Scotland's Mark on America

by George Fraser Black

The Scots were not long settled in Ulster before misfortune and persecution began to harass 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 bloody 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 tithes 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 ships bearing seven hundred Ulster Scots emigrants arrived in Boston on August 4, 1718, under the leadership of Rev. William Boyd. They were allowed to select a township site of twelve miles square at any place on the frontiers. A few settled at Portland, Maine, at Wicasset, and at Worcester and Haverhill, Massachusetts, but the greater number finally at Londonderry, New Hampshire. 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 Hampshire 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 shipload arriving in Boston Harbor in 1652 on the ship 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 passengers 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 Massachusetts 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, Massachusetts.

So desperate had matters become in Scotland at the beginning of the eighth decade of the seventeenth century that a number of the nobility 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 principal 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 principal 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 worship 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 passengers 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, Lanarkshire, 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 sturdy 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 scholarship of America."

In 1682 another company of nobles 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 passengers was the Rev. Archibald Stobo, who was asked by some people in Charleston to preach in the town while the ship was being refitted. He accepted the invitation and left the ship 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 township (1732-34), who named their principal 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 Argyllshire 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 classes 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 ship Mally sailed from Islay full of passengers 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-shire 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-shire 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 Stirlingshire 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 Cumberland 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 leadership 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 gratitude. 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: