Scotland and America, c.1600-c.1800

Alexander Murdoch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780230516496
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350307063
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

While the literature relating to Scottish contact with America has grown significantly in recent years, the influence of America on Scotland and its early modern history has been neglected in favour of a preoccupation with Scottish influence on the formation of North American national identities. Alexander Murdoch's fascinating new study explores Scottish interactions with North America in a desire to open up fresh perspectives on the subject.

Scotland and America, c.1600-c.1800
- Surveys the key centuries of economic, migratory and cultural exchange, including Canada and the Caribbean
- Discusses Scottish participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the debate over its abolition
- Considers the Scottish experience of British unionism with respect to developing American traditions of unionism in the U.S. and Canada

Incorporating the latest research, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamic relationship between Scotland and America during a key period in history.

Part I

Scottish Trade and Settlement in America

1

Scotland and America in the Seventeenth Century

Introduction

In 1622 Sir William Alexander received a charter from James VI of Scotland to found a Scottish colony in the North American lands lying between New England, where English settlement was in its infancy, and the long established English fishing stations on the island of Newfoundland.¹⁵ Later, in 1628, James’s son Charles I granted Alexander a second charter giving him (in theory) a claim to all the lands between English and French territories in North America.¹⁶ Alexander was one of the many Scottish courtiers who followed James to London when he became king of England in 1603. In the pamphlet promoting his projected colony, Alexander wrote that Scots would never participate in overseas plantations unless, just as there was a New England, a New France and a New Spain, ‘they might likewise have a New Scotland’.¹⁷ John Reid has remarked wisely upon ‘the fundamental emptiness of European pretensions to ownership of lands that were already occupied by native people’, but it is clear that Alexander conceived of his colonial ambitions as offering a possible solution to some of James VI’s fundamental concerns about his oldest kingdom. Scotland exported many of its young men as soldiers for the wars of Europe, a growth industry during the wars of religion that prostrated early modern Europe. Unlike England (but like Ireland), Scotland had a surplus population that could be channelled into American colonization. Unlike Ireland (but like England), most of that population was Protestant. Alexander’s An Encouragement to Colonies addressed this. Why should Scots ‘betake themselves to the warres against the Russians, Turks, or Swedens, as the Polonians were pleased to employ them’? He also pointed out that ‘the Lowe Countries have spent many of our men, but have enriched few,’ while ‘the necessities of Ireland are neere supplied, and that great current which did transport so many of our people is worne drie’.¹⁸ Alexander was not correct about the future of Scottish emigration patterns in the seventeenth century. Many more Scots were about to die in the Thirty Years War in Europe and many more Scots would emigrate into Ireland than ever would travel further westward before 1700.

Alexander did, however, understand James VI’s concern about the ‘civilitie’ of Scotland. In his Basilikon Doron, intended as a manual of kingship for his eldest son, James had argued that if the Scottish Crown could establish plantations in the Highlands and Islands of the country they would ‘within a short time … reform and civilise the best inclined among them, rooting out or transporting the barbarous and stubborn sort, and planting civility in their rooms’.¹⁹ If plantation in the Highlands failed to achieve this, then exportation of its savage population to America in the seventeenth century would both promote British empire there and remove them from Scotland. As Charles I put it in a letter to Alexander regarding his renewed efforts to establish New Scotland in 1629, colonists from the Scottish Highlands would assist in ‘debordening that our kingdome of that race of people which in former times hade bred soe many trubles ther’.²⁰ None of this came to pass. Alexander’s scheme to sell baronetcies of Nova Scotia to aspiring gentry who wanted a title failed as a means of raising the finance for further colonization, and by the time of his death in 1640 Scotland had descended into the maelstrom of the British wars of the three kingdoms. Only the name of New Scotland survived, in its Latin form, and was revived in the eighteenth century when what was by then the French colony of Acadia became ‘British’.²¹ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries large numbers of Scottish immigrants would add a significant Scottish element to the population of Nova Scotia. Ironically, many of these immigrants came from the Scottish Highlands that Sir William Alexander had convinced Charles I (briefly) would be the ideal source of population for an American New Scotland. However, by 1632 plans to establish a new Scotland in the seventeenth century had been abandoned in the interests of peace with the French, who re-established their presence in the land they called Acadia. Nova Scotia would not be established until the eighteenth century, but it did eventually become the kind of British colony James VI and William Alexander would have wanted. Scotland’s empire would be created out of the edifice of British unionism James VI did so much to create and promote as part of his reign in both England and Scotland.

