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Some Scots are now more familiar with
American history and icons than with their own. Yet were they to probe
the roots of that history they would find that many of the key figures
in the making of North America were Scots.
From the first settlements in Nova Scotia in the 1620s, to the
explorations of land to the north and west, and finally the great
Canadian Pacific Railway which became its backbone, Canada was shaped
and led by Scots. In the United States, Scots may not now have as high a
profile as the Irish or the Jews, but as recently as 1980 the Census
recorded that 5.3 per cent of the population - over 12 million people -
were of Scots descent. And 61 per cent of US Presidents have had
Scottish blood in their veins.
But it was in the beginning of both nations - the United States and
Canada - that the influence was most acutely felt. Nine of the 13
governors of the States that formed the initial union were Scots. Its
first secretary of war, General Henry Knox, was a Scot, and its first
surgeon-general was Dumfriesshire-born James Craik, a close friend of
George Washington. The political agitation that brought about the
American Revolution was led by Patrick Henry, the greatest orator of his
generation, whose father was Scottish. Another American revolutionary
with a Scottish father was Alexander Hamilton, a contributor to the
Federalist Essays which helped shape the drafting of the US
constitution. He became the first secretary of the US Treasury. The
US’s foundation document, the Declaration of Independence, was signed
by two who played a huge role in shaping two key institutions in modern
America - Princeton University and the US Supreme Court.
The first, Rev John Witherspoon (1723-94), was the only ordained
clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon was born
at Gifford in East Lothian and became a parish minister in Beith, then
in Paisley. He was the leader of the evangelical party in the Kirk but
also an adherent of the Common Sense philosophical school. In 1768 he
emigrated to the American colony to become president of the College of
New Jersey (known later as Princeton University). At first he declined
the job since his wife was reluctant to leave Scotland, but a second
offer persuaded him. He imported many of the ideas of the Scottish
Enlightenment to the curriculum at Princeton.
Although it is Thomas Jefferson who is credited with the fact that the
United States made no pact with any church, keeping church and state
strictly separate, there is no doubt that Witherspoon’s ideas were
influential in creating a climate for religious pluralism in the US from
the outset. Among his students were a future president and
vice-president, nine cabinet officers, 21 senators, 39 congressmen,
three Supreme Court Justices and 12 state governors.
Another signatory was James Wilson (1742-98) who had received education
at each of the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow but did
not graduate from any of them. Instead, at the age of 23, he set sail
for the New World where, aided by some letters of introduction, he
obtained a job as a tutor with the College of Philadelphia which swiftly
conferred on him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. Attracted to law
as a profession, he was admitted to the Philadelphia bar in 1767 and
soon was so successful that nearly half of the cases which came to the
county in Reading were handled by him.
In 1774 he wrote a legal opinion on the nature and extent of legislative
authority which caused quite a stir. It averred that unless Americans
had representation in the British parliament, it had no authority to
legislate over them. This argument - no taxation without representation
- was the constitutional ground on which the break with Britain took
place.
The following year he made a passionate speech on the possibility of an
unconstitutional act being made by Parliament. Here, in embryo, is the
principle of Judicial Review, the American system in which acts passed
by government can be checked against the constitution. This evolved
later into the Supreme Court, of which Wilson became an associate
justice.
Wilson was a stickler for legal principle and very nearly did not sign
the Declaration (of which he approved) because the Middle States which
he represented were divided over the issue and he did not have a clear
mandate.
But when he did sign, his signature broke the deadlock in the
Pennsylvania delegation.
James Wilson
Nation Builder (1742—1798). Signer of the Declaration of Independence,
Stalwart Nationalist in the Continental Congress, Great Leader in the
United States Constitutional Convention, Justice of the Supreme Court of
the United States on its Establishment. A Biographical Monograph by
Lucien Hugh Alexander, M. A., of the Philadelphia Bar (1907) (pdf)
The Works of the
Honourable James Wilson LL.D.
Late one of the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United
States, and Professor of Law in the College of Philadelphia, published
under the direction of Bird Wilon, Esquire in 3 volumes. (1804)
Volume 1 |
Volume 2 |
Volume 3
Wilson’s career ended inauspiciously, which cannot be said of the
founder of the US Navy, John Paul Jones (1747-92). Naval historians have
never been able to agree about the man whom Thomas Jefferson later
described as "the principal hope of America’s future efforts on
the ocean". Was he patriot or pirate? Swashbuckling ladies man or
self-serving gangster? Hero or hardman?
