When a rigid structure collapses the pieces can be
put to use. This was a tenet of the old engineering theory as propounded
in the early nineteenth century, but it also has validity in the field
of "social engineering." There are few more striking examples of its
applicability than the way in which the Scottish society, in increasing
flux from the early eighteenth century onwards, provided a class of men
of enterprise that played a role, entirely out of proportion to its
small numbers, in the promotion of mercantile and industrial concerns
not only in Scotland, but also in North America, the West Indies, and
the East.
Until the end of the seventeenth century, Scottish
society was much more static than that of England, Holland, and France.
The middle class of traders was small, and lacked political influence in
a country dominated by landed and semi-feudal magnates. Economically,
Scotland lagged far behind Western Europe, and even in the first two
decades of the eighteenth century showed little sign of fulfilling the
destiny that lay in store - the achievement within years of a new role
in the forefront of European culture, commerce, industrialization,
finance and economic thought. It was a remarkable transformation, and in
no field can its workings be observed more clearly, and in such
illuminating detail, than in the British North American colonies which
were eventually to confederate. That is one reason why the role of the
Scot as businessman in the early phases of Canadian history is so
important. These colonies were an easily available laboratory for early
Scottish mercantile experimentation, and the specific character of
Scottish enterprise is clearly revealed in its colonial application.
For Canada, just as much as for Scotland,
investigation of these "mercantile men" who came out from their homeland
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is valuable and
important, for the Scots were to imprint indelibly their methods,
"mores" and outlook on the whole commercial and economic life of these
colonies. Recent studies in Canadian business and entrepreneurial
history have shown clearly that they were predominant and
pre-eminent in trade, commerce and industry, and their influence as well
as that of their descendants has largely moulded the economic outlook of
Canada.1
Yet in this business role the Scot has been
surprisingly neglected. With the exception of the fur trade, the only
aspect of Scottish enterprise to attract the attention of historians,
little basic work has been done on the work of Scottish entrepreneurs in
the general trade of importing and exporting, in banking, in
ship-building, the vitally important timber trade and the establishment
of manufactures.2
This chapter will attempt to survey, in brief form,
the activities of mercantile Scots in the whole area to 1900 and to
elucidate the motivations of the men concerned. It will also attempt to
gauge the characteristics which they brought with them, and their
operating methods and techniques. The subject is a two-sided one, for it
investigates not only Scottish influences in Canada, but also the
effects which these Canadian activities had on the attitudes,
aspirations, and the various regional economies of the homeland. If the
Canadian experience reflected strong Scottish influence, it also exerted
a "counter influence" on Scotland itself.
The main problem facing the traders and merchant
burgesses of the small cities and towns of Scotland in the seventeenth
century was the lack of overseas markets for their hides and fish and
other primary products. As Professor S.G. Lythe has shown, marketing was
difficult, with demand constantly fluctuating on the continent. In the
later part of the century, as the standard of living, at least for
nobility, gentry and burgesses, began to rise, there developed a demand
for colonial produce and for trade with colonial areas. This demand was
difficult to meet, since Scotland, with no colonies of her own, was
precluded from trade with the flourishing English colonies in North
America and the West Indies. The Scottish social system in the
seventeenth century was fairly rigid and static, as far as the lower
groups were concerned, but an interesting change in the pattern of land
ownership had begun well before 1650. Small estates, all over the
country, and particularly in the Lowlands, were tending to be absorbed
into larger estates, and numerous members of the lesser gentry, faced
with rising living costs and fixed returns in rentals from their lands,
were selling out to the greater gentry or the landed nobility. This
"displaced gentry" frequently sought employment in the armies of Sweden,
Holland, Muscovy, and the German states as mercenaries, or settled in
the "Plantation" of Ulster. A considerable number also took up various
lines of trade, manufacture, or the professions in the towns, thus
augmenting the embryo middle class of merchant burghers.
This early period saw the first glimmers of Scottish
interest in North America, as the Scots sought for outlets for their
produce and a share in England's promising colonial ventures. In 1620 a
group of seven of the "principal merchantis" of Glasgow put together a
fund of money, which they invested in an English North American venture,
the Newfoundland Company, established in Bristol and London in 1609, and
chartered by the Crown in 1610.3 The Scottish investment in this joint stock company
brought slight return, the major beneficiaries being the shipowners of
London and Bristol, but the Scots continued to be interested in
Newfoundland and its fisheries, seeing in the island a loophole in the
tight English colonial system, for there was great legal uncertainty
regarding the exact status of the area. Some English authorities-at-law
held that Newfoundland was "no true plantation, but a part, nay, a mere
extension of His Majesty's good realm of England," and since Scots were,
in fact, allowed to trade openly with England, though not with its
colonies, the island seemed to afford a useful outlet for budding
Scottish enterprise.4
Yet the weakness of Scotland as a potential trading
and colonizing power was shown by the failure and confusion which
resulted from the ambitious schemes of Sir William Alexander, later Earl
of Stirling, who projected the feudal domain of "New Scotland" or Nova
Scotia, and of Lord Ochiltree, with his even more remarkable scheme for
a "Scots Barony or Stewardry" in Cape Breton Island. These projects
broke down because a basis of financial backing, of adequate shipping
and a well-developed mercantile class was lacking to support them.5
It was only as the pattern of ownership of
land - the sole real source of wealth in the country - changed in the
course of the seventeenth century that the accumulations of capital
necessary for mercantile and overseas investment came to exist in
private hands. It is significant that the financial magnate and
educational benefactor, George Watson, who flourished in the latter
years of the century, made most of his money from "Wadset'' or mortgage
transactions, or from loans against rentals.6
Despite all these difficulties, weak and
undercapitalized, the merchant burghers of Glasgow pushed on their
"interloping" activities in the English colonies, especially in
Virginia, with its attractive tobacco trade. These ventures, commenced
as early as the mid-1660s under the useful cover of the Newfoundland
fisheries, started the popular national game of evading the English
Navigation Laws and the London-centred English colonial system. In June,
1680, Edward Randolph, "Surveyor General of Customs for the American
Plantations," complained bitterly to the commissioners of customs in
London that "many vessels full laden with tobacco" gave in bond at the
Naval Office in Boston that they were bound for Newfoundland, but
proceeded in fact to Scotland, Canada, and other countries.7 This interesting practice, together with the ruse
of registering their ships at Whitehaven, just across the Border in
Cumberland, England, enabled the Glasgow merchants to break into the
tobacco and plantation trades long before the Union Act of 1707 gave
them a right to participate. The Board of Trade raged in the 1690s
against the "dubious legality" of the Scots' expedient of dispatching
convoys of cartloads of tobacco by road from Virginia to Massachusetts,
whence it was shipped to Newfoundland in colonial vessels and there
transhipped into Scottish ships for dispatch to the Clyde; but the
Newfoundland coastline and waters were difficult to police and patrol.
In 1701, Randolph reported the
"audacity" of a combine of Scottish merchants in setting up a "factory"
on the Newfoundland coast. Ostensibly a "fishing station," this
establishment was in fact a "front" for a point of transhipment for
Virginian tobacco and West Indian sugar for dispatch in Scottish vessels
to the Clyde, Holland, the Baltic, France, and Scandinavia.8
The remarkable display of ingenuity on the part of
the handicapped Scottish merchants is significant, for it helped to set
the "tone" of Scottish mercantile activity throughout the eighteenth
century. The disregard for rules and regulations that had been
inculcated in the period before 1707 as a national necessity if Scottish
overseas trade was to develop continued to be characteristic of the
Scottish traders. After the union they had little compunction in
breaking the law if the law hampered the plying of their trade. As
smuggling was given more countenance by all classes in Scotland than in
England, there seems little doubt that the debut of the Scots on the
Canadian mercantile scene was made by those merchants of Glasgow and the
Clyde ports who engaged in the "Newfoundland trade" from the 1680s
throughout the eighteenth century.
