Scotland's Mark on America Part 1

Scotland's Mark on America.

by George Fraser Black.

FOREWORD

It has been said that the Scot is never so much at home as when he is abroad. Under this half-jesting reference to one of the characteristics of our race, there abides a sober truth, namely, that the Scotsman carries with him from his parent home into the world without no half-hearted acceptance of the duties required of him in the land of his adoption. He is usually a public-spirited citizen, a useful member of society, wherever you find him. But that does not lessen the warmth of his attachment to the place of his birth, or the land of his forbears. Be his connection with Scotland near or remote, there is enshrined in the inner sanctuary of his heart, memories, sentiments, yearnings, that are the heritage of generations with whom love of their country was a dominant pa.s.sion, and pride in the deeds that her children have done an incentive to effort and an antidote against all that was base or ign.o.ble.

It is a fact that goes to the core of the secular struggle for human freedom that whole-hearted Americanism finds no jarring note in the sentiment of the Scot, be that sentiment ever so intense. In the sedulous cultivation of the Scottish spirit there is nothing alien, and, still more emphatically, nothing harmful, to the inst.i.tutions under which we live. The things that nourish the one, engender attachment and loyalty to the other. So, as we cherish the memories of the Motherland, keep in touch with the simple annals of our childhood's home, or the home of our kin, bask in the fireside glow of its homely humor, or dwell in imagination amid the haunts of old romance, we are the better Americans for the Scottish heritage from which heart and mind alike derive inspiration and delight.

It is as difficult to separate the current of Scottish migration to the American Colonies, or to the United States that grew out of them, from the larger stream which issued from England, as it is to distinguish during the last two hundred years the contributions by Scotsmen from those of Englishmen to the great body of English literature. We have the first census of the new Republic, in the year 1790, and an investigator who cla.s.sified this enumeration according to what he conceived to be the nationality of the names, found that the total free, white, population numbering 3,250,000 contained 2,345,844 people of English origin; 188,589 of Scottish origin, and 44,273 of Irish origin. The system of cla.s.sification is manifestly loose, and the distribution of parent nationalities entirely at variance with known facts. That part of the population described as Irish was largely Ulster-Scottish, the true Irish never having emigrated in any considerable numbers until they felt the pressure of the potato famine, fifty years later. There is excellent authority for the statement that, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War one-third of the entire population of Pennsylvania was of Ulster-Scottish origin. A New England historian, quoted by Whitelaw Reid, counts that between 1730 and 1770 at least half a million souls were transferred from Ulster to the Colonies--more than half of the Presbyterian population of Ulster--and that at the time of the Revolution they made one-sixth of the total population of the nascent Republic. Another authority fixes the inhabitants of Scottish ancestry in the nine Colonies south of New England at about 385,000. He counts that less than half of the entire population of the Colonies was of English origin, and that nearly, or quite one-third of it, had a direct Scottish ancestry.

These conclusions find powerful support in the number of distinguished men whom the Scots and the Ulstermen contributed to the Revolutionary struggle, and to the public life of the early days of the United States. Out of Was.h.i.+ngton's twenty-two brigadier generals, nine were of Scottish descent, and one of the greatest achievements of the war--the rescue of Kentucky and the whole rich territory northwest of the Ohio, from which five States were formed--was that of General George Rogers Clark, a Scottish native of Albert County, Virginia.

When the Supreme Court of the United States was first organized by Was.h.i.+ngton three of the four a.s.sociate Justices were of the same blood--one a Scot and two Ulster-Scots. When the first Chief Justice, John Jay, left the bench, his successor, John Rutledge, was an Ulster-Scot. Was.h.i.+ngton's first cabinet contained four members--two of them were Scotch and the third was an Ulster-Scot. Out of the fifty-six members who composed the Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence eleven were of Scottish descent. It was in response to the appeal of a Scot, John Witherspoon, that the Declaration was signed; it is preserved in the handwriting of an Ulster-Scot who was Secretary of the Congress; it was first publicly read to the people by an Ulster-Scot, and first printed by a third member of the same vigorous body of early settlers.

George Bancroft will hardly be accused of holding a brief for the Scot in American history but, with all his New England predilections, he frankly records this conclusion: "We shall find the first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain, came not from the Puritans of New England, or the Dutch of New York, or the planters of Virginia, but from Scotch-Irish Presbyterians." It was Patrick Henry, a Scot, who kindled the popular flame for independence. The foremost, the most irreconcilable, the most determined in pus.h.i.+ng the quarrel to the last extremity, were those whom the bishops and Lord Donegal & Company had been pleased to drive out of Ulster.