Charles I did not share that vision, and the result was catastrophe across Britain and Ireland. By the time of Sir William Alexander’s death in 1640, civil war and anarchy had rolled across all three of the Stuart kingdoms. After the execution of Charles I, the legacy he left ensured military conquest of both Scotland and Ireland by the English republican regime led by Oliver Cromwell. Scotland was defeated and occupied every bit as comprehensively as Ireland had been, but for Cromwell the Presbyterian Scots of the covenants, although misguided, were still part of the Godly Revolution to which he had devoted his life.²² The Irish, by contrast were a threat and, along with Wales and the Scottish Highland clans, provided the basis for a possible Stuart counter-revolution that had to be guarded against at all times. Catholic Gaelic-speaking prisoners from Ireland sent to the West Indies became a threat to stability there, whereas the planters valued the Presbyterian Lowland Scots sent to them after Cromwell’s victories at Dunbar and Worcester.²³

We do not know much about it, but Scottish assimilation into the Cromwellian Protectorate after the comprehensive defeat of Scottish armies at Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651) had repercussions that made it possible for Scotland to participate in the Atlantic economy of the seventeenth century in a manner that had been closed to it during the reigns of the early Stuart monarchs of Britain. Although the Covenanting Presbyterian regime in Scotland had been defeated, the victorious English military regime recognized their previous role in challenging and ultimately defeating the ambitions of the Stuart kings. In contrast to the situation in Ireland, Scotland was not forcibly integrated into the English Commonwealth, although the Scots involved in the negotiations for union with the Commonwealth were hardly negotiating from a position of strength. The Cromwellian regime in Scotland was sympathetic to Scottish landowners who continued to seek means of economically developing the resources of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland, and sought to co-opt them to the regime.²⁴

An important aspect of this was that those few Scottish merchants able to trade at all after the devastation Scotland suffered were able to enjoy access to English markets in the Caribbean and North America. This was partly because some Scottish merchants were able to continue to take advantage of existing connections with merchants in the Netherlands, sometimes trading under Dutch colours for protection. Indeed, the increase of registration of Glasgow-owned ships in the 1650s documented in the Dumbarton shipping register may have been because of the willingness of Glasgow merchants to register Dutch vessels they had chartered as their own to evade disruptions to trade during the Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–54.²⁵ Although at other points in the seventeenth century the English Navigation Acts were applied against Scottish merchants as well as the Dutch, the Act of the 1650s did not affect the Scots, as they were now subjects of the expanded Cromwellian Commonwealth.

There is little evidence that Scottish merchants were able to take much advantage of this opportunity. Thomas Tucker reported to the Commonwealth government in England in 1655 that trading voyages from Scotland to the Caribbean had been discontinued because the returns had been poor.²⁶ The only entry in the Dumbarton Register of Ship Entries that relates to tobacco refers to it as imported in a ship from Rotterdam. Another entry from the earlier year of 1648 records the importation of 20,000 pounds of tobacco in a Glasgow-owned vessel arriving from Martinique in the Caribbean.²⁷ Scots sent as convict labour to the West Indies after the defeats at Dunbar and Worcester were sent in English ships. Although some prisoners had been sent to America after the Scottish defeat at the battle of Preston in 1648, The Proceedings of the Council of State relating to Scotland during the period of the Commonwealth of 19 September 1650 ‘authorized the transportation of 900 Scots prisoners to Virginia and 150 to New England.’²⁸ Some of these men moved to other colonies when they completed their indentures. One later Scots immigrant to East Jersey in 1685 wrote back to Scotland that he had met a fellow ‘countryman, who was sent away by Cromwell to New England; a slave from Dunbar, living now in Woodbridge [East Jersey] like a Scots laird, wishes his countrymen and his native soil well, though he never intends to see it.’²⁹ David Dobson has argued that it was ‘no coincidence that the Scots Charitable Society was established in Boston on 6 January 1657 “for the relief of Scotchmen” as this was around the time that many of the Dunbar and Worcester veterans would have been ending their years of servitude’.³⁰ Although other Scottish prisoners taken at Dunbar and Worcester were offered to the French and the Venetians for service in their armies against the Turks, it was those sent to the western hemisphere who would contribute to the process whereby more Scottish merchants after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy (and a separate kingdom of Scotland) in 1660 looked westward beyond Ireland for profitable trading under the impact of continued disruption of the longstanding Scottish trading links to France, the Netherlands and the ports of the Baltic Sea by chronic political instability in Europe.

