How the Scots Invented the Modern World (38 page)

Certainly contemporaries recognized it.
The Dominion of Providence
went through nine editions, with publishers in Philadelphia, London, and Glasgow. The Edinburgh editors of the
Scots Magazine
strongly condemned it, and concluded that “the unhappy commotions in our American colonies” were due almost entirely to “clerical influence,” and that “none . . . had a greater share . . . than Doctor Witherspoon.” Horace Walpole, son of the former prime minister, rose in Parliament to speak. “There is no use crying about it,” he said. “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.” Everyone knew whom he meant.

On June 28, 1776, Witherspoon was in Philadelphia as part of the New Jersey delegation to the Continental Congress. They were there to draw up a declaration of American independence.

Revolution thrust on all Scottish immigrants, and on Americans of recent Scots or Ulster Scots extraction, a set of difficult choices. Should the colonists rebel or not rebel, in order to secure their rights? If they did rebel, should one join with them or remain loyal to the British Crown?

Recent immigrants, particularly those from the Highlands, tended to choose the Crown. Remarkably, even some of those who had fled in the wake of the Forty-five remained loyal to the government that had done so much to drive them from their homes. When Flora and Allan MacDonald heard the news about Lexington, Allan immediately offered his services to the loyalist side. He became second-in-command of the loyalist militia raised from the Highlanders in the Cape Fear region, under one Brigadier Donald MacDonald, a British officer dispatched to North Carolina—who also happened to be a cousin. Their Highland militiamen, complete with bagpipes and broadswords, ran afoul of the rebels at Moore’s Creek at the end of February 1776. Leading the charge was another Cape Fear Highlander, Donald MacLeod, who died with nine musket balls in him; thirty or so others also fell until the loyalists fled in confusion. The field belonged to the rebels—most of whom were almost certainly Ulster Scots.

In the Mohawk Valley in New York, Highland immigrants rallied to the British colors under two veterans of Culloden—one who had served on the Jacobite, the other on the Hanoverian side. The old Hanoverian, Alexander MacDonald, declared that “nothing can cure the madness that prevails all over America but the sternest of measures.” He led an ugly and savage guerrilla-style war in the valley, pitting Indians against rebel settlers, and Highlanders against Continental regulars. Incidents such as this, and the fighting at Moore’s Creek, made Scottish immigrants synonymous with loyalist or “Tory.” They became easy targets for abuse. John Witherspoon even penned an
Appeal to the Natives of
Scotland,
urging them to reconsider on grounds of self-interest. Independence, he insisted, would make their new American home “powerful and opulent to a degree not conceived.” Eventually Britain and America would be bound together by ties of another kind, of free trade (he even quoted David Hume on this point!). They were not giving up their old roots, but were gaining new ones.

But by and large the Scots stood firmly against revolution. When it ended, most would end up paying for their decision by having to leave, as the newly independent Americans made it clear that they were no longer welcome:

Tories, with their brats and wives,
Should fly to save their wretched lives.

Allan and Flora MacDonald returned to their original home, on the Isle of Skye—coming full circle after a life of constant adventure and turmoil. One hundred fifty thousand other Loyalist exiles, at least a fifth of them Scots, left for the remaining British dominions in the Americas. At least one-half went to Canada, and nearly 35,000 of those to Nova Scotia, Scotland’s original foundation in North America. After the opulence of life in the thirteen colonies, immigrants found conditions there austere. Some nicknamed their new home “Nova Scarcity.” But the American Revolution did have this unexpected consequence: it infused the British dominions in Canada with a bracing dose of Scotsmen who would play an important part in the making of the country in the next century.