The distinguished place which men of Scottish or of Ulster origin had a.s.serted for themselves in the councils of the Colonies was not lost when the Colonies became independent States. Among the first of the thirteen original States two-thirds were of either Scottish or Ulster-Scottish origin. Of the men who have filled the great office of President of the United States, eleven out of the whole twenty-five come under the same category. About half the Secretaries of the Treasury of the Government of the United States have been of Scottish descent, and nearly a third of the Secretaries of State.

But it is perhaps in the intangible things that go to the making of national character that the Scottish contribution to the making of America has been most notable. In 1801, the population of the whole of Scotland was but little over a million and a half, and behind that there were at least eight centuries of national history. Behind that, too, were all the long generations of toil and strife in which the Scottish character was being molded into the forms that Scott and Burns made immortal. It is a character full of curious contrasts, with its strong predilection for theology and metaphysics on one side, and for poetry and romance on the other. Hard, dry and practical in its att.i.tude to the ordinary affairs of life, it is apt to catch fire from a sudden enthusiasm, as if volatility were its dominant note and instability its only fixed attribute. And so it has come about that side by side with tomes of Calvinistic divinity, there has been transmitted to Scotsmen an equally characteristic product of the mind of their race--a body of folksong, of ballad poetry, of legend and of story in that quaint and copious Doric speech which makes so direct an appeal to the hearts of men whether they are to the manner born or not. It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living from a stubborn soil, and still harder work to defend their independence, their liberties, their faith from foes of their own kindred, should be best known to the world for the romantic ideals they have cherished and the chivalrous follies for which their blood has been shed.

But, it is well to remember that long before the Reformers of the sixteenth century founded the parish school system of Scotland, the monasteries had their schools and so had the parish churches; there were high schools in the burghs and song schools of remarkable excellence. The light of learning may have waxed dim at times, but it was not from an illiterate land that Scottish scholars carried into Europe all through the Middle Ages the name and fame of their country, any more than it was from a people unversed in the arts of war that Scottish soldiers went abroad to fight foreign battles, giving now a Constable to France, a General-in-Chief to Russia and still again a Lieutenant to Gustavus Adolphus. If evidence were needed of the vigor of the Scottish race, it is readily forthcoming in the fact that for five hundred years the Land O'Cakes enriched the world with the surplus of her able men.

Nurse of heroes, nurse of martyrs, nurse of freemen, are t.i.tles which belong of right to our Motherland and she has been justified of her children, at home and abroad. The rolls of honor of many countries and many climes bear their names; there is no field of distinction whether it be of thought or of action that has not witnessed their triumphs.

That Scotland has yielded more than her share of the men who have gone forth to the conquest of the world is largely due to the fact that it was part of her discipline that men must first conquer themselves. The weakest of them felt that restraining influence, and the striving after the Scottish ideal, however feeble, has been a protection against sinking into utter baseness. The most wayward scions of the Scottish family have known that influence, and have borne testimony to the beauty of the homely virtues which they failed to practice and the n.o.bility of aspirations which fell short of controlling their life.

It belongs to the character and antecedents of Scotsmen that the attribute of national independence should take so high a place among the objects of human effort and desire. It was because Scotland settled for all time, six hundred years ago, her place as an independent State that she proved herself capable of begetting men like John Knox, Robert Burns and Walter Scott. It is because the vigor of the Scottish race and the adaptiveness of the Scottish genius remain to-day unimpaired, that the l.u.s.tre of Scottish-names shone so brilliantly during the World War. It may be confidently a.s.serted that, whether regarded as a race or a people no members of the great English-speaking family did more promptly, more cheerfully or more courageously make the sacrifices required to perform their full part in the struggle to defend the freedom that belongs to our common heritage and to preserve the ideals without which we should not regard life as worth living. The union, centuries old, in the Scottish mind and heart of the most uncompromising devotion to individual liberty with the most fervid patriotism, is a sentiment of which the world stands greatly in need to-day. We need not go far to find evidence of how perilous it is to sink regard for the great conception of human brotherhood in a narrow, nationalistic concern for individual interests. In the Scottish conception of liberty, _duties_ have always been rated as highly as _rights_; it has been a constructive, not a destructive formula; it has been an inspiration to raise men out of themselves, not to prompt them to indulge in antics of promiscuous leveling. The kind of democracy for which Scotsmen have deemed that the world should be made safe is a human brotherhood, indeed, but a brotherhood imbued with the generous rivalry of effort, the enthusiasm of emulous achievement, and not one of inglorious, monotonous and colorless equality.

JOHN FOORD

SCOTTISH EMIGRATION TO THE AMERICAN COLONIES

Scottish emigration to America came in two streams--one direct from the motherland and the other through the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland. Those who came by this second route are usually known as "Ulster Scots," or more commonly as "Scotch-Irish," and they have been claimed as Irishmen by Irish writers in the United States.

This is perhaps excusable but hardly just. Throughout their residence in Ireland the Scots settlers preserved their distinctive Scottish characteristics, and generally described themselves as "the Scottish nation in the north of Ireland." They, of course, like the early pioneers in this country, experienced certain changes through the influence of their new surroundings, but, as one writer has remarked, they "remained as distinct from the native population as if they had never crossed the Channel. They were among the Irish but not of them."

Their sons, too, when they attended the cla.s.ses in the University of Glasgow, signed the matriculation register as "A Scot of Ireland."

They did not intermarry with the native Irish, though they did intermarry to some extent with the English Puritans and with the French Huguenots. (These Huguenots were colonies driven out of France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and induced to settle in the north of Ireland by William III. To this people Ireland is indebted for its lace industry, which they introduced into that country.)

Again many Irish-American writers on the Scots Plantation of Ulster have a.s.sumed that the Scots settlers were entirely or almost of Gaelic origin, ignoring the fact, if they were aware of it, that the people of the Scottish lowlands were "almost as English in racial derivation as if they had come from the North of England." Parker, the historian of Londonderry, New Hamps.h.i.+re, speaking of the early Scots settlers in New England, has well said: "Although they came to this land from Ireland, where their ancestors had a century before planted themselves, yet they retained unmixed the national Scotch character.

Nothing sooner offended them than to be called Irish. Their antipathy to this appellation had its origin in the hostility then existing in Ireland between the Celtic race, the native Irish, and the English and Scotch colonists." Belknap, in his _History of New Hamps.h.i.+re_ (Boston, 1791) quotes a letter from the Rev. James MacGregor (1677-1729) to Governor Shute in which the writer says: "We are surprised to hear ourselves termed Irish people, when we so frequently ventured our all for the British Crown and liberties against the Irish papists, and gave all tests, of our loyalty, which the government of Ireland required, and are always ready to do the same when demanded."

Down to the present day the descendants of these Ulster Scots settlers living in the United States who have maintained an interest in their origin, always insist that they are of Scottish and not of Irish origin. On this point it will be sufficient to quote the late Hon.

Leonard Allison Morrison, of New Hamps.h.i.+re. Writing twenty-five years ago he said: "I am one of Scotch-Irish blood and my ancestor came with Rev. McGregor of Londonderry, and neither _they_ nor any of their descendants were willing to be called 'merely Irish.' I have twice visited," he adds, "the parish of Aghadowney, Co. Londonderry, from which they came, in Ireland, and all that locality is filled, not with 'Irish' but with Scotch-Irish, and this is pure Scotch blood to-day, after more than _200_ years." The mountaineers of Tennessee and Kentucky are largely the descendants of these same Ulster Scots, and their origin is conclusively shown by the phrase used by mothers to their unruly children: "If you don't behave, Clavers [i.e., Claverhouse] will get you."

If we must continue to use the hyphen when referring to these early immigrants it is preferable to use the term "Ulster Scot" instead of "Scotch-Irish," as was pointed out by the late Whitelaw Reid, because it does not confuse the race with the accident of birth, and because the people preferred it themselves. "If these Scottish and Presbyterian colonists," he says, "must be called Irish because they had been one or two generations in the north of Ireland, then the Pilgrim Fathers, who had been one generation or more in Holland, must by the same reasoning be called Dutch or at the very least English Dutch."