There is also no doubt that the trade was a "cover"
for the shipment to Scotland and the continent of enumerated colonial
products (which could only be shipped legally from the colonies to
England before 1707), and of sugar and other French and Spanish colonial
produce thereafter. The transhipment of vast quantities of French
brandy, laces and silks, Dutch spirits, and German and Russian linens
also went on, the goods being smuggled into Scotland as well as to the
British West Indian and North American colonies.
Before 1759-60, when the first Scottish merchants
secured a foothold in Quebec and Halifax, and long before 1783, when the
"grand period" of Scottish mercantile enterprise in Canada and the
Maritimes began, there were Scottish factors, agencies and firms in the
"fishing" settlements of Newfoundland. By the 1770s the firms of
Johnstone and Co., Lang and Co., and Graham and Co., and several lesser
concerns were operating in and around the island. Little is known about
the activities of these companies prior to the 1790s for of their
records only a few fragments of the archives of Lang and Co. survive. We
can, therefore, only guess at the scope and scale of their activities.9
All of the Newfoundland firms were based on
or had strong connections with the Clyde, which was, from the 1680s
through to the first half of the nineteenth century, the hub and focus
of Scotland's trade with Canada and of Scottish emigration to Canada,
and the chief supplier of Scottish merchants and businessmen to the
colonies.
By 1807, Greenock, down the Clyde from Glasgow, alone
had thirty-nine sizable vessels engaged in Newfoundland, coming third on
the list of British ports involved in the "fishery."10 By 1785, practically all commerce with Canada,
Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick was conducted through this port, which
was well-described by a contemporary as "the throat, as it were, of the
principal manufacturing district of this nation."
The population rose from 15,000 in 1783 to 25,000 in
1800, and by the latter date no fewer than 377 ships were owned there."
In this thriving town were situated sugar refineries and rum
distilleries, ropeworks, and sailcloth manufactories, and most
important, a number of excellent shipyards, some of which had by 1780
gained the reputation of being among the best in the United Kingdom.
There were also numerous mercantile and ship-owning firms, and from
their counting houses men would go out to Canada and the Maritimes to
create a vast, informal, commercial empire.
Even more important were the developments in the
Clyde's hinterland, as between 1750 and 1800 Scotland experienced a
radical and amazing change in its social and economic life. The country
"took off," in the economists' phrase, into the first stage of its
industrial revolution with dramatic suddenness, principally in Glasgow
and the surrounding area. Linen and cotton mills, ironworks, coal mines,
shipyards, and numerous other industrial enterprises sprouted around
what had been a quiet little cathedral city in the seventeenth century.
By 1800 Glasgow rivalled Edinburgh in population, with over 100,000
inhabitants, and Glasgow's chief port, Greenock, was surpassing
Scotland's ancient "metropolitan and paramount port" of Leith in trade,
shipping, and initiative.
Within the hub of commerce a new breed was appearing
- the commercial Scot, a creature very different from the ultra-cautious
seventeenth century merchant burgher with limited objectives and
willingness to leave affairs of state to his betters. The "new men" were
ambitious, and increasingly determined to have a say in matters of
church and state, especially in those which touched their own interests.
Since this class provided the men who spearheaded the Scottish
commercial advance in what was to become Canada, its characteristics are
worth examining in some detail.
The career of William Forsyth of Cromarty, and the
writings of another veteran Scottish merchant, David Lock of Over
Carnbie, who flourished in the 1760s, show how aware they were of the
gap that separated English affluence from the old Scots penury, and how
determined they were, by every effort in their power, to rectify this
imbalance, which they felt to be unjust and discriminatory.12 Men of this stamp felt that their country had
lagged behind, and that now, at last, the chance was afforded them to
"catch up." After 1750 a
new vigour, a new breadth of vision, had entered into the bodies
and minds of Scottish businessmen. This was clearly seen in the midst of
the frantic controversy that raged in Britain following the taking of
Quebec, as to whether Canada should be retained. Many Scots felt acutely
that here lay the field for enterprise, the markets for manufactures and
the sources of raw materials that their country so badly needed, and
they threw their full weight on the side of the "Retentiontists." In
January, 1760, a merchant, signing himself "Britannicus," stated in a
letter to the Glasgow Journal: "Of all our acquisitions, the conquest of
Quebec and consequently, of the country of Canada is the most important
and most beneficial ... for such a source of trade and commerce will be opened to us here, as will be fully
sufficient, had we no other, to employ all our trading and commercial
people, and find a vent, or constant consumption, for all our goods,
products, and manufactures. It is therefore above all things to be
wished that the country of Canada may never be relinquished."
This especially strong desire for the possession of
Canada as a solution to Scotland's economic and social problems was
further evinced by an editorial comment in the same newspaper (editorial
comments were then rare, and only provoked by especially weighty
issues). It ran: "The expense of this Conquest (i.e. of Canada) is the
most thrifty disbursement ever made - an exclusive fishery! A boundless
territory! The fur trade engrossed! and innumerable tribes of savages
contributing to the consumption of our staple! There are sources of
exhaustless wealth! Ignorant and designing men have called this a
quarrel for a few dirty acres of snow, but the public will soon have
feeling [sic] proofs that Britain must sink or swim with her colonies."13
A further proof of the particular interest in the Glasgow-Greenock
area in ensuring that Canada be not restored to the "Papistical Bourbon
Tyranny of the House of France," but kept British "regardless of our
outlay in moneys and blood," was seen in the deputations of Glasgow and
Greenock merchants to the Provost, the baillies, the local nobility and
gentry, and to the local Presbytery, asking that they use their
influence to ensure that "the French should be totally cleared out of
North America."14
With this new awareness went a rapidly developing
combativeness. Many of the "new men" were increasingly dissatisfied with
the religious establishment in Scotland, where Queen Anne's Acts of
Patronage left the right of nomination of parish ministers in the hands
of the heritors, i.e. the local aristocracy and gentry. Since the parish
schools were run in conjunction with and under the supervision of the
Kirk, this was a matter of more than simple religious significance.
Consequently, the majority of the mercantile Scots were Dissenters,
supporters of various "breakaway" groups, such as the "Anti-Burghers"
and the United Secession Synod. Their role in organizing and leading
such dissident bodies undoubtedly gave them valuable experience which
increased their growing confidence as men of business and as
participants in politics.
In politics, they were also exponents of the cause of
Reform - not only of Parliamentary Reform, but of the much more vital
cause of Burgh Reform, particularly important in Scotland because of the
peculiarly corrupt system of parliamentary election by nominated town
councils, which made the country an easily-managed electoral appanage of
the Dundas family and its connections. Adherence to reform as a good
cause was another characteristic that the Scottish businessmen brought
to their new North American environment.
These were all admirable qualities under the
circumstances, but other features of the class were, perhaps, less
attractive. Reference has already been made to their ingenuity in
evading the law and the trade regulations.
This was to be a continuing trait, as we can see in
the "trading on the line" activities of Christopher Scott, in the
"prize-purchasing operations" of the Scottish Halifax circle, and in the
utter high-handedness in taking the law into their own hands displayed
by the leading partners of the North West Company, to which reference
will be made later. From the most charitable point of view it can be
regarded as an attitude bred of English discrimination against the Scots
in the period following the union of the crowns in 1603. In support of
this contention it must be remembered that as late as the 1760s it was
still possible for an "anti-Scottish campaign" to be launched by Wilkes
and others in London.
