merchant of Baltimore was Dr. John Stevenson, and in 1730 his fellow Scot, George Buchanan, laid out the city’s streets. Thus Scots were practically the founders of that great city.
In Virginia the Scots soon became predominant in the tobacco industry, and brought Virginia wood, tar, pig iron and cotton to the world market.
Their success sometimes backfired on the Scots as prejudice against them arose. Georgia actually passed a law banning Scots from settling there. Yet management of the Colonies was put largely in Scottish hands: more than 100 terms as colonial governors were served by members of the Scottish minority.
Among these, Alexander Spotswood was particularly distinguished. Governing Virginia from 1710 to 1722, he helped bring the frontier under British influence and was the main driving force behind the development of the tobacco business, which laid the foundation of Virginia’s wealth.
Following him was Robert Dinwiddie, who discovered a young man named George Washington, and gave the young Washington’s career a start. (The ancestry of George Washington, Virginia planter, American general, victorious commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and father of our country, has been traced back to the Scottish King Malcolm II.)
The founder of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, although considered an Englishman, wore a kilt (his mom was Scottish). Near the end of the Colonial period, the governor of Georgia was Archibald Bulloch, an ancestor of Theodore Roosevelt. (Evidently the anti-Scottish law didn’t keep all the Scots out.)
Many schools (such as Princeton) were started in America by the Scots (including the Scotch-Irish), along with many newspapers and book publishing houses. It is not surprising that the Scots and their Presbyterian churches played a key role in the American Revolution.
With the long history of hostility between Scotland and England, Scottish-Americans naturally had no great sympathy for the English or British government.
The widely circulated pastoral letter issued by the Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia in 1775, urging the Colonists to support the future decisions of the Continental Congress, was the chief cause of the Colonies’ determination to resist British tyranny.
And it has been suggested that the Presbyterian tradition of choosing church leaders from the bottom up, not from the top down, was, in large part, the basis for American democracy. Indeed, history suggests that the concept of egalitarianism is a much older and stronger concept among Scots than among Englishmen.
It has been said that in the American Revolution, a Presbyterian loyalist was an unheard of thing. British soldiers in some areas were instructed to burn farmhouses to the ground if they were found to contain Presbyterian Bibles.
In the famous freedom-of-the-press incident involving John Peter Zenger, his lawyer was Andrew Hamilton, a Scottish lawyer from Philadelphia. The judge instructed the jury to merely determine whether Zenger had printed the statements in question, leaving the question of whether they were “libelous” to the judge to decide. Hamilton’s eloquent arguments addressed the concepts of free press and the limits of judges’ power, and he encouraged the jurors to decide whether the government had been “libeled.”
The jury found Zenger not guilty, establishing freedom of the press in America. The attitude of the Colonists toward England was never the same.
By 1774 the Continental Congress had formed the first government of the United Colonies, and elected Peyton Randolph, of partly Scottish descent, as our first president.
Americans were openly discussing secession from England, and especially in the west, where Scotch-Irish settlers met in Pennsylvania communities and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, to oppose continued British rule.
“The shot heard round the world” may have been fired by Scottish-American Ebenezer Munro of the Lexington Minutemen. Ironically the British response (or maybe it was actually the first shot fired) was from Maj. John Pitcairn, another Scot.
The Scotch-Irish were revolutionaries almost to a man, and the most determined revolutionaries. The Scotch-Irish troops stayed through the painful winter at Valley Forge with George Washington while other troops deserted.
One-third to one-half of Washington’s generals were Scottish, such as Arthur St. Clair, Alexander MacDugall, Lachlan MacIntosh and Richard Montgomery. Hugh Mercer, who was surgeon to Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, and later to Washington, was killed at the Battle of Princeton.
There were also the famous George Rogers Clark and “Mad Anthony” Wayne, Gen. John Stark at Bunker Hill, and Gen. Henry Knox, who captured and transported enough artillery to Boston to allow the Americans to drive the British out. Knox participated in nearly every important battle of the war and led the forces that wrested Trenton from the Hessians on Christmas night, 1776.
Then there was the Scot John Paul Jones, founder of the American Navy, conqueror of the HMS Serapis. Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, at least 21, or 38%, were Scots—this in an America where Scots constituted only 6.7% of the white population.
When the Americans met to decide whether to secede from the British empire, they did so in a Georgian building (now called Independence Hall) designed in part by Scot Andrew Hamilton, who once owned part of the square on which it rests. It was in response to Scot John Witherspoon that the declaration was signed, after it had been given to Thomas Jefferson, a relative of King Robert the Bruce, to draft. The final document was written in the hand of an Ulster Scot, Charles Thomson and was first printed by Ulsterman John Dunlap and publicly proclaimed by Ulsterman Capt. John Nixon, while Scot Andrew McNair rang the bell that came to be known as the Liberty Bell.
The constitutional convention of 1787, called by half Scot Alexander Hamilton, was held to reform the Articles of Confederation. As usual, Scots were well overrepresented. Edmund Randolph, a great orator, of the noble Randolphs of Scotland, opened the meeting with a three hour speech advocating essentially the form of government we have today. But the plan was unacceptable to the smaller states, and the response of Scot William Paterson was to put forth an alternative plan called the New Jersey plan, leading ultimately to the “Great Compromise.”
James Madison, a part-Scot, was the most influential of all the delegates and is called the master architect of the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights also was drafted by Madison, and Scottish-American Patrick Henry was largely responsible for its ratification. Our old friend John Dunlap was the first to print the Constitution.
The Federalist Papers were written largely by Hamilton and Madison—printed by Archibald and John MacLean. The philosophy of the Papers has been traced to Scotland, and especially to David Hume.
During the Scottish Golden Age, during the latter part of the reign of Alexander II and the earlier years of Alexander III, little Scotland burst forth as the intellectual nucleus of civilization.
In 1986, brilliant scholar Daniel Bell said that the Scottish enlightenment had “emphasized the individual as the unit of society . . . and [that this] came to fruition in Anglo-American society.”
It is nearly impossible for the well-informed reader not to be moved by the breadth of Scottish contributions to American culture, as well as to world culture in general, and the many lessons we can learn from these remarkable sons of Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Hermann, Arthur, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It, Three Rivers Press (Random House), 2002.
Bruce, Duncan A., The Mark of the Scots: Their Astonishing Contributions to History, Science, Democracy, Literature and the Arts, Citadel Press (Kensington Publishing Corp.), 1996, 1998.
JOHN TIFFANY is the assistant editor for THE BARNES REVIEW. He has been active in the Revisionist and Freedom movements for several decades. He is of Scottish and Irish ancestry.
|
|