To understand the reasons for the Scots colonization of Ulster and the replantation in America it is necessary to look back three centuries in British history. On the crus.h.i.+ng of the Irish rebellion under Sir Cahir O'Dogherty in 1607 about 500,000 acres of forfeited land in the province of Ulster were at the disposal of the crown. At the suggestion of King James the I. of England, Ulster was divided into lots and offered to colonists from England. Circ.u.mstances, however, turned what was mainly intended to be an English enterprise into a Scottish one. Scottish partic.i.p.ation "which does not seem to have been originally regarded as important," became eventually, as Ford points out, the mainstay of the enterprise. "Although from the first there was an understanding between [Sir Arthur] Chichester and the English Privy Council that eventually the plantation would be opened to Scotch settlers, no steps were taken in that direction until the plan had been matured ... The first public announcement of any Scottish connection with the Ulster plantation appears in a letter of March 19, 1609, from Sir Alexander Hay, the Scottish secretary resident at the English Court, to the Scottish Privy Council at Edinburgh." In this communication Hay announced that the king "out of his unspeikable love and tindir affectioun" for his Scottish subjects had decided that they were to be allowed a share, and he adds, that here is a great opportunity for Scotland since "we haif greitt advantaige of transporting of our men and b.e.s.t.i.a.ll [i.e., live stock of a farm] in regairde we lye so neir to that coiste of Ulster." Immediately on receipt of this letter the Scottish Privy Council made public proclamation of the news and announced that those of them "quho ar disposit to tak ony land in Yreland" were to present their desires and pet.i.tions to the Council. The first application enrolled was by "James Andirsoun portionair of Litle Govane," and by the 14th of September seventy-seven Scots had come forward as purchasers. If their offers had been accepted, they would have possessed among them 141,000 acres of land. In 1611, in consequence of a rearrangement of applicants the number of favored Scots was reduced to fifty-nine, with eighty-one thousand acres of land at their disposal. Each of these "Undertakers,"

as they were called, was accompanied to his new home by kinsmen, friends, and tenants, as Lord Ochiltree, for instance, who is mentioned as having arrived "accompanied with thirty-three followers, a minister, some tenants, freeholders, [and] artificers." By the end of 1612 the emigration from Scotland is estimated to have reached 10,000. Indeed, before the end of this year so rapidly had the traffic increased between Scotland and Ireland that the pa.s.sage between the southwest of Scotland and Ulster "is now become a commoun and are ordinarie ferrie," the boat-men of which were having a rare time of it by charging what they pleased for the pa.s.sage or freight. In the selection of the settlers measures were carefully taken that they should be "from the inwards part of Scotland," and that they should be so located in Ulster that "they may not mix nor intermarry" with "the mere Irish." For the most part the settlers appear to have been selected from the s.h.i.+res of Dumbarton, Renfrew, Ayr, Galloway, and Dumfries. Emigration from Scotland to Ireland appears to have continued steadily and the English historian Carte estimated, after diligent doc.u.mentary study, that by 1641 there were in Ulster 100,000 Scots and 20,000 English settlers. In 1656 it was proposed by the Irish government that persons "of the Scottish nation desiring to come into Ireland" should be prohibited from settling in Ulster or County Louth, but the scheme was not put into effect. Governmental opposition notwithstanding emigration from Scotland to Ireland appears to have continued steadily, and after the Revolution of 1688 there seems to have been a further increase. Archbishop Synge estimated that by 1715 not less than 50,000 Scottish families had settled in Ulster during these twenty-seven years. It should be also mentioned that "before the Ulster plantation began there was already a considerable Scottish occupation of the region nearest to Scotland. These Scottish settlements were confined to counties Down and Antrim, which were not included in the scheme of the plantation. Their existence facilitated Scottish emigration to the plantation and they were influential in giving the plantation the Scottish character which it promptly acquired. Although planned to be in the main an English settlement, with one whole county turned over to the city of London alone, it soon became in the main a Scottish settlement."

The Scots were not long settled in Ulster before misfortune and persecution began to hara.s.s them. The Irish rebellion of 1641, said by some to have been an outbreak directed against the Scottish and English settlers, regarded by the native Irish as intruders and usurpers, caused them much suffering; and Harrison says that for "several years afterward 12,000 emigrants annually left Ulster for the American plantations." The Revolution of 1688 was also long and b.l.o.o.d.y in Ireland and the sufferings of the settlers reached a climax in the siege of Londonderry (April to August, 1688). They suffered also from the restrictions laid upon their industries and commerce by the English government. These restrictions, and later the falling in of leases, rack-renting by the landlords, payment of t.i.thes for support of a church with which they had no connection, and several other burdens and annoyances, were the motives which impelled emigration to the American colonies from 1718 onwards. Five s.h.i.+ps bearing seven hundred Ulster Scots emigrants arrived in Boston on August 4, 1718, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Rev. William Boyd. They were allowed to select a towns.h.i.+p site of twelve miles square at any place on the frontiers.