TC Smout, in commenting on the expansion of Glasgow’s trade in the seventeenth century, identified the years after 1649 as the beginning of Glasgow’s ascendancy in Scottish trade, commenting that increasing access to a British market allowed the town’s merchants to consolidate their existing trade and gain access to markets that previously had been ‘completely outwith the horizons of normal Scottish trade’. Through this they entered ‘the wider Atlantic, sending their ships to the Spanish Atlantic Islands (the Canaries, the Azores and Madeira), to the English Caribbean (especially Nevis, Montserrat and Barbados) and to the mainland plantations of North America (Carolina, Virginia and Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts)’.³¹ Did they begin to do this because integration into the Cromwellian Commonwealth/Protectorate had made possible what had been impossible under the early Stuarts?³² Did the Cromwellian period open up regional economic avenues for trade from Glasgow to Ireland and the west of England as well as the north Atlantic through the west of Scotland to the rest of the nation?

However it happened, it was a gradual process in which established merchants were encouraged to try to enter the Atlantic trade, and received returns that were substantial enough for them to persist with the experiment. After 1660 this brought them into conflict with the English Navigation Acts, but the lack of clarity in this legislation (and perhaps enough shared interest with fellow Protestant dissenters in England, Ireland and New England) enabled them to find niches where trade was possible. Smout wrote that ‘at least after 1673 the traders that were principally a nuisance to the English in breaking the monopolies conferred by the acts were the Scots – the Dutch hardly bothered to try any longer’.³³ Scottish merchants wealthy enough to trade overseas included Gavin Hamilton and William Walkinshaw in 1683. The former traded cloth from the south-west of Scotland via Bo’ness on the Forth estuary to Rotterdam while the next year he was involved in shipping Virginia tobacco from New England to Port Glasgow. Walkinshaw, meanwhile, had imported wine and salt from France and iron from Sweden. The next year he imported tobacco from Boston and Liverpool (although there was no evidence of direct trade from Glasgow to the Chesapeake Bay) but also wine from Spain, wood from Norway and more salt from France. In the following year he did much the same, except that there was much more iron brought from Sweden and the tobacco came to the Clyde straight from Virginia.

It may be that the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland had less to do with more Scottish merchants entering the Atlantic trade than it did with the determination of the restored Stuart regime from 1660 to erase that experience, forget the Covenanting revolution that preceded it and re-establish the Scottish kingdom of 1603–38, complete with absentee monarch. No wonder that the Scottish poet and former courtier Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty died of laughter on hearing the news of the Restoration.³⁴ ‘Disaggregation’, to use an ugly modern term, allowed the restored Stuart monarchy to govern Scotland (and Ireland) without reference to an English Parliament. This meant that the Scottish Privy Council under the Stuarts had no interest in enforcing the English Navigation Acts in Scotland. The Glaswegian merchant Walter Gibson, ‘who sailed his vessels disguised as English ships and imported Nevis sugar straight home to the refineries on the Clyde,’ flourished despite the Navigation Acts.³⁵ Scottish proposals that the Restoration English Parliament grant trading privileges to Scotland ‘ran up against English fears about the competitive edge enjoyed by the Scottish carrying trade, the close Scottish trading links with the Dutch and, above all, the perceived Scottish threat to vested coal and salt interests in the northeast of England’.³⁶ When this idea was revived by London merchants seeking access to cheap Scottish coal and salt in 1674, the project failed again because ‘the Scots opted for colonial expansion rather than closer ties to English domestic markets.³⁷

The arrival of James, Duke of York and Albany, in Scotland as King’s Commissioner in 1679 encouraged those Scottish merchants and members of the aristocracy and gentry who saw colonial trade as the panacea for Scotland’s economic difficulties to embark on serious planning to encourage it. James had been posted to Scotland by his brother because of opposition in the English Parliament to his status as heir to the throne in the so-called ‘Exclusion’ crisis, at a time when mercantilist economics were rapidly reducing the options open to smaller European kingdoms and trading centres seeking access to colonial trade. York, or rather Albany, to give him his Scottish title, sought to use his position in Scotland to demonstrate his ability to govern. His Scottish title was used to name the frontier settlement established on the New York frontier once he had assumed authority over that colony and what became East and West New Jersey following their conquest from the Dutch.³⁸ The Scottish Duke of Albany’s time in Scotland was a relatively short period in what one might charitably term a varied career. His role in Scottish public life was not always to be so positive, as he was the instigator of the ill-starred Scottish Jacobite movement that so blighted the history ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Scottish Trade and Settlement in America
• Part II: Transatlantic Scotland: Cultural Exchange between Scotland and America
• Epilogue: ‘The Scottish Invention of the USA’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index