Ulster Scots, on the other hand, had no such qualms. A long-standing hatred of the English drove them into the arms of the Sons of Liberty and the rebel cause. They were, said one appalled New Englander, “the most God-provoking democrats on this side of Hell.” Another in Philadelphia said, “a Presbyterian loyalist was a thing unheard of.” Some, such as William Stark, commander at Bunker Hill, found a leading role in the fight, but most played a humbler part, like Andrew Jackson’s family. Two of Jackson’s brothers enlisted in the South Carolina militia, and one was only sixteen when he was killed in action. Andrew himself joined the militia at the incredible age of twelve, was wounded in battle and captured, and, when he refused to clean a British officer’s boots, received a saber cut across the skull that left a permanent scar. In prison he contracted smallpox and malaria. His mother nursed the wounded, and died of exhaustion before the war ended.

The Scotch-Irish from places such as Mecklenburg and Orange counties in North Carolina, Augusta and Rockbridge counties in Virginia, and Bucks and Chester counties in Pennsylvania supplied the cause of independence with more than just patriotic fervor. Debate now rages among historians about how skilled the average American colonist really was with firearms and whether most even owned or had fired a musket. One thing seems certain, however: the typical frontier Scotch-Irish settler had grown up with firearms, including the use of the rifled musket, which, the British general Howe had to admit, they had “perfected with little knowledge of ballistics.” They would supply the backbone of George Washington’s Continental Army. One estimate (probably exaggerated) had it that half the army at Valley Forge were Ulster Scots. Certainly they brought military experience, leadership, and a fighting spirit to a revolution that badly needed all three.

Daniel Morgan of North Carolina raised a regiment of volunteer rifles, beat British regulars at the Battle of Cowpens, and then was instrumental in frustrating the British general Cornwallis’s campaign in the Carolinas. Virginia-born and frontier-hardened George Rogers Clark turned the tables on the British in the Ohio Valley when he and his band of rangers made an epic journey to capture Fort Vincennes.

Henry Knox’s father had arrived in Boston from Ulster in 1729. Henry was twenty-five when the rebellion broke out; although he had no soldiering experience, in less than a year he was head of General Washington’s artillery. He personally led Washington’s raid on the Hessians in Trenton on Christmas Eve, 1776, and earned accolades for service in subsequent campaigns. He became major general in 1781, at age thirty-one. A key member of Washington’s inner coterie, Knox later served under him as the new nation’s first secretary of war. He pushed hard for the creation of a national militia in 1790, although Congress turned him down. Knox did, however, manage to take the first steps toward the creation of a national military academy at West Point, New York.

James McHenry grew up in County Antrim in Ulster, and was educated in Dublin, probably at a Presbyterian academy. He emigrated to Philadelphia in 1771, and while the rest of his family founded a prosperous import business in Baltimore, McHenry chose to study medicine at the College of Philadelphia with Benjamin Rush. The war drew them both into the Continental Army as physicians, although McHenry turned from army medicine (he was senior surgeon of the army’s mobile field hospital at Valley Forge) to staffwork, becoming secretary to General Washington and then to Lafayette. McHenry also went on to sit as secretary of war, both for Washington and for John Adams. When the threat of war with France flared, he ordered a series of forts built along the East Coast. The one in Baltimore would later bear his name, and the British siege of Fort McHenry in 1812 would inspire another American of Scottish extraction, Francis Scott Key, to pen the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the American national anthem.

Important contributions to the American war effort did not just come from Ulster Scots, however.

John Paul’s father was a gardener on a wealthy estate in Kirkcudbrightshire in extreme southern Scotland. However, his son had no interest in remaining on land. He was drawn irresistibly to the sea, and made his first voyage to Fredericksburg, Virginia, on a Scottish merchant ship at age thirteen. A brilliant seaman, he soon became master of his own ship; unfortunately, command brought out that part of his character which would plague him all his life: his vanity, his quickness to quarrel, and his ferocious temper. When he was charged with murdering one of his crewmen in 1773, he decided to skip Britain for Virginia, where he changed his name by adding to it a surname, Jones. The colonies were on the brink of rebellion: it was the perfect opportunity for a daring adventurer and skilled seaman. John Paul Jones won commission as lieutenant on the
Alfred,
the very first ship in the Continental Navy. On November 1, 1777, he took command of the
Ranger,
and with it and later his French-outfitted
Bon Homme Richard
he became America’s first naval war hero. His vanity and restless ambition prevented him from playing a more important role in the navy after the war; but his epic sea battles, and his famous maxim, “I have not yet begun to fight,” embodied the kind of do-or-die spirit that would eventually enable the struggling revolution to prevail.

