How the Scots Invented the Modern World (36 page)

The Scotch-Irish South was a breeding ground for a type of strong, independent man and woman, a school for natural leaders. Andrew Jackson was son of an Ulster Scot immigrant, Hugh Jackson, a wealthy weaver and merchant from Carrickfergus. In 1765 he led a group of emigrants to America into South Carolina. His son was a typical product of the tight-knit, tough, and quarrelsome culture of Ulster Scot Carolina, and chose his wife from a similar Scotch-Irish clan. Another immigrant, Captain Robert Polk, had joined the parade of emigrants from County Donegal for the New World slightly earlier. His son settled in Virginia, and his five children, Robert’s grandchildren, ended up in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. James Knox Polk was born there in 1795, eventually representing his state as senator and still later serving as twelfth President of the United States.

Patrick Calhoun and his wife, Catherine Montgomery, left Ireland for America in 1733, with their four sons. Patrick junior married a Caldwell, descendants of a Borders family also settled in South Carolina, and his son John C. Calhoun would become South Carolina’s most powerful politician.

John Henry emigrated from Scotland around 1730; he numbered among his relations on his mother’s side that stalwart of the Moderate literati William Robertson. He settled in Hanover County, Virginia, which was quickly becoming home to Scots and Ulster Scot families, and married another relative, Sarah Syme. Their son Patrick Henry was born in 1736. His most famous maxim, “Give me liberty or give me death,” abruptly but perfectly encapsulates the mentality of these backcountry Scottish communities, in which living as you pleased—a crude homegrown version of Hutcheson’s notion of man’s moral liberty— was a matter of birthright. In 1768 Mecklenburg County even told the North Carolina colonial assembly, “We shall ever be more ready to support the government under which we find the most liberty.”

Defending that liberty against all challengers required force of will and a keen sense of valor. Here, in America, a warrior ethos took root, which was as fierce and violent as that of any Highland clan. President Andrew Jackson would remember his mother telling him, “Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault, or battery. Always settle them cases yourself.” One day she scolded him: “Stop that, Andrew. Do not let me see you cry again. Girls were made to cry, not boys.” “What are boys made for, mother?” he asked. She answered, “To fight.”

Jackson spent his life fighting, both as a soldier and as a gentleman of honor in duels that took the lives of two opponents. Dueling, and the code of honor that went with it, became embedded in Southern culture. Men defended themselves with their fists, knives, and muskets. Training with a gun and target practice were standard parts of a boy’s, and sometimes a girl’s, training for dealing with the real world. Running battles or feuds between backcountry families were as common, and as vicious, as any between Scottish Borders dynasties or Highland clans—the epic Highland clashes of Campbells and MacDonalds would later be matched in backcountry America by those of Hatfields and McCoys.

To see justice done, men were prepared to take the law into their own hands. In the Carolinas, bands of vigilantes or Regulators crisscrossed the territory in the late 1760s, stamping out local hooligans and waging war on interlopers. This vigilante attitude was epitomized by a Scots Borders descendant from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, named Captain William Lynch. He ruled as virtual dictator of his county, punishing wrongdoers and warning lawless elements that “we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained.” “Lynch’s Law,” and the punishments and hangings it inflicted, also became part of American culture—an ugly part, but a legacy of a harsh world and a harsh, unforgiving people.

The Presbyterian Ulster Scots also brought over their burning hatred of Episcopalians (especially since, as British subjects, they had to pay taxes for the established Anglican Church in America). When one Anglican missionary tried to preach in the Carolina mountains, the locals “disrupted his services, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his congregation.” The missionary, an Englishman, learned to hate his would-be Scotch-Irish converts with a passion. “They delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life,” he wrote, “and seem not desirous of changing it.”

Religious feeling was not all negative. The years in Ireland had kept the original evangelical fervor of John Knox’s Kirk intact. For all their wild and “heathenish” ways, Ulster Scots dipped deep into the emotional resources of Scottish Calvinism. They worshiped in “prayer societies” and large “field meetings”—the ancestor of the American revival meeting. They turned to their ministers for inspiration and support, and took comfort in a hellfire-and-damnation style of Christianity. The skeptic Robert Burns mocked the dramatic flair of Scottish evangelical preachers in “The Holy Fair”:

Hear how he clears the points o’ Faith,
Wi’ rattlin’ an’ thumpin’
Now meekly calm, now wild in wrath
He’s stampan an he’s jumpan!

But the Scots and Scotch Irish laity loved it, and it became the hallmark of Southern—and American—religion from then until the present. It also forged a link between the Presbyterian “People of the New Light,” as the immigrants call themselves, and the intense Protestant revivalism taking place in the 1730s and 1740s, which historians call the Great Awakening.

The Great Awakening transformed the culture of colonial America, touching its inhabitants with the spark of promised redemption, and daring them to challenge orthodox assumptions and institutions. It set the stage for the American Revolution. The man most often associated with it is the New England minister Jonathan Edwards, and his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. But in fact Scottish Presbyterians were front and center in the movement from the start.

The Great Awakening’s basic notion was that the past had passed, and the future was alive with possibilities for celebrating the glory of God. Jonathan Edwards preached that the coming of Christ’s kingdom, the millennium, would begin in America. Anyone—not just Presbyterians but all Protestant sects, even the hated Episcopalians— could be touched by God’s grace; all the righteous would eventually join together, regardless of denomination or place of origin, to form a single great “Christian commonwealth.” Righteousness, not birth or status, determined one’s place in the coming kingdom of God. It was a revivalist message that echoed the themes of Scottish Calvinism since Knox’s day. Not surprising, then, that Presbyterians became its most enthusiastic partisans, or that the arrival of the Ulster Scots in the middle colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland provided the initial spark.

At the center of the explosion were minister William Tennant and his sons. A recent scholar has concluded, “The Tennants were probably the single most important clerical force in the progress of the Great Awakening.” William Tennant, Sr., was born in Northern Ireland, educated in Edinburgh, and in 1704 ordained as a minister in the Anglican Church. However, the moment he set foot in America, in 1718, he felt drawn to the faith of his ancestors and his wife’s family. By 1720 he was a Presbyterian minister in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, at the edge of the frontier, and in the midst of a thronging Scotch-Irish immigrant community in Neshaminy.

He soon realized that he had far more Ulster Scots parishioners than he could deal with, and far fewer trained clergy than he had counted on. So he decided to open his own school of theology in a log cabin (naturally) next to his church, which became known as “Log College.” It was the first Presbyterian academy in the middle colonies. One of its first graduates was his son Gilbert. Hard and fearless, Gilbert Tennant would have made a worthy companion to Andrew Jackson, or perhaps William Wallace. “Taller than common size,” he was “a man of great Fortitude, a lover of God, ardently jealous for His glory, and anxious for the salvation of sinners.” He went on to Yale College and returned to Pennsylvania to cheer the revivalist tour of George Whitefield in 1740, which ignited the Great Awakening in Protestant congregations all along the eastern seaboard.

It was a crucial moment. The Pennsylvania synod had decided to shut down William Tennant’s Log College because of his aggressive assertion that the clergy should inspire, not just rule over, its congregation. He defied them and set off a split within the Presbyterian Church in the colony, between the orthodox Old Side, and the New Side, who recruited their laity into their cause. By 1744, Gilbert Tennant was the New Side minister for the church in Philadelphia and the Tennant version of Presbyterian “New Light” was reaching out to New Jersey and New England.

To inspire students and future ministers for the New Side, the Tennants and their allies decided to create a new Presbyterian college in New Jersey. It opened its doors in 1747, and eventually moved to the town of Prince Town, or Princeton. It was supposed to be a revivalist antidote to the “corruption” of institutions such as Harvard and Yale. The college even chose Jonathan Edwards as its honorary president, although he died less than three months after moving to Princeton to assume his duties. A new president—Aaron Burr, Sr., father of the future vice president of the United States—was named, and by then the schism between Old Side and New Side Presbyterians was beginning to heal. Princeton became a haven for revivalist religion everywhere, regardless of denomination: even the Baptist leader Isaac Backus encouraged sons of his flock to go there.