Another less admirable feature of the new Scottish
commercial class was its intense, narrow localism. Despite the rapid
social and industrial change of 1750-1800, Scotland was still
essentially a country of regions -not only of "Highlands" and "Lowlands"
but of subdivisions within each, among which population movement was
still comparatively slight. "Clannishness," "parochialism," "favour to
kin," and the nursing of prejudice, not only against the English and the
Highlanders, but also against Scots from other areas of the Lowlands
(most of the businessmen, because of the different social and economic
structure of the Highlands and Lowlands, were Lowlanders), were charges
that were absolutely valid when directed against Scottish businessmen of
the time, whether at home or abroad. Scottish merchants in Canada,
Newfoundland, and the Mari-times tended to trade with their home ports
(mostly with Greenock) and to congregate in their colonial settings with
Scots from their own regions, if they were available. They also
recruited clerks, craftsmen, and labourers from their own districts back
in Scotland - and kinfolk wherever possible, often to the detriment of
the colonial population seeking employment. It is not surprising that in
Quebec and Montreal, the Scottish paramountcy in trade, commerce, and
industry came to be bitterly resented by some of the local population.
The high hopes held by Scottish merchants that
Glasgow might "engross" the fur trade of Canada, and thus replace Paris
as the main emporium for the peltries of North America, were not
fulfiled. The dominant part that the Scots of the North West Company
were to play in the trade after the 1780s is considered elsewhere in
this volume, but the fact is that London, always the centre of Britain's
fur importations from the time of the establishment of commercial links
with Muscovy in the 1550s, went on to be the principal market for North
American furs as well. As London had the specialized manufactures, and
the experienced dealers and processers, accustomed to handling shipments
of furs from Russia and Hudson's Bay, Scotland never became a major
importer of peltries. Between 1764 and 1778 only four small consignments
of furs are recorded as arriving in the Clyde; and of the total of 152
ships listed by the Colonial Office and the Board of Trade as sailing
for Britain from Montreal and Quebec with full cargoes of furs between
June, 1786, and January, 1814, only seven were destined for Scottish
ports.15
It was in the field of general trade (importing and
exporting a wide range of commodities) that they were active at first.
There were scores of Scots among the "four hundred and fifty
contemptible sutlers and traders" to whom their countryman, General
Murray, made such scathing reference as being an embarrassment to him in
newly conquered Canada.16 Many
had been attracted by the lucrative trade in supplies for the large
British and colonial armies engaged in the conquest. Several of the
Scottish-Newfoundland traders shipping flour, salted beef and other
supplies from the Clyde and from Cork in Ireland to the St. Lawrence, to
judge by references in the contemporary Scottish press, were obviously
making considerable profits. In the years 1759, 1760 and 1761, no fewer
than thirty-three full shiploads of provisions for the conquest armies
sailed from Greenock alone.17
Many Scots "sutlers" stayed on in Halifax, Montreal,
and Quebec after 1763. In 1768 in Halifax they were already numerous
enough to form a "North British Society," which flourished and grew from
its inception. In Quebec, the Scots soon dominated the trade of Canada.
Unfortunately little is known in detail about these Scottish merchants
in the early phase between 1759 and 1783, but from the Scottish and
colonial press some "reconstruction" can be done to offset the lack of
archival material.
Most prominent of the early Scots merchants was James
Finlay, who headed the Canadian side of a joint concern, based in
Greenock. From this latter point, his elder brother Robert, one of the
most powerful and enterprising of the "new breed" of commercial men in
the port, directed operations. By 1764, the Finlay brothers had
established what constituted, in effect, a regular shipping service
between Quebec and the Clyde. They shipped out Scottish linens,
woollens, spirits, and ironware, bringing back to the Clyde colonial
lumber, potash for glass-making and textile processing, and scant
quantities of furs. More important, they organized a primitive
emigration service based on the "indenture" principle already practised
on the Clyde for the securing of slave overseers and craftsmen for the
West Indies plantations. In Greenock, Robert Finlay advertised on behalf
of his brother and his brother's Scottish mercantile associates in
Quebec for "masons skilled in building, gardeners, quarriers, and
millers, fabricators of dry stone dykes, and good and sober men skilled
in the management of flour and saw mills." 18 Applicants were offered free passage in the Finlay ships
and well-paid employment. These Scottish craftsmen brought out by the
Finlays and other operators who speedily emulated them played an
important part in the building of stores, warehouses, and residences for
their fellow countrymen in Quebec's building booms of the 1760s, 1770s
and 1790s.
As with the Quebec/Montreal Scottish mercantile
circles, that of Halifax, largely drawn from Glasgow, Greenock, and the
Clyde area maintained the closest of links with Scottish west coast
ports in trade and the fostering of emigration. This was natural enough,
for several of the earliest merchants to find lodgement in Halifax,
during the Seven Years' War, were Scots from Newfoundland, attracted by
the rapidly-developing fisheries of Arichat and by the chance of sharing
in contracts for the supplying of the conquest army. The three most
notable of the early arrivals were John Geddes of Glasgow, who appeared
in 1755, Peter McNab of Inverness, who came out in the same year, and
Alexander Brymer, a successful Glasgow merchant, who ventured to settle
in Halifax in 1760 with the fruits of his commercial activities in
Glasgow, the then-sizable capital of £4000.
Brymer, a remarkably able merchant, was intent on
encouraging other Scots to come out to join the circle. He became known
as "Father of the Community of Scottish Merchants" in the town, the
group which Harold Innis described as "the little commercial group which
dominated Nova Scotian behaviour." The North British Society, which he
helped to found in 1768, was essentially a Scottish commercial club,
though it also had benevolent and charitable aims.19 Brymer prospered exceedingly from the trade in fish to
the West Indies and from the import trade, especially in rum and other
spirits from the Clyde, and by the 1770s was regarded as a merchant
prince. Like many of his type and nation, however, the merchant had a
strong philanthropic streak. He not only personally paid for the return
passages to Scotland of many emigrants who were unable to cope with
colonial life, but also lent large sums without interest to encourage
merchants in Glasgow and Greenock to come out and join the "circle" in
Nova Scotia.20 Since by 1777 the North British Society had
over one hundred members, nearly all merchants, it was necessary to
employ a full-time messenger to maintain communications among them. It
may be guessed that the purpose of these messages was largely
commercial, pertaining to shipping arrivals and departures, prices and
cargoes.
The St. Lawrence trade became in the period between
1764 and 1800 one of the principal strands in the complex commerce of
the Clyde. In the 1760s some sixteen owners were recorded as sending out
vessels to Quebec, including the owners of ships who employed them from
time to time as well in the West African-West Indian slave traffic. By
1800 there were at least thirty-five firms in Greenock and Glasgow which
were largely concerned with the St. Lawrence trade. It would be no
exaggeration to say that Scotland's share of the trade with Canada in
the last forty years of the eighteenth century was far out of proportion
to the country's population or shipping and mercantile strength. It was
dominated by the Clydeside Scots and their kinfolk, agents and
representatives on the other side of the Atlantic; and the same
situation was intensified in the Nova Scotian and New Brunswick trades
in the period of intense economic development after 1783.21 To draw together, however, the widely separated
threads of Scottish enterprise in the newly conquered colony of New
France, in the Province of Nova Scotia and, after 1784, in the new
territory of New Brunswick, is not an easy task, for these places were
far apart, not only geographically, but in outlook and background.
Still, as far as the Scottish mercantile connection was concerned, there
is a common factor which applied to
them all. It was the utterly disruptive but still creative effect of the
American Revolution. There can be no doubt that this phenomenon led to a
vital change of direction in the economic life of Nova Scotia and
Canada, while it created the economic life of New Brunswick. To all
three areas, the Revolution brought a further Scottish wave made up of
the dispossessed Scottish Loyalist businessmen and merchants, many of
them bringing valuable experience of colonial trading conditions, and
useful expertise in the pioneering of new lines of commerce. A few, such
as James Dunlop of Montreal, even managed to bring with them some
capital which they had contrived to save from the wreck of earlier
careers.
