Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

The distinctiveness of the emigrant Scot was much more noticeable in an overseas setting. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries many made their mark as mercenary soldiers, notably in Scandinavia, but also in France, Prussia, Spain, Poland and Russia. The kings of Denmark and Sweden recruited heavily in Scotland, particularly during the Thirty Years War (1618—48), when up to 25,000 Scots signed what for many amounted to their own death warrant, and over 3,500 Scottish officers have been identified among British forces in Scandinavia and the Baltic states. 21 Others who had gone to the Netherlands, initially to fight against Spain, were re-formed into the Scots Brigade during the Thirty Years War, and many survivors later settled down in the Netherlands. The Low Countries also attracted Scots of a more peaceful persuasion, including scholars who studied medicine and law at the universities of Utrecht and Leyden, Calvinist churchmen fleeing the religious intolerance that blighted seventeenth-century Scotland and merchants who traded their coal, wool and fish at ports like Veere. Bruges had established a Scottish altar in a Carmelite church as early as the fourteenth century, Danzig in the fifteenth century, and other European trading centres such as Copenhagen, Elsinore, Dieppe, Bergen-op-Zoom and Regensburg in the early sixteenth century. By 1700 there were 1,000 communicants in the Scots Kirk at Rotterdam. To ensure maximum attendance at the biannual Communion season, the Rotterdam congregation altered the dates of the sacrament to avoid both midwinter, when Scottish merchants were away in the Mediterranean, and midsummer, when they were absent in the Arctic.

  Scottish merchant-pedlars had frequented the Low Countries — as well as Scandinavia, France and Prussia — since the 1500s, but the country which drew them out in greatest numbers was Poland. Scots citizens were present in Cracow as early as 1509, but the biggest concentrations were found in the Baltic ports of Danzig and Konigsberg, where Scottish shipowners liaised with their fellow countrymen in other parts of Poland to buy up flax and hemp to take back to Scotland. All Polish commerce was left to foreigners, and Scots from many walks of life flocked to Poland to take advantage of this opportunity, pushing their fortunes as craftsmen and itinerant pedlars, particularly in the century after 1560. By the 1620s, when the movement peaked, the Polish ambassador in London estimated that there were 30,000 Scots in Poland, most of whom settled there permanently and assimilated. 22

  Russia was another significant destination for eastward-bound Scots. Many of them, like their countrymen in western and northern Europe, were mercenaries. Scottish soldiers had probably gone to Russia since the fourteenth century, but began to form a significant nucleus in the 1550s, when a number of Scottish mercenaries in the service of Sweden were captured by Ivan the Terrible and brought to Moscow. Eighty years later Alexander Leslie, after fighting for both Poland and Sweden, was sent to Moscow by the Swedish king and recruited 5,000 foreign mercenaries — including Scots — for the unsuccessful siege of Smolensk against the Poles. But arguably the most famous Scottish soldier in Muscovy was Patrick Gordon of Aberdeenshire, who in 1661 was enticed by the prospect of better pay and conditions to move on from Swedish and Polish service and begin a thirty-eight-year career as a Russian mercenary. Scots also held key positions in the Russian army and navy in the first half of the eighteenth century, at the same time as the country was penetrated by engineers, architects, travellers and scholars. Scots doctors too had a significant role in Russia in the century after 1750. Sir Alexander Crichton and his nephew, Sir William Crichton, both served the Russian imperial family in the early nineteenth century, while Sir James Wylie was chief medical inspector of the Russian army between 1806 and his death in 1854. And Russia’s economic development was aided by men like the unscrupulous Charles Gasgoigne, managing director of the Carron Company at Falkirk, which exported armaments to the Russian navy from the early 1770s. Gasgoigne himself settled in Russia in 1786, leaving behind considerable debts but establishing cannon factories, iron foundries and a textile mill, to which he introduced western technology and Scottish and English workmen. Several of his enterprises were taken over by fellow Scots, including his former interpreter Alexander Wilson (who became engineer-general) and Charles Baird, who had come over from Carron with Gasgoigne and later developed his own industrial empire in St Petersburg. In a very different capacity, Scottish missionaries were active — if fairly unsuccessful — in the Caucasus from 1802 to 1833 and in Siberia from 1819 to 1840 under the auspices of, respectively, the Edinburgh Missionary Society (later renamed the Scottish Missionary Society) and the London Missionary Society.