A similar spirit overtook the delegates at the Continental Congress that steamy summer of 1776. Witherspoon, as part of the New Jersey delegation, knew the risks that this sort of undertaking involved. Within a year, British troops would invade Princeton. They would ransack Nassau Hall and burn the splendid library that Witherspoon had worked so hard to assemble. But at this point his attention was entirely fixed on the nation’s future. “It has been often said,” he wrote, “that the present is likely to be an important era to America. I think we may safely say, it is likely to be an important era in the history of mankind.” He believed that the Congress had more than just a duty to declare independence; its job was to lay the foundation for the creation of a new nation. “We have the opportunity of forming plans of government upon the most rational, just, and equal principles. I confess,” Witherspoon added, “I have always looked upon this with a kind of enthusiastic satisfaction.” It was, he believed, something that had never happened before in history. If they failed, it might never happen again.

The Continental Congress included a host of other delegates of Scottish or Ulster Scot extraction: at least nineteen, in fact, out of fifty-six signers of the final Declaration, or fully one-third.
²⁴
In addition to Witherspoon, there was William Hooper of North Carolina, whose father was a Scottish Congregationalist from Boston. There was Thomas McKean of Delaware, son of a farmer and tavernkeeper from the Scotch-Irish settlement in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania delegation was full of Scottish descendants, including James Smith; George Taylor, who had come over from northern Ireland as an indentured servant; and the native-born Scot James Wilson, who came from Carskerdy and was educated at St. Andrews and (probably) Glasgow— and whom we will meet again shortly.

The influence of Scottish education was also much in evidence, with Witherspoon, Wilson, and Benjamin Rush, who sat as a Pennsylvania delegate, and Thomas Jefferson. While Jefferson never attended any Scottish university, his alma mater at William and Mary College had been recently overhauled on the Scottish model. His closest teacher, William Small, had been a native-born Scot educated at the University of Aberdeen. The most arresting phrases in his draft of the declaration, “we hold these truths to be self-evident” and “the pursuit of happiness,” owed their lineage to the Scottish school. In addition, the final copy of the Declaration itself was written by an Ulster Scot (Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress); it was publicly read aloud to the citizens of Philadelphia by an Ulster Scot, and first printed by yet another Ulster Scot.

In Scotland itself, meanwhile, politicians, ministers, philosophers, merchants, and ordinary people lined up on either side of the conflict. In Parliament, Scots were now a prominent part of the governing establishment, and two sat in Lord North’s cabinet as he guided Britain into war. Alexander Wedderburn was serving as Solicitor General, and Robert, Lord Dundas, as Lord Advocate for Scotland, while Lord Mansfield acted as chief spokesman for His Majesty’s Government in the House of Lords. On the other side, the flamboyant Lord George Gordon, rabble-rousing orator and anti-Catholic bigot, proudly proclaimed the cause of American independence.

The merchant elites in both Glasgow and Edinburgh stoutly backed the government, and offered to raise volunteer regiments to help put down “those damned rebels.” At stake was more than just the loyalty of North Britons. Their material self-interest was also on the line. Merchants worried that American independence would cripple their lucrative transatlantic tobacco business. In fact, the war had brought an embargo on American goods, which rocked the foundations of most of Glasgow’s great merchant houses: by 1776 a few were ready to topple. William Cunninghame was an exception. As the American crisis had begun to heat up, Cunninghame had quietly bought up inventories of Virginia and Maryland tobacco from his rivals. When the war came, and the price skyrocketed, he graciously consented to sell the tobacco back to them—at an astronomical profit. It was the proceeds from the deal that enabled him to construct his splendid house on Virginia Street, and to emerge as the most successful—and the most cunning—of all the Tobacco Lords.