A few settled at Portland, Maine, at Wica.s.set, and at Worcester and Haverhill, Ma.s.sachusetts, but the greater number finally at Londonderry, New Hamps.h.i.+re. In 1723-4 they built a parsonage and a church for their minister, Rev. James MacGregor. In six years they had four schools, and within nine years Londonderry paid one-fifteenth of the state tax. Previous to the Revolution of 1776 ten distinct settlements were made by colonists from Londonderry, N.H., all of which became towns of influence and importance. Notable among the descendants of these colonists were Matthew Thornton, Henry Knox, Gen.

John Stark, Hugh McCulloch, Horace Greeley, Gen. George B. McClellan, Salmon P. Chase, and Asa Gray. From 1771 to 1773 "the whole emigration from Ulster is estimated at 30,000 of whom 10,000 were weavers."

In 1706 the Rev. Cotton Mather put forth a plan to settle hardy Scots families on the frontiers of Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re to protect the towns and churches there from the French and Indians, the Puritans evidently not being able to protect themselves. He says, "I write letters unto diverse persons of Honour both in Scotland and in England; to procure Settlements of Good Scotch Colonies, to the Northward of us. This may be a thing of great consequence;" and elsewhere he suggests that a Scottish colony might be of good service in getting possession of Nova Scotia. In 1735, twenty-seven families, and in 1753 a company of sixty adults and a number of children, collected in Scotland by General Samuel Waldo, were landed at George's River, Maine. In honor of the ancient capital of their native country, they named their settlement Stirling.

Another and an important cause of the early appearance of Scots in America was the wars between Scotland and England during the Commonwealth. Large numbers of Scottish prisoners taken at Dunbar (1650) and at Worcester (1651) were sold into service in the colonies, a s.h.i.+pload arriving in Boston Harbor in 1652 on the s.h.i.+p _John and Sara_. The means taken to ameliorate their condition led in 1657 to the foundation of the Scots Charitable Society of Boston--the earliest known Scottish society in America. Its foundation may be taken as evidence that there were already prosperous and influential Scots living in Boston at that time. A list of the pa.s.sengers of the _John and Sara_ is given in Suffolk _Deed Records_ (bk. 1, pp. 5-6) and in Drake's _The Founders of New England_ (Boston, 1860, pp. 74-76). These men, says Boulton, "worked out their terms of servitude at the Lynn iron works and elsewhere, and founded honorable families whose Scotch names appear upon our early records. No account exists of the Scotch prisoners that were sent to New England in Cromwell's time; at York in 1650 were the Maxwells, McIntires, and Grants. The Mackclothlans [i.e., Mac Lachlans], later known as the Claflins, gave a governor to Ma.s.sachusetts and distinguished merchants to New York City."

The bitter persecution of Presbyterians during the periods of episcopal rule in the latter half of the seventeenth century also contributed largely to Scottish emigration to the new world. A Scottish merchant in Boston named Hugh Campbell, obtained permission from the authorities of the Bay State Colony in February 1679-80 to bring in a number of settlers from Scotland and to establish them in the Nepmug country in the vicinity of Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts.

So desperate had matters become in Scotland at the beginning of the eighth decade of the seventeenth century that a number of the n.o.bility and gentry determined to settle in New Jersey and the Carolinas. One of these colonies was founded in New Jersey in 1682 under the management of James Drummond, Earl of Perth, John Drummond, Robert Barclay the Quaker Apologist, David and John Barclay, his brothers, Robert Gordon, Gawen Lawrie, and George Willocks. In 1684 Gawen Lawrie, who had been for several years previously residing in the colony, was appointed Deputy Governor of the province, and fixed his residence at Elizabeth. In the same year Perth (so named in honor of the Earl of Perth, one of the princ.i.p.al proprietors, now Perth Amboy) was made the capital of the new Scottish settlement. During the following century a constant stream of emigrants both from Scotland and from Ulster came to the colony. One of the princ.i.p.al encouragers of the Scottish colony in New Jersey was George Scot or Scott (d.

1685) of Pitlochrie, who had been repeatedly fined and imprisoned by the Privy Council of Scotland for attending "Conventicles," as clandestine religious gatherings were then called in Scotland, and in the hope of obtaining freedom of wors.h.i.+p in the new world he proposed to emigrate "to the plantations." To encourage others to do the like he printed at Edinburgh (1685) a work, now very rare, called "The Model of the Government of the Province of East New Jersey, in America; and Encouragement for Such as Design to be concerned there."