  In the course of the seventeenth century, however, Scots began to look west rather than east, initially to Ireland, but increasingly to America. Although Scottish mercenaries — galloglas — had played a part in Ireland’s struggles against the English from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, significant settlement began only in the early 1600s. That was when James VI and I instituted the Ulster Plantation, whereby Scottish undertakers, mainly small tenant farmers from the overpopulated south-west of Scotland, with a smattering of lairds from Lothian and Fife, were settled in the six forfeited counties of Ulster. Highlanders — with the exception of some Argyllshire emigrants to Antrim — were deliberately excluded from the Plantation, for fear they would ally with the native Irish, but up to 30,000 Lowlanders may have moved to Ulster by 1641, probably from the home areas of the ‘undertakers’. Statistics are scanty thereafter, but a further 60,000—100,000 Scots could have crossed to Ireland by the end of the seventeenth century. The Irish economy improved as the Scottish economy deterioriated, particularly in the 1690s, when large numbers of Scots were driven out of their homeland by harvest failure and famine.

  America beckons

  Until the late seventeenth century relatively few Scots looked across the Atlantic, unlike their English neighbours. The exceptions were mainly criminals and political prisoners who were given no choice in the matter, including almost 2,000 Cromwellian prisoners in the 1650s and a smaller number of Covenanters in the 1670s and 1680s. Many of these unwilling exiles were taken to Virginia as indentured servants. Religious persecution was the driving force behind two other emigrations in the 1680s, the attempt to found a Scottish Presbyterian colony in South Carolina in 1684 and the settlement of Scottish Quakers in East New Jersey three years later, while America also became a bolthole for out-of-favour Episcopalians after 1689. In the vanguard of a steady flow of Episcopalian clergy was James Blair, a graduate of Marischal College, Aberdeen, and subsequently minister of Cranstoun, near Edinburgh. In 1685 he went to Virginia, where in 1689 he became the Bishop of London’s commissary and in 1693 the first president of William and Mary College, where he seems to have modelled the curriculum and teaching methods on his own alma mater. As Virginia’s most influential Scot in the early eighteenth century, Blair (who died in 1743) was to act as a conduit for fellow Episcopalians from north-east Scotland to secure positions as colonial clergymen, tutors and schoolmasters. His blatant manipulation of patronage sometimes infuriated the colony’s governors, as he imprinted a Scottish influence on the Virginian Church that was clearly disproportionate to the number of Scottish communicants in that colony. 23

  Political prisoners and religious refugees were not necessarily averse to serving in colonial militias or engaging in commercial ventures. The Reverend William Dunlop, factor of the short-lived and largely forgotten Carolina Company, held the rank of major in the local militia at Port Royal, South Carolina, and immigrant indentured servants often formed the rank and file of local militias. The Carolina Company’s subscribers were mainly Covenanters from south-west Scotland, but the venture involved extensive commercial networking on the west coast. The aim was to form a joint-stock company which would trade with local Spanish and Indian people, exchanging precious metals and skins for Scottish manufactures such as cotton and linen cloth, shoes, hats and scissors. The expedition of around a hundred colonists and thirty-five prisoners sailed under Lord Cardross, but when the infant settlement at Port Royal was destroyed by Spain, the e
xperiment was abandoned. Some subscribers returned home, but others, including Lord Neill Campbell (whose brother, the Earl of Argyll, was beheaded in 1685), invested in an alternative venture in East New Jersey. That settlement was sponsored by twenty-four proprietors, half of whom were Scots. It was initially promoted by George Scot of Pitlochie, who died, along with his wife, while accompanying a shipload of prisoners and indentured servants to the colony in 1685, and the leading Scottish Quaker, Robert Barclay of Urie. Yet while less transient than the South Carolina colony, the East New Jersey venture was not sustained beyond the Revolution of 1689—90, despite Barclay’s careful planning and assurances of good trading prospects.

  A number of Scottish entrepreneurs, many of them with good connections at court, therefore defied the English Navigation Acts to pursue commercial ventures throughout the American colonies. The most famous — or infamous — of these ventures was the Darien Scheme. In 1695 an act of the Scottish Parliament created the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, by which the Scots hoped to set up, on the humid and swampy isthmus of Panama, a colony that would trade simultaneously with the Atlantic and the Pacific. The result was an unmitigated disaster, attributable to poor planning and market research, the choice of a location that (like Port Royal) was claimed by Spain, the devastating impact of tropical disease on the settlers, and the determination of the English East India Company and the English government to undermine a scheme that threatened, respectively, its commercial monopoly and its delicate relationship with Spain at a time of joint action against France. The first contingent of 1,500 emigrants in five ships left Leith in July 1698, but within six months of arrival half the colonists had died and the survivors had fled to Jamaica in the face of a threatened Spanish attack. Two months after a second contingent of 1,300 colonists arrived at the deserted Darien settlement in December 1699 they were attacked by Spain from land and sea, and in March they surrendered, abandoned the colony and prepared to sail back to Scotland via Jamaica. Very few ever arrived, since all three ships were wrecked in August 1700, and the whole Darien venture collapsed spectacularly with the loss of almost 2,000 lives and most of the investment capital that had been subscribed by a wide spectrum of Scottish society. The country was virtually bankrupted.

  Within seven years of the Darien disaster, the Scots’ interest in transatlantic emigration and investment was legitimized by the union of the parliaments, which gave Scotland unfettered commercial access to England’s colonial empire. That constitutional change heralded a steadily growing Scottish participation in transatlantic trade and settlement alike, so that by the end of the eighteenth century Scots had a significant, and sometimes dominant, influence in many of the American colonies. Contrary to popular perception, until the 1760s the majority came from the Lowlands, driven by a combination of ambition and frustration. They included artisans and tradesmen responding to advertisements for better wages and living conditions, or impelled by periodic trade recessions; farmers banding together in land companies; tobacco merchants pursuing their fortunes in the Chesapeake; fur traders recruited by the Hudson’s Bay Company; doctors and scholars, who made a distinct impact on American medicine, philosophy and education; and, further south, an influential network of Caribbean planters.

  Some ambitious Scots, finding their route to office and status blocked at home, sought public positions in the colonies, manipulating their access to patronage for all they were worth. While India remained a rich source of patronage, a significant number of Scots secured public offices in the American colonies, some of them at a very high level. The best known are Cadwallader Colden, the lieutenant and acting governor of New York, Alexander Spotswood and Robert Dinwiddie, governors of Virginia, James Glen, governor of South Carolina, Gabriel Johnston and Thomas Pollock, both governors of North Carolina, and John Murray, governor of New York and Virginia. In all, there were thirty Scottish governors and lieutenant governors in the American colonies in the seven decades before the Revolution. These men in turn used their positions to promote the interests of their fellow countrymen through appointments and land grants, an activity which undoubtedly generated much of the anti-Scottish resentment that was evident in colonies like Georgia by the 1770s.

  Others sought to achieve their ambition through commerce. After serving a three-year mercantile apprenticeship in London in the early 1730s, James Murray of Roxburghshire became a successful merchant-planter and member of the governor’s council in North Carolina, bolstered by the patronage of the colony’s new Scottish governor, Gabriel Johnston. Roderick Gordon of Carnousie, a doctor, ship’s surgeon and slave owner, fits the image of a Scot on the make. In 1734, six years after he settled in Virginia and began to try his hand as a trader, he wrote home:

  My situation in this Colony is tolerable and we live in the most plentifull country in the world, for all necessaries of life; for our estates consist cheifly in land and nigros; which nigros make grain in plenty to raise all necessary provisions within ourselves, as also a great deal for export; which returns us rum, sugar & molasses from the Caribee Islands & wines from other islands; and the tobacco, made att the same time by these slaves, returns us from England all necessary appearrel for ourselves & slaves … I beg pardon for this tedious description of our country, but did thousands in Scotland know it they would desire banishment never to return. 24

  The tobacco trade to which Gordon referred was probably the most visible manifestation of Scottish entrepreneurial expertise in the American colonies. The Scottish merchants, who congregated mainly around Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Maryland, stole a march on their English counterparts by operating a store, as opposed to a consignment, system. After purchasing tobacco directly from the planters, the resident factors exported it to Glasgow on ships which, on their return voyage, brought in consumer goods for sale to the planters. Influential men like Robert Dinwiddie, whose brother was twice provost of Glasgow, used their positions to help Glasgow merchants become dominant in the colonial trade, to such an extent that by the 1770s there were well over sixty retail stores in Virginia belonging to two dozen Glasgow firms, most of the 2,000 factors who managed the trade in the colony were Scots and the rise of Glasgow as the second city of the Empire was based on its role as a tobacco entrepôt.

  Many of the tobacco factors were indentured to their trade. But indenture, which originated in Virginia in the seventeenth century, was of much wider significance, being of key importance in the settlement of the eastern seaboard of what in 1783 became the United States, as well as parts of the Caribbean. By the 1700s it was no longer primarily a device for transporting criminals and political prisoners, but a profitable enterprise for merchants and ships’ captains, who advertised extensively in the Scottish press, recruiting America bound passengers to fill the holds which they had just emptied of tobacco or cotton. Indenture also benefited colonial employers, since the indentured servants were cheaper than slaves, while the employees too found that, as the colonies developed, skilled tradesmen could command high wages, as well as a free passage and accommodation in return for up to seven years of servitude. Although it was obviously a device particularly suited to emigrants who could not afford to finance their own removal, the recruits were not necessarily impoverished, except perhaps during the recession of the early 1770s, when a higher proportion of families, as opposed to single men, took up indentures.

  But not all emigrants needed or wanted to tie themselves down to an indenture. Lowland farmers who objected to increased rents and new agricultural practices sought better prospects overseas by forming themselves into self-financing emigration companies, complete with written constitutions. The best known of these enterprises was probably the Scots America Company of Farmers, formed at Inchinnan in Renfrewshire in 1773 and commonly known as the Inchinnan Company. It had 138 members, mainly farmers, but also included forty tradesmen, ten servants and a few merchants. Two representatives sent to America in 1773 to explore likely locations eventually purchased a tract
of land at Ryegate (now in Vermont). They had been steered to that area by Dr John Witherspoon, a land speculator and president of the College of New Jersey, who had emigrated from Paisley in 1768 and later achieved fame as a delegate to the Continental Congress and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

  By the 1770s, however, the spotlight had moved from the Lowlands to the Highlands, and from individual to extended-family, or group, emigration. Between 1773 and 1776 a remarkable 18 per cent of all British emigrants came from the Highlands and Islands, many of them leaving in large parties on specially chartered ships. Some eighteenth-century Highland emigrants were given no choice about leaving. Around 600 Jacobite prisoners — including many Highlanders — were exiled after each of the two major risings, in 1715 and 1745—6, mainly to the Cape Fear River area of North Carolina. But, contrary to popular perception, most other eighteenth-century Highland emigrants were not expelled by poverty or landlord compulsion, the vast majority paying their own way across the Atlantic against the wishes of landlords, who feared a shortage of labour on their estates.While harvest failure, cattle disease and fluctuating seasonal employment opportunities undoubtedly boosted emigration figures in certain years, the main irritant for the emigrants was the social dislocation that resulted from the complete reorganization of Highland estate management.

  Clanship was destroyed as much by commercial landlordism as by government legislation. As traditional townships were broken up, as competitive bidding for conditional leases became the norm, as rents rose inexorably and as multiple-tenant farms gave way to single-tenant enterprises for cattle ranching and commercial sheep farming, erstwhile clansmen were ‘cleared’ to newly created crofting communities. There they were expected to pay their ever-increasing rents by combining subsistence agriculture with a variety of ancillary employments — kelp manufacturing, fishing, illicit whisky distilling, quarrying and seasonal employment in the Lowlands. Emigration was for most a reaction against these radical changes, an attempt to preserve or re-create a way of life that was being destroyed, particularly from the late 1760s, when the pace of change was stepped up in response to buoyant southern markets for Highland produce.