How the Scots Invented the Modern World (58 page)

This was the second great barrier to Africa’s development. Britain had abolished the buying and selling of slaves in 1807, and virtually shut it down all across the Atlantic. It had freed its own slaves in 1833. However, Arab traders continued the ugly business of seizing, buying, and selling human captives for export. The wars that African kingdoms waged with one another in order to find captives to sell to the slave traders, and the incessant deportation of thousands of victims to the great slave-trading port of Zanzibar, had devastated entire sections of central and southern Africa. On Livingstone’s travels overland, he would come across parties of people linked together by wooden yokes on their march to the Arab slave markets, a journey that could be even more horrific and lethal than the Atlantic “middle passage.” Livingstone wrote in his diary, “We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. . . . An Arab who had passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk.”

Livingstone did what he could to hinder the slave traders—he did not hesitate to give modern firearms to African communities to fight them off. But in the end he believed the final remedy had to be the spread of legitimate trade and commerce with European nations across Africa. When local chiefs realized they could make more money selling palm oil or ivory, instead of their own people, Africa’s ways would change. And rivers for commerce and communication were the key to making it happen. It drove him to launch more and more exploratory expeditions into the interior, and to insist that Britain had to take the lead in making Africa safe, for white and nonwhite alike.

After two years of speeches and celebrity, Livingstone was eager to return to Africa. On February 8, 1858, he was appointed Her Majesty’s Consul and “commander of an expedition for exploring Eastern and Central Africa, for the promotion of commerce and civilization with a view to the extinction of the slave trade.” Livingstone and his companions, including his wife, Mary Moffat Livingstone, his son Robert, and his brother Charles, reached the mouth of the Zambezi on May 14. They traveled up the river as far as Quebrabasa Rapids in the world’s first steel-hulled steamboat,
Ma Robert
(or “mother of Robert,” which locals called Mary Livingstone), which handled the rocks and inevitable beachings without a mishap.

Then things began to go wrong. Livingstone quarreled with the English members of the missionary society over the goals of the journey: he wanted to combat the slave trade, while they wanted to convert the natives. Then disease descended on the party. On the hard journey up the Zambezi rapids, Mary died, as did their infant child. When Livingstone and the other survivors reached Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi), the second-largest body of water in Africa, a war between local tribes broke out. The British government, discouraged by reports of death, disaffection, and a local drought, ordered Livingstone home.

Livingstone’s third and final African expedition was sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society. He planned to discover the source of the Nile in eastern Africa, but Livingstone’s hopes went further than that. He intended to show that the culture of ancient Egypt derived its remote origins from black Africa—a thesis that in many ways anticipates those of modern afrocentrist scholars. “One of my walking dreams,” he told friends, “is that the legendary tales about Moses coming up into Inner Ethiopia with Merr, his foster-mother, and founding a city which he called in her honor ‘Meroe,’ may have a substratum of fact.”

He never had the chance. He set out into the bush in 1866 with no white companions, only thirty porters, a band of Indian sepoy soldiers, students from a government school for freed African slaves, and a few local recruits. Like the extras in a Tarzan movie, the porters and the rest bolted the expedition at the first sign of trouble. When they made their way to the coast, they spread the rumor that Livingstone had been murdered. No one knew the truth of what had happened to the man who had made Africa a part of everyday conversation. Nothing but silence came from the endless expanse of jungle and savannahs.

For two years no one knew anything about Livingstone’s fate. Some speculated that he really was dead; others that he was in hiding; still others that he had discovered the fabled ancient cities of Christian Ethiopia and their mythical king, Prester John. The story of Dr. Livingstone became an international sensation. Finally the Scottish-descended owner of an American newspaper sent a reporter, Henry Stanley, to find him as a way to generate publicity and sell newspapers. It was no pleasure junket. Stanley’s two-year trip across the heart of east central Africa proved as uncertain and dangerous as any of Livingstone’s expeditions. At last, in 1872, Stanley found him in the village of Ujiji, with a handful of loyal followers. Livingstone’s health had finally given way. For months he had lain on a cot, too ill to move or lift a pen. But he refused to leave Africa. Instead, he said farewell to Stanley and set off on his final journey into the interior, still hoping to hit on the Nile’s source.

On May 1, 1873, Livingstone died. His two constant companions, Chuma and Susi, former freed slaves, found his body kneeling at the foot of his cot, as he was about to say his prayers. They buried his heart under an
mpundu
tree seventy miles from Lake Bangweulu. Then, having wrapped his body in calico to try to preserve it, they set off on an incredible eleven-month, fifteen-hundred-mile journey to the coast to have his body buried in a European cemetery. It was a labor of love and a tribute to Livingstone from the people he had tried to protect and serve.

A similar tribute poured out when Livingstone’s body returned home. Britain went into mourning. His body was buried at Westminster Abbey, with the epitaph

DAVID LIVINGSTONE:
MISSIONARY, TRAVELLER, PHILANTHROPIST

They forgot to mention: Scottish doctor.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Self-Made Men: Scots in the United States

America would have been a poor show had it not been for the Scotch.

—Andrew Carnegie

Canada and the United States should be more alike than they are. Once parts of the same British Empire, they share a common language, a common geography, and a common economic fate. Both are, in their own way, nations of immigrants—including, in both cases, sizable and influential numbers of Scots.