The change in the direction of the Scots' trading
interests after 1783 was towards the timber trade and its ancillary, the
ship-building industry. True, other types of trade did not disappear,
but the shipping of timber to Great Britain and the building of West
Indian ships in North America began to loom ever larger in the general
trade pattern. With the outbreak of the wars with France in 1793 the
need for supplies of timber and ships became very pressing. Furthermore,
with Napoleon's institution of the Continental System as an attempted
blockade of the British Isles, other commodities such as sugar and grain
were in great demand. Of all this the British North American-based
merchants took quick advantage, and none more quickly than the Scots.
Timber, however, remained basic as the foundation for many of the
fortunes made before the mid-point of the nineteenth century.
William Forsyth, who possessed a combination of
daring, caution and vision, was the classic type of Scottish
entrepreneur. He arrived in Halifax in 1782, and as a partner in the
important Greenock firm of Hunter and Robertson, rapidly made his mark
in the West Indies fish trade and in ship-owning. By the mid-1780s he
was the owner of two fleets of vessels -one made up of eight large ships
which he employed in the trans-Atlantic trade, the other consisting of a
score of smaller ships which were engaged in the coastal and West Indies
trades. Judged by the standards of the time, the supply of salted fish,
often of the poorer or "refuse" quality, sent to the West Indian
plantations as food for the slaves, was the basis of all his commerce.
These were shipped from Halifax in Forsyth's larger coasting vessels to
Jamaica, Grenada and Antigua.
The proceeds of the fish cargoes were invested in
rum, sugars, and salt from St. Ubes, which were then shipped back to
Halifax, where the rum and salt went out to supply the fisheries, and
the sugars were consigned to the Clyde. Because prices of salt fish in
the West Indies and of quality sugars in Britain rose steeply during the
Wars of 1776-83 and 1793-1815, Forsyth profited greatly.22 On the basis
of this success, he then launched into a variety of other lines of
business, acting as Halifax agent for numerous Scots, American, Dutch
and German shipowners, exporting New Brunswick timber to the West Indies
and masts to Britain, and acquiring large vessels in New Brunswick which
in the 1790s made his fleet the largest in Nova Scotia. After war with
revolutionary France broke out in 1793, he saw that ships and
ship-building timber would shortly be at a premium because of wartime
losses, and if a trade in lumber with Britain could be built up in
wartime, it might well continue profitably when peace came.23
He also pioneered in other lines of trade, including
importing from Liverpool vast quantities of prime Cheshire salt for the
fisheries, of which he obtained a virtual monopoly.24 Also, through relatives established in trade in Montreal
from 1790, he speculated in furs, potash, Canadian timber and colonial
grain, the latter a commodity in increasing demand in Britain in the
1790s. Contracts with the Admiralty for the supply of masts to British
and West Indian naval dockyards, the importation of wines from Madeira,
Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean, the export of Cape Breton coals
to Newfoundland, and the importing of entire shiploads of cottons,
linens, and woollens from the Clyde also swelled his business. By these
means he helped to raise Halifax to the key position as an entrepot of
the North Atlantic trade by 1800.
Forsyth also joined in a lucrative practice that grew
up in Halifax in wartime - that of speculating in prize ships and
cargoes seized by the navy and auctioned by order of the Vice-Admiralty
Courts. Many Scottish naval and military officers, professional men and
merchants made large fortunes by forming syndicates for such dealings.
The system is well described by James S. MacDonald when he states that
"although Halifax had a small population at this time, the enterprise of
her Scottish merchants was known to all mercantile centres of the
trading world."25 In bidding for prize
ships and cargoes knowledge of their character was invaluable. This the
Scots were often able to obtain through collusion with their countrymen
in high positions in the naval establishment. There seems little doubt
that there was a good deal of sharp practice, verging on illegality, in
these proceedings.
Forsyth, however, saw that the seizure of neutral
vessels, if overdone, could only dislocate trade and generate bad
feeling among the victims. On many occasions, he acted as agent for the
owners of captured ships, managing to secure their release. As he put it
in a letter to an American correspondent (needless to say, a Scot),
James Crawford of Philadelphia, in September, 1796: "We shall upon all
occasions afford to American citizens every protection and assistance in
our power to obtain justice, it being no more than we should expect of
others were our property in the like situation."26 This attitude was a remarkably advanced and civilized one
for the time, especially considering that Forsyth lost several vessels
to French privateers. But there can be no doubt that Forsyth's
assistance to neutrals helped to strengthen his network of useful
contacts in foreign Ports, in many ways the true foundation of his
prosperity.
Other Scots were of key importance in Nova Scotia,
but they are little more than names today. One such was the industrious
partnership of Fraser and Thorn, who came out from Scotland in 1786 with
the backing of the Greenock firm of Alan Kerr and Co. They established a
fisheries and general trading base at Beaubair's Island, which became
the central point for the commercial development of the Northumberland
Strait and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In typical Scots fashion, they did
business with William Forsyth in Halifax. They also brought out
ship-builders and other craftsmen from the Clyde, from whose activities
sprang the later flourishing ship-building centres of Pictou, New
Glasgow and Antigonish.
Another dim figure of whom there is little record is
Captain Lowden, also from the Clyde area, who set up the first shipyards
in Pictou County in 1788-92. William Davidson and John Cort, Scottish
partners with experience in the large scale salmon fisheries of their
native land, established themselves about 1762 at the mouth of the
Miramichi River, in an area abandoned by the French. By 1766-70 they
were exporting annually, to Britain, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, the
Mediterranean, and the West Indies, no less than 1800 tierces of salted
salmon, or about twelve hundred barrels. By the mid-1770s they had
secured a vast grant of 100,-000 acres on the river and had launched out
into lumbering on a large scale, ship-building and general trade. Little
is known in detail of these operations, as is the case of Edward
Mortimer, the Scot from Banff, who became known as "the King of Pictou"
and the "master trader" in the 1790s, or of Alexander Walker, who built
up from Bathurst harbour a flourishing commerce in fish, furs, walrus
tusks and hides, oils and other local products. All of these men looked
to Halifax and its Scottish mercantile community as their natural base
of supply and source of provisions and trade goods. But because of the
loss of their records, our knowledge of the foundation era of Canadian
commerce is the poorer.
The centre of the economic life of the Province of
Canada from the 1770s on was Montreal. Fortunately here there is more
evidence to go on, partly because of the interest that has been taken in
that predominantly Scottish concern, the North West Company of fur
traders. Yet our detailed knowledge of such men as James McGill and the
remarkable Simon McTavish (alias "the Marquis") is really very slight.
In the case of James Dunlop, Loyalist refugee from Virginia, a merchant
trained in Glasgow and linked with several Greenock firms, we are
fortunate that his letters to his Scottish kinfolk have survived.27
Dunlop was intensely ambitious, rather ebullient,
very convivial, loved social life and liked to operate on a large scale.
He was, in fact, very different from the balanced, rather self-effacing,
cautious and sagacious William Forsyth of Halifax. Yet what the two men
did have in common was a keen perception of trading trends, coupled with
an ability to grasp the main chance when it offered. Commencing
operations as a "general trader" in Montreal in 1776, he built up by
1791 a thriving business as an importer of textiles, liquors and
groceries, based on his large warehouse -the most extensive in town - on
St. Paul Street. On the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in
1793 he was quick, like Forsyth in Halifax and numerous other Scots
merchants in colonial centres, to see the opportunities afforded by the
new wartime conditions. He launched out into the West Indian trade,
taking advantage of the Act of Parliament of 1788 which allowed vessels
carrying lumber, provisions and livestock to ply directly between Canada
and the British West Indies, and to bring back from the islands sugars,
rum and other commodities. As a result of this trade, between 1793 and
1815, Dunlop became one of the colony's largest shipowners. Dunlop also
exported cargoes, in both his own and chartered vessels, of choice
Canadian oak to Leith and to the Clyde, where they fetched unprecedented
prices due to wartime demand, profits of several hundred per cent being
made from some of these voyages. He invested heavily and profitably in
the export of Canadian grain and potash, for cereals were scarce in the
West Indies, England and Scotland while potash was in strong demand for
industrial purposes.