The early years point to the less flattering analysis, but by the end of
his life Jones had acquired the aura of gallant gentleman. Born in a
gardener’s cottage on the Arbigland Estate, Kirkbean in Dumfriesshire,
as plain John Paul, he was apprenticed to sea at the age of 13 before
winning his first command (the brig John) at the age of 21. He was at
first involved in slave ships but quit what he called "the
abominable trade" and began to make his fortune with other cargo
such as sugar from the Caribbean. He was arrested and brought back to
Scotland to stand trial for the murder of a sailor he had ordered to be
flogged, but was able to produce witnesses who testified that the man
died not of wounds but of yellow fever while on another ship.
Luck continued to smile on him. When he quelled a mutiny by running the
ringleader through with his sword, he managed to escape to Virginia
where his brother had left him a tobacco plantation. Adding Jones to his
name, he built a new identity but had not lost his taste for
swashbuckling. With the US on the brink of war he accepted a commission
in the navy of the Continental Congress and was soon in command of the
US Navy, carrying out daring raids, including one on his former laird in
Solway, and winning battles. After the war of independence was over,
Jones was made an admiral in the Russian navy by Catherine the Great but
he was forced to quit, and died soon after. His diminutive body lies
like that of a saint in the US Naval Academy chapel in Maryland.
Another physically small man with a large reputation, also unlikely to
be associated with sanctity, is Andrew Carnegie (1838-1919) who played a
crucial role in America’s Industrial Revolution. Born in Dunfermline,
to which he never lost a sentimental attachment, poverty forced his
family to emigrate. He taught himself accountancy and by a mixture of
hard work and shrewd decisions (taking railroad stock in lieu of salary)
was soon able to benefit from America’s industrial boom, for which the
new railways were the infrastructure. Realising that raw materials of
iron and steel were needed for locomotives, rails, and bridges, Carnegie
was soon supplying a huge sector of the market.
His accurate stock-taking and appetite for new technology and methods
soon saw off his competitors. But his ruthless approach to labour
relations eventually tarnished his reputation. He used lock-outs and
muscle to break strikes and when he sold his steel company in 1901 for
an astonishing $480 million, becoming the richest man in the world, he
set about restoring his reputation by preaching what he called "The
Gospel of Wealth".
His idea was that since inheritance and trusts cannot be guaranteed to
use riches wisely, the duty of the man of wealth is to give all his
riches away and become a philanthropist. By his death in 1919, Carnegie
had given away $325 million, mostly to build libraries and support
education charities, but he had also paid for 7,689 church organs, over
1,000 of them in Scotland. The "Star-spangled Scotchman"
retired to Skibo Castle in Scotland and in his later years was not
averse to using the newspapers he owned to promote his political views,
among which was Home Rule for Ireland.
Earlier in his career as the Man of Steel, the incident which did most
to tarnish his reputation was the breaking of the Homestead Strike for
which he employed the Pinkerton Detective Agency. This famous agency,
whose logo was an all-seeing eye and led to detectives being called
"private eyes", was the brainchild of Allan Pinkerton
(1819-84), a Glaswegian who was to 19th-century America what J Edgar
Hoover was to the 20th. The two men shared the same opinion of strikers.
Pinkerton’s views are summed up in the title of a book he wrote in
1877 called Strikers, Communists and Tramps.
But in his earlier years Pinkerton was forced to emigrate after getting
into radical politics himself in Glasgow. He found work as a cooper in
Illinois, until his citizen’s arrest of a band of counterfeiters led
to his election as a deputy sheriff. He soon saw that more unorthodox
methods than he was obliged to employ would yield better results in
crime detection.
The Pinkertons often operated undercover and had some early notable
successes in infiltrating the Irish mafia, known as the Molly Maguires,
foiling an assassination plot against President-elect Lincoln, and
recovering $700,000 stolen in a robbery. During the Civil War, Pinkerton
and his men operated undercover as spies for the Union and were highly
successful in monitoring the troop movements of the Confederacy. If the
American Secret Service has a patriarch, it is surely Allan Pinkerton.