Yet their histories run in very different directions. The development of Canada was largely a public enterprise, controlled and in many cases financed from the top down. The Hudson’s Bay Company started that tradition; the building of the Canadian Pacific epitomized it. Americans built their world around the principles of Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, of individual self-interest governed by common sense and a limited need for government. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 enumerated the powers of the federal government, and left the rest to the individual states. The Canadian Confederation of 1867 explicitly gave the provinces certain powers, and kept the rest for itself. It reflected the political vision of Dugald Stewart: government as a resource for society’s progress, rather than a hindrance to it.

Despite these differences, the Scots themselves were almost as important to the development of the United States as to that of Canada. In Bernard Aspinwall’s phrase, they were “the shock troops of modernization, ” the first echelon of skilled immigrant labor to reach America’s shores and make it a productive nation. They transformed the new republic from an agricultural community of “agrarian yeoman” into an industrial powerhouse, the quintessential modern nation.

The Scots who came to the United States in the nineteenth century reveal once again why the Scottish diaspora was so different from other mass immigrations in history. Despite their relatively small numbers (less than three-quarters of a million, compared with 5 million Irish), the vast majority of Scottish immigrants could read and write English. Most knew some trade other than farming. Almost half of the Scottish males who came to America between 1815 and 1914 qualified as either skilled or semiskilled workers. In fact, while Canada tended to draw Scotsmen who wanted to own a farm and lead a rural life, the United States attracted those who were determined to succeed in a trade or in a factory job. Their work ethic and moral discipline were bywords. “Of all immigrants to our country, the Scotch are always the most welcome,” wrote the entrepreneur and prohibitionist Neil Dow in 1880. “They bring us muscle and brain and tried skill and trustworthiness in many of our great industries, of which,” he added pointedly, “they are managers of the most successful.”

Of all American immigrant groups, probably only the Jews had more or comparable skills. But unlike the Jews, or the Irish for that matter, Protestant Scottish immigrants were not held back by religious discrimination. And unlike the English, they did not expect special or preferential treatment. They lived by Sir Walter Scott’s famous maxim, “I am a Scot and therefore I had to fight my way into the world.” They anticipated hard work as a matter of course.

Nor were they intimidated by their new environment. On the contrary, it had a certain familiar feel: an Anglo-Saxon privileged elite who dominated politics and government; an Anglicized urban middle class divided into competing Protestant sects; Irish immigrant workers crowded into growing industrial cities; an inaccessible interior governed by tribal warrior societies about to be displaced by the forces of progress—here was Scotland all over again.

It is not surprising that so many Scots came to identify with America. They saw it as the fulfillment of their own hopes and desires, and Scottish men and women as indispensable to its forward progress. Andrew Carnegie’s famous declaration quoted above echoed the sentiment of many others, that “the United States was Scotland realized beyond the seas.” It was a place where the Scotsman could create a new life for himself out of the opportunities the continent offered, and a new identity. After all, being an American was above all an idea, just as being a “North Briton” had been, or civilization itself. All it required was a goal and a desire to succeed—and a person could become anything, or anyone, he wanted.

This was a self-confident individualism as old as the Renaissance: “Man can do all things if he will.” But then it had been an ideal for an elite. It presupposed a fixed social structure, a hierarchy of status groups in which individual talent, like water, would eventually find its own level. No such thing existed, or seemed to exist, in America. The field was wide open, just as the country itself was wide open—“an empire of liberty,” as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, which the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 had more than doubled in size. It was the Scots who would show the rest of the Americans how to operate in that kind of social and cultural void—where nothing seems impossible, where a man can take his skills and his willpower and turn it into gold.

A new social ethos was born, which the rest of the world would come to see as quintessentially American—and quintessentially modern. In fact, it is quintessentially Scottish, and the Scots in America would also demonstrate that the endless possibilities of this inventive self-fashioning and the pursuit of individual success do not have to end in chaos. They can spawn a new kind of civic community, which respects the right of all people to pursue their own ends as long as they respect that right for others. It is an enlightened community, with echoes of David Hume’s secular Golden Rule. But it is reinforced, like concrete with steel rods, by a traditional moral discipline, the legacy of Presbyterianism.

Scots had helped to create the new American nation. Now they would show how it could work.

In 1788 Benjamin Rush wrote to John Adams, “America has ever appeared to me to be the theater on which human nature will reach its greatest civic, literary, and religious honours. Now is the time to sow the seeds of each of them.”

Rush had come back from his sojourn to Scotland in 1774, where he had recruited John Witherspoon to Princeton and studied medicine with William Cullen, energized and enthused. With an almost missionary zeal, he had thrown himself into the revolutionary cause and then into shaping the newly born republic into a modern nation. Rush founded the first antislavery society in America, recognizing in that “peculiar institution” precisely the kind of tyranny that had prompted Americans to break with Britain. He became a pioneer in the temperance movement, and he led a crusade for humane treatment of the mentally ill, making him America’s first clinical psychologist. He helped to found the American Philosophical Society, based on the Edinburgh original, and supplied its operative motto: “Knowledge is of little use, when confined to mere speculation.” This captured perfectly the practical side of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Rush’s own desire to see an America take shape in conformity to that model.

The basis of this new enlightened American identity, Rush believed, was going to be its system of education, and above all its universities. Here his influence was enormous and long-lasting. He completely remade the College of Philadelphia’s medical school, where he was a popular and influential teacher, recasting the teaching of medicine according to the Edinburgh model. He founded Dickinson College in western Pennsylvania, with a Scottish president, which became the vehicle for Rush’s vision of a new kind of nondenominational educational institution. He argued for moving Latin and Greek out of the center of the curriculum (although he still believed in the importance of classical languages), and ushering science in. The university should be a place that pushed forward the frontiers of knowledge in all areas, Rush believed, through research and innovation, as well as a center of instruction.