Unlike Forsyth, who operated his far-flung trading
empire from his Halifax counting house, Dunlop was a traveller par
excellence, devoting much of his time and energy to wayfaring through
Lower and Upper Canada seeking out grain, timber and potash and
bargaining with the producers. The goods purchased were paid for largely
in imported Scottish manufactures or West Indian rum, so that Dunlop
benefitted from both sides of the trade.28 He was also a dealer in treasury and other bills, and an
acute manipulator of the colonial money market. According to the
historian of St. Gabriel Street Presbyterian Church, in which Dunlop
worshipped, he was by far the largest operator in bills in British North
America, negotiating as much as fifty thousand pounds of government and
private paper on occasion.29 The proceeds from these
transactions were used to build larger and finer vessels, and to
stockpile vast quantities of wheat, potash and timber for speculative
export to the British market. On several occasions between 1891 and 1812
he was almost able to corner the market in these commodities - an
exciting game, which he played with verve, and steadiness of nerve.30
The ships which he built in his own yards, using
imported Scottish ship-designers, shipwrights and craftsmen, and manned
on completion entirely by Scottish crews, were among the largest built
up to that date in Quebec and Montreal. Named after members of the
Dunlop family, they were ships of over 400 tons - large sea-going
vessels judged by the standards of the time. By 1810 he owned three such
ships and was building two more in Montreal. In addition he owned, or
had shares in, more than thirty smaller vessels engaged in the coasting
or St. Lawrence River trade.
Dunlop's aim, in his own words, was to have "the
largest mercantile establishment in the colony." Therefore in the early
1800s he purchased extensive water frontages on the St. Lawrence River,
where wharves, houses, stores and other facilities were constructed,
achieving this high ambition.31 The
climax of his success came in the War of 1812. He had already made large
profits by shipping barrelled beef and flour to Wellington's armies in
the Peninsula, and he was a past master at securing supply contracts from commissary officials.
He now calculated that there would be bonanza profits from treasury,
army and navy bills, from an even greater demand for Canadian
ship-building timber, flour and potash, owing to the fact that there
were no longer competing United States goods on the British market, and
that rum and other provisions had to be supplied to the augmented
British land and naval forces in North America.
He also embarked on the project of taking out
"letters of Marque" for his finest ships so that they could operate
against the Americans as privateers. Remarkably, every single one of his
ventures, including the privateers, bore fruit. By 1814 he could
declare, "I have done more good business since the War began than ever I
did in the same space of time, but I also have been more bold in my
speculations than any other person or Company in this Province."32
The claim sounds rather vainglorious, but it was no less than the
truth.
Active in the militia (he served as a Major of
Volunteer Artillery), Dunlop was a "hard-liner" on the issue of the
American war. Unlike his countryman Forsyth in Halifax, who wished to
conciliate the Americans, Dunlop held that the War should be waged to
the bitter end, since "we will never again have the same good
opportunity of bringing the United States to our own terms."33
It is interesting to speculate about what
further heights of success this brilliant businessman might have
attained, had he not died suddenly in August, 1815, probably due to
overmuch "conviviality" in the celebration of Waterloo.
From the time of the foundation of St. John, New
Brunswick, by United Empire Loyalists in 1784, Scots had been
predominant among its traders. The principal commercial street of Saint
John in the 1790s was known as "Scotch Row," and McPhail's Tavern
thereon was a sort of unofficial commercial exchange in which goods were
advertised or "cried" and auctioned, and deals made. By 1790 there were
at least fifteen mercantile houses operated by Scots in the town. These
firms dominated the trade of New Brunswick, especially those headed by
the Black, Pagan and Johnston families, and by the enterprising Andrew
Crookshank. By 1798 there was also a flourishing Saint Andrew's Society.
Timber and fish were the principal staples in which
these houses specialized, the former becoming increasingly important
with the onset of the great revolutionary wars in Europe in 1793. Hugh
Johnston, founder of the house of Johnston and Company, the largest
mercantile concern in Saint John, came out from Morayshire in 1784 in
his own ship, with a cargo of Scottish manufactures. He rapidly built up
a flourishing business, based, like that of William Forsyth in Halifax,
on the trade to the West Indies, in exported fish and imported rum and
sugar. On this foundation he launched out in the late 1790s and early
1800s into a variety of other lines, most of them highly profitable, but
involving illegal smuggling activities on the border and the coastal
waters of the Bay of Passamaquoddy. From 1812 he played a leading part
in the highly illegal but most lucrative "Trading on the Line" with the
Americans. Like many of his countrymen, he was keenly interested in that
revolutionary maritime innovation, the steamboat. As a leading member of
the consortium which owned the General Smythe, New Brunswick's
finest steam vessel, plying on the Saint John River, Johnston took the
lead in operating steam vessels in the Bay of Fundy, being half-owner of
the Saint John, the first steamship to sail those waters.34
So large did these early Scots businessmen loom in
the Maritimes that only passing reference can be made to the more
outstanding figures such as John Black, from Aberdeen, via
Glasgow, who arrived in Saint John in 1786 as purchasing agent for the
important firm of Blair and Glenie, a Scottish concern based in London,
which was interested in securing masts and yards from New Brunswick's
virgin forests. He soon built up a vigorous trade in shipping, general
importing and timber exporting by having his own agents in Scotland. In
1802 he moved to Halifax where he took a leading part in organizing the
Halifax Committee of Trade (1804) and five years later promoted the
foundation of the Quebec Board of Trade which, like the Halifax
Committee, was formed to put pressure through the London Committee on
the home government to grant privileges to the British American ports.35
Another interesting personality was John Young of
Glasgow, merchant and agricultural reformer, better known under his
nom-de-plume of ''Agricola.'' Young was an active trader
"on the Line" during the War of 1812, and a devoted champion of
the commercial interests of the Maritime provinces and of his countrymen
there. Indeed, the two causes were so closely identified as to be
well-nigh identical.
The case of Christopher Scott, another leading
Scottish merchant, is an unusual one, because of the circumstances in
which he came out to New Brunswick. In 1797 the Scotts, already in the
first rank of British shipbuilders, faced a desperate situation due to
the lack of ship-building timber. Supplies from the Baltic were scarce
and expensive because of the restrictive policies of the Russian
government regarding exports. Consequently it was obvious to the senior
partners, James and William Scott, that new supplies must be secured
speedily. They conceived the plan of sending out their younger brother
Christopher, an experienced shipbuilder and master mariner, with tools
and metal fittings, cordage and sails, as well as a number of skilled
craftsmen from their yard, to set up a completely new ship-building
installation on the Saint John River. This was a remarkable project for
the time, and one that proved an immense success for the Scotts, as well
as a boon to the infant ship-building industry of the colony, for the
Scott craftsmen who settled there taught their crafts and expertise to
the locals.36
Within two years Christopher Scott sent nineteen new
vessels to the Clyde with timber, not only oak and pine for ship
construction, but also large quantities of black birch, which found a
ready market among the cabinet-makers of the growing furniture
industries of Paisley and Beith.37 The shipping of copper fastenings and
other metal fittings from the Clyde to the firm's New Brunswick yards
was illegal, prohibited by British or-ders-in-council, but, as in so
many other cases where evasion of the law was necessary for Scots to
achieve their commercial ends, the law was breached continuously.