Scot received a grant of five hundred acres in recognition of his having written the work, and sailed in the _Henry and Francis_ for America. A malignant fever broke out among the pa.s.sengers and nearly half on board perished including Scot and his wife. A son and daughter survived and the proprietors a year after issued a confirmation of the grant to Scot's daughter and her husband (John Johnstone), many of whose descendants are still living in New Jersey.

Walter Ker of Dalserf, Lanarks.h.i.+re, banished in 1685, settled in Freehold, and was active in organizing the Presbyterian Church there, one of the oldest in New Jersey. The Scots settlers who came over at this period occupied most of the northern counties of the state but many went south and southwest, mainly around Princeton, and, says Samuel Smith, the first historian of the province, "There were very soon four towns in the Province, viz., Elizabeth, Newark, Middletown and Shrewsbury; and these with the country round were in a few years plentifully inhabited by the accession of the Scotch, of whom there came a great many." These Scots, says Duncan Campbell, largely gave "character to this st.u.r.dy little state not the least of their achievements being the building up if not the nominal founding of Princeton College, which has contributed so largely to the scholars.h.i.+p of America."

In 1682 another company of n.o.bles and gentlemen in Scotland arranged for a settlement at Port Royal, South Carolina. These colonists consisted mainly of Presbyterians banished for attending "Conventicles." The names of some of these immigrants, whose descendants exist in great numbers at the present day, included James McClintock, John Buchanan, William Inglis, Gavin Black, Adam Allan, John Gait, Thomas Marshall, William Smith, Robert Urie, Thomas Bryce, John Syme, John Alexander, John Marshall, Matthew Machen, John Paton, John Gibson, John Young, Arthur Cunningham, George Smith, and George Dowart. The colony was further increased by a small remnant of the ill-fated expedition to Darien. One of the vessels which left Darien to return to Scotland, the _Rising Sun_, was driven out of its course by a gale and took refuge in Charleston. Among its pa.s.sengers was the Rev. Archibald Stobo, who was asked by some people in Charleston to preach in the town while the s.h.i.+p was being refitted. He accepted the invitation and left the s.h.i.+p with his wife and about a dozen others.

The following day, the _Rising Sun_, while lying off the bar, was overwhelmed in a hurricane and all on board were drowned. This Rev.

Archibald Stobo was the earliest American ancestor of the late Theodore Roosevelt's mother. In the following year (1683) the colony was augmented by a number of Scots colonists from Ulster led by one Ferguson. A second Scottish colony in the same year under Henry Erskine, Lord Cardross, founded Stuartstown (so named in honor of his wife). Another colony from Ulster was that of Williamsburgh towns.h.i.+p (1732-34), who named their princ.i.p.al village Kingstree.

There were settlements of Scots Highlanders in North Carolina, on the Cape Fear River, as early as 1729; some indeed are said to have settled there as early as 1715. Neill McNeill of Jura brought over a colony of more than 350 from Argylls.h.i.+re in 1739, and large numbers in 1746, after Culloden, and settled them on the Cape Fear River. Cross Creek, now Fayetteville, was the center of these Highland settlements, and hither came the Scottish heroine, Flora MacDonald, in 1775. The mania for emigration to North Carolina affected all cla.s.ses in Scotland and continued for many years. The _Scots Magazine_ for May 1768 records that a number of settlers from the Western Isles had embarked for Carolina and Georgia, including forty or fifty families from Jura alone. In September of following year it is stated that a hundred families of Highlanders had arrived at Brunswick, North Carolina, and "two vessels are daily expected with more." In August 1769 the s.h.i.+p _Mally_ sailed from Islay full of pa.s.sengers for North Carolina, which was the third or fourth emigration from Argyll "since the conclusion of the late war." In August 1770 it was stated that since the previous April six vessels carrying about twelve hundred emigrants had sailed from the western Highlands for North Carolina. In February of the following year the same magazine states that five hundred souls in Islay and adjacent islands were preparing to emigrate to America in the following summer. In September of the same year three hundred and seventy persons sailed from Skye for North Carolina, and two entries in the magazine for 1772 record the emigration of numbers from Sutherland and Loch Erribol. In the same year a writer says the people who have emigrated from the Western Isles since the year 1768 "have carried with them at least ten thousand pounds in specie. Notwithstanding this is a great loss to us, yet the depopulation by these emigrations is a much greater.... Besides, the continual emigrations from Ireland and Scotland, will soon render our colonies independent on the mother-country." In August, 1773, three gentlemen of the name of Macdonell, with their families and four hundred Highlanders from Inverness-s.h.i.+re sailed for America to take possession of a grant of land "in Albany." On the 22d of June previously between seven and eight hundred people from the Lewis sailed from Stornoway for the colonies. On the first of September, 1773, four hundred and twenty-five men, women and children from Inverness-s.h.i.+re sailed for America. "They are the finest set of fellows in the Highlands. It is allowed they carried at least 6000 pounds Sterling in ready cash with them." In 1774 farmers and heads of families in Stirlings.h.i.+re were forming societies to emigrate to the colonies and the fever had also extended to Orkney and Shetland and the north of England. In 1753 it was estimated that there were one thousand Scots in the single county of c.u.mberland capable of bearing arms, of whom the Macdonalds were the most numerous. Gabriel Johnston, governor of the province of North Carolina from 1734 to 1752, appears to have done more to encourage the settlement of Scots in the colony than all its other colonial governors combined.