John Muir (1838-1914) looked like a patriarch and his upbringing was one
of strict Puritanism, but Muir channelled his passions into reverence
for the created order. Born in Dunbar and taken by his tyrannical father
to Wisconsin, Muir showed early promise as an inventor but after he
nearly lost his sight in a workplace accident, he vowed to devote his
life to the "inventions of God".
He travelled widely in western America’s areas of natural beauty and
through his articles in Century magazine began a mission which grew into
the system of National Parks. His book in 1901 on the scheme led
President Theodore Roosevelt to visit him at Yosemite where they laid
the foundation of Muir’s conservation programmes which are orthodoxy
now, but were then innovative and prophetic.
No less successful in political lobbying on behalf of the land, if in a
different sense, was James Wilson (1835-1920) whose career as US
Secretary of Agriculture spanned three presidencies and set records
which have never been equalled for tenure and achievement. Born within a
few miles of the land Burns once farmed in Ayrshire, "Tama
Jim" was one of 14 children who came with his parents to Iowa in
1852. Having mixed local politics, farming and teaching agriculture, he
was an ideal candidate for Secretary of Agriculture when he was
appointed in 1897. He revolutionised America’s approach to
agriculture, extending the influence of his department into research,
soil conservation, reforestation, plant disease and insect control, and
even into weather forecasting, improvements to rural roads, and the
inspection of food. The effect was to give the United States the lead in
agricultural science throughout the world.
The history of Canada developed very differently from the US. It might
not have been so had a rebellion, supported by Montreal traders who saw
their opportunities lying in America, been successful in 1837 . One of
its leaders was William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861) who became Mayor of
Toronto in 1834 after emigrating from Dundee where he had been a radical
. Mackenzie was not the only man bearing this surname who was
significant in shaping Canada in the 19th century, nor was he the only
Scots Canadian who made his reputation through journalism, among them
Chas Herbert Mackintosh (1843-1931), MP for Ottowa and editor of several
newspapers, and George Brown (1818-80) who was even more influential in
Toronto.
One might say Canada was hoaching with scotchmen at this time. Its north
and west were opened up by the efforts of Sir Alexander Mackenzie
(1764-1829). Mackenzie was born in Stornoway in the Western Isles. At
the age of 24 he discovered and charted Canada’s largest river, the
2,500-mile stretch of water which reaches up to the Arctic Ocean and is
now called Mackenzie River, one of 11 sites in British Columbia and the
North West Territories that are named after him. In pursuing trade
routes through to the Pacific he soon became one of Canada’s
wealthiest men but failed in his attempts to take over the rival
Hudson’s Bay Company.
It produced two other Canadian trade barons. George Smith (later Lord
Strathcona) (1830-1914) was its governor from 1889 to 1914 and
effectively ruler of a vast tract of land to the north west. He doubled
as Canadian High Commissioner to London and was the inaugural chairman
of Burmah oil, his last great venture. Another member of the commercial
elite from within the Hudson’s Bay Company was George Stephen (later
Lord Mount Stephen) who put together the syndicate for the project which
was to define Canada - the great Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).
It had the support of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John
Macdonald (1815-91), who was born in Dornoch. A charming Tory
wheeler-dealer, unconcerned by what today is called sleaze, he was an
ideal man to juggle the conflicting loyalties in North America at the
time and bring confederation into being in 1867. He served most of the
rest of his life as prime minister, with a brief break between 1873-78
when a scandal over the railway caused him to lose the election to the
Liberals, led by yet another Scots journalist, Alexander Mackenzie
(1822-92), born in Logierait, Perthshire. But Macdonald was soon back in
power and the railway was finished in 1881.
Kirkcaldy-born surveyor Sandford Fleming (1827-1915) was in charge of
the CPR project and noted the chaos caused on a transcontinental journey
by frequent resetting of watches because noon was defined as the moment
when the sun was overhead. Despite claims that time zones were against
God’s will, in 1885 the International Prime Meridian Conference
adopted his scheme for the creation of Standard Time Zones into which
the world has been divided ever since.
Stewart Lamont
Thursday, 13th September 2001
The Scotsman
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