Christopher Scott settled permanently in the colony,
in the border town of Saint Andrews in 1805, and became an expert
"Trader on the Line," privateer, smuggler, speculator in prize ships and
cargoes, and architect of a considerable fortune which he invested in
landed estates in New Brunswick and in his native land. He was
responsible for building the superb "Greenock Church" in the town,
providing financing, craftsmen and plans from Scotland; he also built
the fine blockhouse which still stands as a memento of the War of 1812.38
The activities of Johnston, Black and Scott helped to
usher in what has been called "the golden age of the New Brunswick
timber trade," as well as the apogee of Scottish mercantile influence in
that colony. In 1807, 156 ships sailed from its ports with almost 24,000
tons of timber. More than one-third of the vessels engaged in the trade
between 1800 and 1825 were Scots' ships, a number out of all proportion
to the country's relative shipping strength.
In the latter stages of the Napoleonic Wars,
industrial over-production, exclusion from continental markets, and a
glut of tonnage brought difficulties for Scottish manufacturers,
merchants and ship-owners. To many ship-owners, the Saint John and
Miramichi timber trades seemed the last resort if their vessels were to
have employment. The emigration traffic from Highlands and Lowlands was
also attractive in providing some return for outward voyages. This led
to a razor-keen competition among Scottish ship-owners, and, for the
first time, the ports of the east coast -notably Aberdeen, Alloa and
Grangemouth - began to participate in the trade, but Greenock, backed by
Glasgow, held on to its leading place.
Freight rates sank so low in this post-war period
that some Scottish merchants in the Newfoundland and Quebec trades sold
off most of their vessels, since low rates in the ships of others were
so readily available. Peace-time timber gluts on the Thames, the Mersey,
the Clyde and the Forth, with a new emphasis on quality and a need for
larger vessels specially built for the trade, soon led to the emergence
of large scale timber firms, who operated their own concessions on
contract systems rather than extending credit for goods to settlers and
taking timber in return. These new firms maintained their own sawmill
establishments and fleets of timber ships. Now a new phase opened in the
commercial relations between Scotland and British North America.
The four principal firms of the "new wave" of large
scale operations were all Scots' concerns, though two of them,
Richardson Forsyth and Co., and Scott, Idles and Co., were based in
London and Montreal, and another, Duncan Gibb and Co., operated from
Liverpool. The fourth of these leaders in the timber trade was the firm
of Pollok, Gilmour and Co., which revolutionized the industry in the
colonies.
The key figure in conceiving this giant among
contemporary companies was Allan Gilmour. Temperamental and adventurous,
he began his business career as a small importer of lumber from the
Baltic area.39 In 1804, however, he
went into partnership with the Pollok brothers, grocers and sons of a
Renfrewshire farmer. The new firm was capitalized at £1500 of which
Gilmour provided £1,000. During the latter years of the Napoleonic Wars,
Pollok and Gilmour gradually expanded their business by turning to the
Canadas and New Brunswick for their timber and by pressuring the British
government into imposing duties on Baltic imports. As one of the first
Scottish timber merchants to recognize the advantage of importing North
American wood, Gilmour moved his headquarters from Grangemouth at the
mouth of the Great Canal to Port Glasgow on the Clyde. In 1804 he
established a branch in Quebec City and in 1812 another at Miramichi,
and from that time on the firm grew rapidly. In the late 1820s they were
operating eleven shipyards in the North American colonies, and between
1822 and 1832 their fleet increased from 54 to over 100 vessels. In the
1830s, apart from the 5,000 men employed in the ships and shipyards,
over 15,000 were working in the forests of New Brunswick to obtain the
timber, although in Canada they bought directly from the lumbermen as
they rafted their logs down the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. In 1834
alone the firm exported 300 shiploads from Miramichi, St. John, Quebec,
Montreal and Bathurst, probably amounting to some 150,-000 tons if the
average ship's capacity was 500 tons, although some were much larger.
Pollok and Gilmour also acted as agents for ship-builders in the
Maritime colonies, selling large numbers of their vessels on the London
market. We may gain some idea of the way in which the wealth of the
partners increased during this period by the fact that Gilmour between
1815 and 1836 bought a number of country estates and finally in 1838
sold out his share to the Polloks for £150,000, not a bad capital gain
on his original £1,000 investment.40 The Polloks then moved
the headquarters of the firm to Liverpool where capital was more easily
obtainable and the port facilities had been greatly expanded. From then
on, the firm became English, although its fortunes had been made by
Gilmour.41
Pollok and Gilmour was only the most prominent of a
cluster of Glasgow, Greenock and Port Glasgow firms which were followed
by others in Aberdeen, Leith, Dundee and Dumfries, and which grasped at
the new sources of timber supply. James Scott of Glasgow had sixteen
ships in the Quebec-Miramichi lumber trade by 1823, while John Mitchell
of the same city had eleven vessels constantly plying from the Clyde to
the Miramichi by the same year. The squared pine of that river, so
easily worked, appealed to carpenters, joiners, house-builders and
shipwrights all over Scotland in the years of the wars and their
aftermath, marked by prosperity, temporary setbacks, but population
growth at an unprecedented rate.
When peace came, the timber trade continued to
flourish, and the Scots were predominant in it. Though Brougham might
rail in parliamentary debate in 1817 against the "Canadian and shipping
interests" and the "mercantile school" with its "inferior timbers from
the North American Colonies," the ship-owners and lumber merchants whose
interests were bound in with the Quebec, Miramichi and Saint John trade
were now so influential that there was no question of reversing the
policy of preference instituted in 1810.42 It is significant that Kirkman Finlay, member for
Glasgow, and a leading exponent of freedom in trade, who was presenting
petitions for his city's Chamber of Commerce at this time urging an end
to all restrictions, did nothing to support Brougham on this issue. His
constituents and their Greenock, Leith, Aberdeen and Dumfries associates
were doing too well out of the trade.43 Arguments like that
of the able shipowner Joseph Marryat, member for Sandwich in 1820, that
the Canadian lumber trade employed 340,000 tons of shipping in 1819 as
against 80,000 tons in 1811, were bound to be conclusive.44
The dominant role of the Scots in every department of
the commercial life of British North America up to 1825 is so vast a
topic that it has been possible only to indicate some of the major lines
of development. The period between 1759 and 1825 saw the Scots secure
not only a foothold, but also a commanding position in the economic life
of the country, and this trend continued unabated as emigration from
Scotland increased at an unprecedented rate in the hard decades of the
1820s, 1830s and 1840s. The new waves of emigrants showed the same
characteristics as their forerunners, and as James MacGregor, an acute
observer, put it when he described the influx into the Maritimes: "The
lessons of early life infuse among the lower and middle classes in
Scotland a spirit which will endure the greatest hardships without
repining whenever a manifest utility is to be attained."45 To the founding of banks, insurance companies and
industrial and trading concerns of all types great and small, the Scots
brought tenacity, shrewdness, industry and expertise.
The Scots' prominence and leadership in the Canadian
business world after 1825 appears most clearly in Montreal where men
such as James McGill, Simon McTavish, Peter Redpath, and many others too
numerous to name dominated the scene. The North West Company was made up
largely of Scots, as is pointed out in another chapter of this book. The
Bank of Montreal, founded in 1817, had Scots as five of its first
directors and the following year three more Scots or Scottish Canadians
joined the board.46 As the nineteenth
century wore on other Scottish names appeared. George Stephen, Lord
Mount Stephen, and his cousin, Donald Smith, Baron Strathcona and Mount
Royal, both played important parts in the financial world of Montreal
and were the two men responsible, along with the engineer Sandford
Fleming, another Scot, for the successful completion of the Canadian
Pacific Railway.47 Many of these Scots were the leading
philanthropists of the city, being responsible for the founding of
institutions such as McGill University, the Royal Victoria and the Montreal General Hospitals, the
building of churches and the establishment of commercial organizations
such as the Board of Trade and even the Mercantile Library Association,
a kind of merchants' mechanics' institute. While there were other ethnic
groups involved in the business life of Montreal, Professor Tulchinsky's
view that in Montreal, "the Scots comprised the dominant group in most
forms of commerce," is amply born out by the facts.48
If one looks to the Atlantic provinces one finds that
much the same state of affairs prevailed there during the mid and latter
part of the nineteenth century. When the Charlotte County Bank was set
up in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, in 1825, out of a total of twenty-five
directors, fourteen were Scots. Forty-four years later, William Jarvis
wrote a description of the launching of a commercial bank in St. John in
1832, in which he emphasized that the organizers were anxious that "the
Scotch system of banking should be brought into operation in the
Province. . . ."49 The early Canadian
banks were modelled on those of Scotland, with their wide distribution
of shares among the public, their establishment of branches and their
novel idea of lending money to well-recommended individuals. Other forms
of business in the Atlantic provinces usually followed the Scottish
patterns of operation.
To the west of Montreal from Toronto and Hamilton as
far as Fort William and Port Arthur at the Lakehead, the same phenomenon
was observable. Whether it was Sir Alan MacNab, who with J.B. Ewart and
Peter Buchanan pushed through the construction of the Great Western
Railway, or Robert Simpson, the originator of the chain of retail
departmental stores, Scots seem to have dominated the business world.50
If we leapfrog over the prairies to Victoria -
founded by a Scot, James Douglas - on the west coast we find that the
eastern pattern tends to repeat itself. Although many different ethnic
groups were represented in the thousands of people who came in with the
Gold Rush in the Fraser River Valley, Scots soon made their appearance
and gradually became some of the most important and influential
businessmen in the area. Thomas and James Lowe were two of the first to
come, arriving in 1861-2, and eventually became leaders of the business
community. Other Scots who came about the same time were J. Robertson
Stewart and Gilbert M. Sproat, president of the local St. Andrew's
Society in 1863. Sproat represented Anderson and Co. which was
interested in ship-building and the lumber trade. In 1859 the first
private bank was established by Alexander Mac-donald who was ruined,
however, by a burglary. Gradually more Scots, with names such as
Dickson, Campbell and Haliburton, moved in. One of he most important was
Robert Dunsmuir who had been selling coal from Nanaimo since 1855. In
1869, he discovered the Wellington mine which enabled him to form a
large coal mining company. In the 1860s men such as William Irving and
Alexander Murray operated the first steam ships in the area. A little
later another Scot who was to wield a great influence settled in
Victoria: Robert Paterson Rithet, who in 1868 was working for Sproat and Co. but later joined J. Robertson Stewart.
When Robertson retired Rithet formed a partnership with an Andrew Welch
and bought the firm. Gradually his interests expanded in the '80s to
wholesaling, shipping, insurance, lumbering, canning, groceries, and
sugar plantations in Hawaii. In 1890 he was a member of the legislature,
and subsequently became involved in railway-building and the developing
of port facilities.
In this connection we should mention the activities
of John Irving, son of the aforementioned William Irving, who along with
Rithet established the Canadian Pacific Navigation Co. which was
eventually bought out by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1900. Robert
Dunsmuir also continued to expand his interests, buying more mines and
finally building, with the help of government subsidies, the Esquimalt
and Nanaimo Railway. While extensive statistical studies of the
situation on the west coast have not been made, it is clear from what
has been said that the Scots operated in much the same way wherever they
located.51
The statistics provided by Professor T.W. Acheson
confirm the impression which one receives from accounts of individual
Scots. In dealing with the question of the origins of the industrial
elite during the period 1880-1885, he points out that 38% of the
country's population lived in the Quebec to Kingston area, and a similar
percentage in the area from Kingston to the Lakehead. The Maritimes had
20% and the West, principally British Columbia, 4%. Of what he counts as
the industrial elite 40% were in the St. Lawrence (Quebec to Kingston)
region and 37% in the Lake Peninsula (Kingston to the Lakehead) region
while the other two regions had about the same percentage as their
proportion of the total population. When recording the birthplaces of
the elite, 20% came from Scotland, the highest percentage of any group,
Canadian or non-Canadian, and it is interesting to note that at this
period the Scottish elite formed only 3% of the population. Carrying
this somewhat farther, however, we find that 28% of the elite's fathers
were born in Scotland, a percentage larger than that of all the
native-born and almost twice as large as the next percentage of
"foreign-born" who were Americans. Moreover it is well to note that
while only 10% of the elite with Scottish fathers were located in the
Maritimes, 31% were in the Lake Peninsula region and 40% in the West.
While these figures are based upon a sampling, it would seem that they
give a fairly accurate picture which certainly indicates that the Scots
tended to be the predominant element in Canadian industry before 1900,
and undoubtedly this would also hold true for their activities in
finance and commerce.
One further fact which should be considered is that
of the industrial elite who had Scottish fathers, 46% of the fathers
were farmers, 14% were craftsmen, 11% were in management and 21% in
manufacturing. The predominance of men with agricultural backgrounds may
explain in part their frugality, their usual strong religious
convictions and their industry. Farming either in Scotland or in Canada
was no easy life and tended to breed hard-working and rugged
individuals. This same background may also, partially at least, explain
their high degree of adaptability and the capacity of Scottish
businessmen to assimilate easily to their environment.
This chapter has barely scratched the surface of a
very large topic which can be fully examined only when hundreds of case
studies of individual Scots have been made on the basis of research into
business records. Yet from the work which has already been done it is
clear that the Scots' contribution to Canada as traders, businessmen,
manufacturers and financiers was extremely important. Their initiative
and their energy, backed by a network of business connections at home
and throughout the country, had most important long term implications
for the colonies which eventually became the Dominion of Canada.
Pierre Berton in The National Dream states the
Scots' accomplishments most clearly. He quotes from Lord Mount Stephen's
address when the latter received the freedom of the City of Aberdeen:
Any success I may have had in life is due in
great measure to the somewhat Spartan training I received during my
Aberdeen apprenticeship, in which I entered as a boy of 15. To that
training, coupled with the fact that I seemed to have been born
utterly without the faculty of doing more than one thing at a time
is due that I am here before you today. I had but few wants and no
distractions to draw me away from the work I had in hand. It was
impressed upon me from my earliest years by one of the best mothers
that ever lived that I must aim at being a thorough master of the
work by which I had to get my living; and to be that I must
concentrate my whole energies on my work, whatever that might be, to
the exclusion of every other thing. I soon discovered that if I ever
accomplished anything in life it would be by pursuing my object with
a persistent determination to attain it. I had neither the training
nor the talents to accomplish anything without hard work, and
fortunately I knew it.
And Berton then adds:
It was this hard ethic, so forcefully expressed
by Stephen, that explains the dominance of the Scot in pioneer
Canada. The Irish could loll in the taverns, sing, brawl, engage at
ward level in the game of politics and otherwise disport themselves
with the religious bickering that so engrossed their time and
energies. For the Scots it was work, save and study; study, save and
work. The Irish outnumbered them, as they did the English, but the
Scots ran the country. Though they formed only one-fifteenth of the
population they controlled the fur trade, the great banking and
financial houses, the major educational institutions and, to a
considerable degree, the government. The CPR was built to a large
extent by Irish navvies and Irish contractors; but it was the Scots
who held the top jobs. Almost every member of the original CPR
syndicate was a self-made Scot. In the drama of the railway it is
the Scottish names that stand out: Macdonald and Mackenzie, Allan
and Macpherson, Fleming and Grant, Stephen, Smith, Kennedy,
McIntyre, Angus and Hill - (who was half Scottish) -living
embodiments of the popular copybook maxims of the time. Waste not,
want not. . . Satan finds more mischief still for idle hands to do
... . God helps those that help themselves .... A penny saved is a
penny earned .... Remember that time is money .... Early to bed,
early to rise . . . Keep your nose to the grindstone .... See a pin
and pick it up .... 53
NOTES
1. David S. Macmillan, ed., Canadian Business
History: Selected Studies, 1947-1971 (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1972); W.J. Rattray, The Scot in British North America,
4 vols. (Toronto: Maclear, 1880); John Murray Gibbon, Scots in Canada
(Toronto: Musson, 1911).