In 1735 a body of one hundred and thirty Highlanders with fifty women and children sailed from Inverness and landed at Savannah in January 1736. They were under the leaders.h.i.+p of Lieutenant Hugh Mackay. Some Carolinians endeavoured to dissuade them from going to the South by telling them that the Spaniards would attack them from their houses in the fort near where they were to settle, to which they replied, "Why, then, we will beat them out of their fort, and shall have houses ready built to live in." "This valiant spirit," says Jones, "found subsequent expression in the efficient military service rendered by these Highlanders during the wars between the Colonists and the Spaniards, and by their descendants in the American Revolution. To John 'More' McIntosh, Captain Hugh Mackay, Ensign Charles Mackay, Col.

John McIntosh, General Lachlan McIntosh, and their gallant comrades and followers, Georgia, both as a Colony and a State, owes a large debt of grat.i.tude. This settlement was subsequently augmented from time to time by fresh arrivals from Scotland.... Its men were prompt and efficient in arms, and when the war cloud descended upon the southern confines of the province no defenders were more alert or capable than those found in the ranks of these Highlanders." "No people," says Walter Glasco Charlton, "ever came to Georgia who took so quickly to the conditions under which they were to live or remained more loyal to her interests" than the Highlanders. "These men," says Jones, "were not reckless adventurers or reduced emigrants volunteering through necessity, or exiled through insolvency or want.

They were men of good character, and were carefully selected for their military qualities.... Besides this military band, others among the Mackays, the Dunbars, the Baillies, and the Cuthberts applied for large tracts of land in Georgia which they occupied with their own servants. Many of them went over in person and settled in the province."

Among the immigrants who flocked into Virginia in 1729 and 1740 we find individuals named Alexander Breckinridge, David Logan, Hugh Campbell, William Graham, James Waddell (the "Blind Preacher"), John McCue, Benjamin Erwin, Gideon Blackburn, Samuel Houston, Archibald Scott, Samuel Carrack, John Montgomery, George Baxter, William McPheeters, and Robert Poage (Page?), and others bearing the names of Bell, Trimble (Turnbull), Hay, Anderson, Patterson, Scott, Wilson, and Young. John McDowell and eight of his men were killed by Indians in 1742. Among the members of his company was his venerable father Ephraim McDowell. In 1763 the Indians attacked a peaceful settlement and carried off a number of captives. After traveling some distance and feeling safe from pursuit they demanded that their captives should sing for their entertainment, and it was a Scotswoman, Mrs. Gilmore, who struck up Rouse's version of the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm:

"By Babel's streams we sat and wept, When Zion we thought on, In midst thereof we hanged our harps The willow tree thereon.

"For there a song required they, Who did us captive bring; Our spoilers called for mirth, and said: 'A song of Zion sing.'"

In the following year Colonel Henry Bouquet led a strong force against the Indians west of the Ohio, and compelled them to desist from their predatory warfare, and deliver up the captives they had taken. One of his companies was made up of men from the Central Valley of Virginia, largely composed of Scots or men of Ulster Scot descent, and commanded by Alexander McClanahan, a good Galloway surname. Ten years later occurred the battle of Point Pleasant when men of the same race under the command of Andrew Lewis defeated the Shawnee Indians.