One alumnus was a young Philadelphian named Benjamin Rush. Although Rush was English, not Scottish, by origin, he was the first of a succession of Americans for whom a Scottish education was the transforming event of their lives. He spent his childhood surrounded by key figures in the Presbyterian Great Awakening.
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When he went to Princeton the college president was Samuel Davies, who had spent years of his life preaching the gospel in the Scotch-Irish backcountry of Virginia. He stressed to Rush’s Class of 1760 “the vast importance and absolute Necessity of entering upon Public Life with A NEW HEART and A NEW SPIRIT.” After graduation, Rush apprenticed with Philadelphia’s leading physician, John Redman, who was also a Log College graduate. Other doctors he met encouraged Rush to travel to Scotland to study medicine, and in 1767 he left for Edinburgh. It was a trip that would change his life—and incidentally change the course of education in America.

He arrived in Liverpool on October 21. Thanks to Benjamin Franklin, who was then living in London, Rush had letters of introduction to various Edinburgh luminaries (during Franklin’s visit in 1759, he had been given the keys to the city). He even met David Hume at a dinner party—“his person was rather ungenteel and clumsy,” Rush wrote in his diary, “he spoke but little, but what he said was always pertinent and sensible.” However, Hume’s evident religious skepticism, and the relaxed attitude about religion generally among Hume’s Moderate friends, disturbed the young Benjamin Rush, suffused as he was with the ardent afterglow of the Great Awakening.

From that point of view, he felt more comfortable with the Kirk’s tradition-minded Popular Party, especially the party’s champion, John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was forty-three years old when Rush met him at his fast-growing parish in Paisley, near Glasgow. Witherspoon was a strong, energetic, squat-faced man with thick, bushy eyebrows; he was a skilled theologian and a brilliant preacher. He was no rock-ribbed, fire-eating reactionary, however. He had been the classmate of William Robertson, Hugh Blair, and the other Moderates, and had received the same humanistic education in the classics, philosophy, and science. Witherspoon grasped the strengths and foibles of his Moderate opponents better than most, and he had used his knowledge with devastating effect in his
Ecclesiastical Characteristics,
the anti-Moderate satire that had made him famous and admired, even in Moderate circles.

It was Witherspoon who had pointed out that the new “enlightened” Presbyterian Church of Robertson and the rest was really a kind of elitism, reinforced by their dependence on powerful political patrons such as Lord Islay. He took the title “Popular Party” with pride: he and his fellow Evangelicals were truly preachers to the people, the farmers and shopkeepers and apprentices and tenant laborers who made up the backbone of the Scottish Kirk. The people deserved a say in who their ministers were, he believed, and in how the Gospel would be preached.

It was the sort of forthright democratic attitude Benjamin Rush, son of the New Light, could identify with, and he was not alone. For, as he explained to Witherspoon, his visit to Paisley was not a pleasure trip. Rush was there on business. He was there to persuade Witherspoon to accept the post he had been offered a year ago November, to become the new president of Princeton College in America.

Princeton, or Nassau Hall as it was sometimes called after its principal building, had had a run of bad luck. It had gone through five presidents in twenty years—one of whom, Jonathan Edwards, had died less than three months after accepting the post. The college needed a president who could give it continuity and stability, and its trustees believed Witherspoon had the right qualifications and the proper orthodox Presbyterian spirit to do that. They also believed that Witherspoon could help the Church heal its New Side–Old Side schism, since Witherspoon had the respect of both groups (the head of the Old Siders, William Alison, was a fellow Scot). On November 19, 1766, they wrote to Witherspoon, offering him a salary of 146 pounds sterling, as well as use of a house and garden, and land for “winter fuel and pasturage.” They closed with, “we ardently pray, that Providence may make your way plain before you for the acceptance of [our] choice.”