2. For the role of the Scots in the fur trade, see
Mrs. W.F. Mitchell's chapter in this volume, as well as such earlier
works as G.C. Davidson, The North West Company, 1818
(Berkely: University of California Press, 1970): W. Stewart
Wallace, Documents Relating to the North West Company (Toronto:
Champlain Society, 1934); John Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River
(London: Macmillan, 1963). Harold Innis' classic study of the trade also
contains valuable material on the Scottish participation.
3. R.G. Lounsbury, The British Fishery at
Newfoundland (Hamden: Ar-chon, 1969), p. 44.
4. Ibid, p. 401.
5. For these early Scottish schemes, see the works of
George Pratt Insh.
6. For Watson's financial career, see the chapter by
Dr. Ian Nish in the history of George Watson's college, recently
published.
7. Lounsbury, pp. 198-9.
8. Ibid., p. 201.
9. Ibid., p. 203-6. For Scottish attitudes to
smuggling or "free-trading" in the eighteenth century, see P.W.J. Riley, The English Ministers and Scotland (London: Athlone Press, 1964),
University of London Historical Studies No. 15.
10. A.C. Wardle, "The Newfoundland Trade," in The
Trade Winds: A Study of British Overseas Trade During the French Wars,
1793-1815, C.N. Parkinson, ed. (London: Allan, 1958), pp. 243-4.
11. Daniel Weir, History of the Town of Greenock
(Greenock, 1829), pp. 11-| 18; "Note on the Progress of Greenock,"
The Scots Magazine, January, 1805; David Macpherson, Annals of
Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries and Navigation (Edinburgh, 1805) 4
vols. For the best account of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland, see
Henry Hamilton, An Economic
History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), Chapters 5-7.
12. Hugh Millar, William Forsyth of Cromarty
(Cromarty, 1844); David Loch of Over Carnbie, Letters Concerning the
Trade and Manufactures of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1774).
13. Glasgow Journal, January 28, 1760.
14. Ibid., January 8, 1761.
15. Colonial Office Records, Series 47, Vols. 80-83,
and Board of Trade Records, Series 5, Vol. 8 (London, Public Records
Office).
16. W. Stewart Wallace, The Pedlars from Quebec
and other Papers on the Nor'Westers (Toronto: Ryerson, 1954), p. 21.
17. Shipping lists and "Plantation News," Glasgow
Journal, 1759-1761.
18. Glasgow Journal, February 2, 1764, et
passim.
19. Ibid., shipping lists, shipping
advertisements and "Plantation News," 1765-1805.
20. For a full account of the North British Society
of Halifax, and its early worthies, see James S. MacDonald, Annals of
the North British Society (Halifax: Alpine, 1905),passim.
21. Ibid., p. 27.
22. Letter book of William Forsyth, 1796-8, Public
Archives of Nova Scotia.
23. Forsyth to Messrs. J. Petrie Campbell, London,
November 12, 1796, Forsyth letter book.
24. Ibid., passim, 1797-98. See also numerous
entries in Forsyth's account books.
25. MacDonald, p. 63.
26. Forsyth's letter book, pp. 83-4 ff.
27. Letters of James Dunlop, G.D./11151
(Scottish Record Office, Her Majesty's General Register House,
Edinburgh).
28. Dunlop to his brother Alexander Dunlop, Glasgow,
April 15, 1798, and December 29, 1799, and to his sister, Mrs. Janet
McNair, Greenock, July 1, 7 and 24, 1800,
Dunlop Correspondence.
29. Robert Campbell, A History of the Scotch
Presbyterian Church, St. Gabriel Street, Montreal
(Montreal: Lovell, 1887), pp. 96-7.
30. Dunlop to Mrs. Janet McNair, Greenock, June 1,
1811 and November 9 and 30, 1811, Dunlop Correspondence.
31. Ibid., Dunlop to Alexander Dunlop,
Glasgow, December 29, 1799.
32. Ibid., Dunlop to Mrs. Janet McNair,
Greenock, May 17, 1814.
33. Ibid., same to same, March 27,1815.
34. Cf. Johnston-Fulton Correspondence, New Brunswick
Provincial Museum, St. John, New Brunswick; also Royal Gazette and
New Brunswick Advertiser 1885-95; 1797-1814; 1816-1821.
35. For Black's early career, see The Judges of
New Brunswick and Their Times (St John,
1912), pp. 223-4.
36. Letter book, September 1798-August, 1800
(Archives of Scotts, Ltd., Greenock).
37. Ibid., John Scott to Messrs. Hunter and
Walkinshaw, Paisley, August 23, 1798.
38. For further details of Scott and his career, see
David S. Macmillan, "Shipbuilding in New Brunswick: From the Clyde to
the St. John River, 1798," in The Canadian Banker, 11 (1970), No.
1; and "Christopher Scott: Smuggler, Privateer and Financier," ibid.,
78 (1971), No. 3.
39. Correspondence, June, 1819, Lang Papers (Business
Archives Collection, Glasgow University); Parliamentary Papers,
Proceedings of the Select Committee on Foreign Trade, 1812 (186), vi,
Evidence and Submissions.
40. John Rankin, A History of Our Firm
(Liverpool, 1921). This book is obviously based on valuable business
records which have since disappeared. The "Pollock and Gilmour Papers"
held in the Business Archives Collection of the University of Glasgow
consist mostly of eighteenth century Scottish estate papers.
41. Ibid., p. 110. For details of the timber
firms and their relative importance see Louise Dechene, "Les Enterprises
de William Price," Histoire So-ciale - Social History, 1 (1968),
pp. 16-52; R.G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power (Hamden,
1965), pp. 355-6.
42. J. Smart, Economic Annals of the Nineteenth
Century (New York, 1964), pp. 596,599-600,757.
43. Rankin, pp. 188-9.
44. David M. Williams, "Merchanting in the First Half
of the Nineteenth Century: The Liverpool Timber Trade," Business
History, viii (1966), 106,110,111.
45. J. MacGregor, Historical and Descriptive
Sketches of the Maritime Colonies of British North America (1828)
(Toronto: Social Science Research Council, 1968), p. 72.
46. MacMillan, "The New Men in Action," in MacMillan, Canadian Business History, p. 101.
47. J.L. MacDougall, "The Character of the
Entrepreneur: The Case of George Stephen," ibid., pp. 192ff.
48. G. Tulchinsky, "The Montreal Business Community,
1837-1853," ibid., pp. 135f.
49. " Second Letter of William Jarvis to the
Shareholders of the Commercial Bank,'' Jarvis Papers, 16/19, New
Brunswick Museum, St. John.
50. D. McCalla, "Peter Buchanan, London Agent for the
Great Western Railway of Canada," in MacMillan, pp. 197ff.
51. J.M.S. Careless, "The Business Community in the
Early Development of Victoria, British Columbia," ibid., pp.
104ff.
52. T.W. Acheson, "The Social Origins of the Canadian
Industrial Elite, 1880-1885," ibid., pp. 144ff.
53. MacMillan, pp. 44ff.
54. Pierre Berton, The National Dream,
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), pp. 319f. Reprinted by
permission of the publishers.