In January 1775, the freeholders of Fincastle presented an address to the Continental Congress, declaring their purpose to resist the oppressive measures of the home government. Among the signers were William Christian, Rev. Charles c.u.mmings, Arthur Campbell, William Campbell, William Edmundson, William Preston and others. Several other counties in the same state, inhabited mainly by Scots or people of Scottish descent, adopted like resolutions. During the Revolutionary war, in addition to large numbers of men of Scottish origin serving in the Continental army from this state, the militia were also constantly in service under the leaders.h.i.+p of such men as Colonels Samuel McDowell, George Moffett, William Preston, John and William Bowyer, Samson Mathews, etc.

The following Scots were members of His Majesty's Council in South Carolina under the royal government, from 1720 to 1776: Alexander Skene, James Kinloch (1729), John Cleland, James Graeme, George Saxby, James Michie, John Rattray (1761), Thomas Knox Gordon, and John Stuart. Andrew Rutledge was Speaker of the Commons' House of a.s.sembly from 1749 to 1752. David Graeme, attorney at law in 1754, was Attorney-General of the State from 1757 to 1764. James Graeme, most probably a relation of the preceding, was elected to the a.s.sembly from Port Royal in 1732, became Judge of the Court of Vice Admiralty from 1742 to 1752, and Chief Justice from 1749 to 1752. James Michie was Speaker of the a.s.sembly from 1752 to 1754, Judge of the Court of Admiralty from 1752 to 1754, and Chief Justice from 1759 to 1761.

William Simpson served as Chief Justice 1761-1762. Thomas Knox Gordon was appointed Chief Justice in 1771 and served till 1776, and in 1773 he also appears as Member of Council. John Murray was appointed a.s.sociate Justice in 1771 and died in 1774. William Gregory was appointed by His Majesty's mandamus to succeed him in 1774. Robert Hume was Speaker of the a.s.sembly in 1732-1733. Robert Brisbane was a.s.sociate Justice in 1764, and Robert Pringle appears in the same office in 1760 and 1766. John Rattray was Judge of the Court of Vice-Admiralty in 1760-61, and James Abercrombie appears as Attorney-General in 1731-32. James Simpson was Clerk of the Council in 1773, Surveyor-General of Land in 1772, Attorney-General in 1774-75, and Judge of Vice-Admiralty in the absence of Sir Augustus Johnson in 1769. John Carwood was a.s.sistant Justice in 1725. Thomas Nairne was employed in 1707 "as resident agent among the Indians, with power to settle all disputes among traders ... to arrest traders who were guilty of misdemeanors and send them to Charleston for trial, to take charge of the goods of persons who were committed to prison, and to exercise the power of a justice of the peace." This Thomas Nairne is probably the same individual who published, anonymously, "A letter from South Carolina; giving an account of the soil ... product ...

trade ... government [etc.] of that province. Written by a Swiss Gentleman to his friend at Bern," the first edition of which was published in London in 1710 (second ed. in 1732).

Among the names of the seventeen corporate members of the Charleston Library Society established in 1743 occur those of the following Scots: Robert Brisbane, Alexander M'Cauley, Patrick M'Kie, William Logan, John Sinclair, James Grindlay, Alexander Baron, and Charles Stevenson.

Of the members of the Provincial Congress held at Charleston in January, 1775, the following were Scotsmen or men of Scottish ancestry: Major John Caldwell, Patrick Calhoun (ancestor of Vice-President Calhoun), George Haig of the family of Bemersyde, Charles Elliott, Thomas Ferguson, Adam Macdonald, Alexander M'Intosh, John M'Ness, Isaac MacPherson, Col. William Moultrie, David Oliphant, George Ross, Thomas Rutledge, James Sinkler, James Skirving, senior, James Skirving, junior, William Skirving, and Rev. William Tennent.

In Maryland there seems to have been a colony of Scots about 1670 under Colonel Ninian Beall, settled between the Potomac and the Patuxent, and gradually increased by successive additions. Through his influence a church was established at Patuxent in 1704, the members of which included several prominent Fifes.h.i.+re families. Many other small Scottish colonies were settled on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Maryland and Virginia, particularly in Accomac, Dorchester, Somerset, Wicomico, and Worcester counties. To minister to them the Rev. Francis Makemie and the Rev. William Traill were sent out by the Presbytery of Laggan in Ulster. Upper Marlborough, Maryland, was founded by a company of Scottish immigrants and were ministered to by the Rev. Nathaniel Taylor, also from Scotland.