Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  For over a decade the Glasgow Colonial Society was almost solely responsible for providing Presbyterian facilities throughout Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritimes, and by 1840 it maintained over forty ministers. Most were in Upper Canada, although a branch of the society, the Edinburgh Ladies’ Association, took a particular interest in the neglected Highlanders of Cape Breton, holding monthly simultaneous prayer meetings on both sides of the Atlantic to demonstrate the spiritual link between the old and new worlds. Under the leadership of Isabella Gordon Mackay, the association sponsored the emigration of Gaelic-speaking ministers, catechists and teachers to such an extent that by the early 1850s it had ‘provided the scaffolding and framework for the whole edifice of Presbyterianism in Cape Breton’. 47 After 1840 the Glasgow Colonial Society merged with the General Assembly’s Colonial Committee, a standing committee which had been appointed in 1836 as part of the Church’s greater commitment to overseas missions. A similar commitment by the Free Church of Scotland after 1843 meant that the second half of the nineteenth century saw considerable attention and resources devoted to colonial needs, not just in Canada, but all over the world. In 1862, for instance, the Reverend Martin Ferguson was sent from Inellan in Argyll to Chascomus, near Buenos Aires, ‘where a large and influential Scotch population are resident, and have built a handsome church and manse’. This development, in the opinion of the Church of Scotland,

  speaks volumes for the religious liberty enjoyed by our fellow-countrymen who have emigrated to this and the other numerous fertile plains of the district watered by the Rio de la Plat, where a liberal and enlightened government are desirous of promoting all the social and religious institutions which those who may adopt this country have previously enjoyed at home; and we cannot doubt therefore, that a large and respectable class of emigrants will seek this new and splendid field for their capital and labour. 48

  The search for religious identity took some emigrants down unorthodox pathways. The Mormon Church, established in 1836, found central Scotland a fertile recruiting ground in the 1840s and 1850s.Bythe end of the century approximately 9,200 Scots had joined the Church and over 5,000 converts had emigrated to Utah, as required by Mormon theology. The first missionaries to Scotland were AlexanderWright from Marnoch in Banffshire and Samuel Mulliner from East Lothian, both of whom had been converted to Mormonism after emigrating to Canada in the 1830s. They arrived in Scotland in December 1839 and while Wright travelled north to preach in and around Banffshire, Mulliner concentrated on the central belt, where in January 1840 he baptized his first converts in the Clyde. The troubled textile town of Paisley, which had already featured prominently in the story of Scottish emigration, was the location for the first branch of the Mormon Church in Scotland, and also supplied one of the first three recruits to go to America, in September 1840. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mormonism, like Chartism, made its greatest appeal in the economically volatile industrial counties of Renfrew, Lanark and Ayr, notably among coal miners and textile operatives, and despite some assistance offered by the Church through its Perpetual Emigrating Fund, several Scottish convertswho were ‘weary to go home to Zion’ were allegedly unable to do so for lack of funds. 49

  The missionaries’ activities did not go unchallenged. When the orthographically challenged Alexander Wright tried to preach near Inverness in 1842 he reported that ‘the pregadeous was so great that I could not get another heren. They spoke the galek and are very much pregadiced against anything but the tradition of their fathers.’ 50 Although no attempt was made to publish the Book of Mormon in Gaelic, some Highland Baptists were persuaded to change their faith. One Argyllshire convert, Daniel Mackintosh, nephew of the pastor of Lochgilphead Baptist Church, was berated by his uncle for violating both his religious identity and his family responsibilities by following a ‘fatal delusion’ and emigrating to Salt Lake City, where by 1851 he was editing a Mormon magazine. After charging Daniel with responsibility for the ‘cruel injuries’ and ‘agony of soul’ that his apostasy had inflicted on his parents, the Baptist pastor turned his polemic on the Mormon creed:

  By their own speeches I am thoroughly convinced that your leaders know not God. They were never converted. They may have a good moral character but they never experienced a change of heart. They do not love Christ, and therefore they do not speak of Christ. Their religion consists, apparently, in external economies and in show. If you are doing justice to their speeches in your periodical, there is little or nothing of Apostolic doctrine or scriptural religion to be found there … Your Leaders, your Elders, your Bishops, your Apostles, as you call them, appear to me to be a set of infidels, and their deluded followers moral Pharisees, of whom the Law said that publicans & harlots should enter the Kingdom of God before them. Oh how it pains me that my dearest Nephew is associated with such people. 51

  Other denominations were equally critical. In March 1852 the United Presbyterian Magazine publicized the Mormon recruitment drive in the hope that it ‘might perhaps do good in warning some thoughtless persons meditating emigration to the great theocratic settlement in America’ to think again, and when William McLaughlin of Dumfries, who had been converted in London, announced his intention of going to Utah, his father responded that it was ‘all nonsence [sic]’ and offered him a job in his home town. Richard Ballantyne recalled that when he had left Selkirk in 1843:

  As we parted with the people of Earlston many of them wept and promised us help if we should ever again return to sojourn with them. They thought we were deceived in leaving our home and country to serve our God. They said why cannot you serve Him in this country as well as in America. We told them it was the command of God that we should go. 52

  Some Scottish Mormons sojourned temporarily in the eastern United States, accumulating sufficient funds for the final trek to Utah, while others went straight to the West. Among the first arrivals, in 1847, were twenty-four Scots who came not directly from home but from the Lanark settlement in Upper Canada, and they were followed by 130 arrivals from Scotland in 1848. By 1890 there were 3,474 Scots in Utah, some of them successful businessmen but many of them artisans whose skills were used in the physical construction of the Mormon colony. Although they sought out fellow Scots and imported national celebrations such as Hogmanay and Burns Night, they seem to have been happy to obey the Mormon exhortation to disavow nationalism in favour of assimilation and concentration on the ingathering of the nations to the new Zion. The Scottish Mormons who organized Utah’s first pipe band in 1939 were anxious to point out that the purpose was not to foment a national spirit, ‘because first, last, and all the time we are AMERICANS’, 53 a sentiment that was probably encouraged both by the family nature of most Mormon emigration and by the Church’s portrayal of America as a favoured land with a divinely inspired constitution.

  If Mormonism discouraged the expression of national sentiment, the mainstream churches, to which most Scottish emigrants belonged, made a significant contribution to the forging of Scottish identity overseas. In practical terms, as we have seen, the various denominations provided money and personnel to build and staff churches in emigrant communities. Melville Church in the ‘Scotch Colony’ of New Kincardineshire, for instance, was opened in 1878 with the aid of a £100 grant from the Colonial Committee of the Free

  17. Melville Church, The Scotch Colony, New Brunswick, 1878. The Kintore and Kincardine settlements which comprised the Scotch Colony were founded in 1873 by over 700 settlers from north-east Scotland under the auspices of William Brown.

  Church of Scotland, and its longest-serving minister — who held the charge for fifty-two years from 1896 — was a Scot, Gordon Pringle. The existence of a church was also used by emigrants to reassure those still at home — particularly in Gaelic-speaking Highland communities — that their religious identity could be reconstituted overseas. ‘The greatest blessing of all,’ wrote Norman Mackenzie of Lake Megantic to his brother in Back, Lewis, in 1866, was that ‘we have the Gospel preached to us in our own t
ongue’, while John Macleod, writing to thank Sir James Matheson for his assistance in helping him emigrate from Lewis to Richmond, noted that the Highland settlers ‘have two churches, with Gaelic ministers settled over them, and form the two largest Protestant congregations in the eastern townships’. 54 Clergymen often became community leaders, offering advice on everything from medical problems to farming methods, as well as mediating in disputes and generally acting as agents of social control. Religion was woven into daily life, not least among the Presbyterians of the eastern townships, where land grants were allegedly marked out by ‘singing the survey’ — that is, settlers repeatedly singing the Twenty-third Psalm in Gaelic as they walked through the woods, marking the boundaries of each family’s plot. 55 The annual or biannual Communion season was celebrated with the same fervour as it was in Scotland, often drawing crowds of several thousand, although, as in the old country, only a fraction of those who attended felt able to take the sacrament. Its significance was highlighted in Sir Andrew MacPhail’s autobiographical novel of life in the Gaelic-speaking community of Orwell, PEI, where, even among second- and third-generation settlers in the 1860s, ‘the way of life, religious customs, and hierarchy of values were those of the old country’:

  The Sacrament was the event of the year. It lasted from Thursday to Monday. People came fifty miles. All work was suspended. Every house was filled, and many visitors were billeted in barns. Thursday was fast-day; Saturday for preparation; Monday for thanksgiving. The church windows were removed, so that those outside could hear the sermon and the Master’s splendid voice as he led the singing. The tables were ‘fenced’ and ‘tokens’ taken up. An elder was once seen to drag an unworthy person from the table lest he eat and drink damnation to himself. In early days the service would not be finished before the sun had set. We still do what we can to keep alive the spirit of the Sacrament. It brings us in contact with old men of rich and beautiful nature. 56

  As MacPhail’s novel demonstrates, the iconic significance of the church, particularly in Highland settlements, is powerfully reflected in fiction as well as the historical record. For Ralph Connor’s Glengarry settlers, life revolved around the church and the school, which respectively form the primary themes of The Man from Glengarry and Glengarry Days. For Connor it was Presbyterian godliness, taught in church and reinforced in school, that made the Highland settlers and their descendants successful and fulfilled. Hugh MacLennan, however, portrayed the Highlanders’ Calvinist heritage as a curse, holding its victims in thrall to a restrictive and inhibiting past, from which they made futile attempts to escape either through drunkenness and dissipation, or through an excessive — and obsessive — pursuit of knowledge:

  To Cape Breton the Highlanders brought more than the quixotic gallantry and softness of manner belonging to a Homeric people. They also brought with them an ancient curse, intensified by John Calvin and branded upon their souls by Knox and his successors — the belief that man has inherited from Adam a nature so sinful there is no hope for him and that, furthermore, he lives and dies under the wrath of an arbitrary God who will forgive only a handful of His elect on the Day of Judgment.

  As no normal human being can exist in constant awareness that he is sinful and doomed through no fault of his own, the Highlanders behaved outwardly as other men do who have softened the curse or forgotten its existence. But in Cape Breton they were lonely. They were no part of the great outer world. So the curse remained alive with them, like a somber beast growling behind an unlocked door. It was felt even when they were least conscious of it. To escape its cold breath some turned to drink and others to the pursuit of knowledge. Still others, as the Puritans of New England had done earlier, left their homes, and in doing so found wider opportunities in the United States or in the empty provinces of western Canada. 57

  Schools and societies

  Whether its effectwasperceivedas positiveor negative,andlargely irrespectiveof denomination, the preservation of their religious heritagewasundoubtedlyoneof the main vehicles for demonstrating and reinforcing the identity of Scottish emigrants, particularly Highlanders, in their transplanted overseas communities. Closelyallied with the church in this respect was the school. Emigrants like George Elmslie and Charles Farquharson were concerned to ensure the proximity of both institutions, the Scotch Colony boasted four schools by 1877, the year before its first church was opened, and for Ralph Connor the two institutionsworked hand in glove in the promotion of spiritual and material well-being. Ministers like NormanMcLeod were also schoolmasters and organizations such as the Glasgow Colonial Society dispatched teachers as well as clergymen. Emigrant guidebooks tooemphasizedtheimportanceof teacherandministerworkingintandem.Robert MacDougall was in no doubt that both should accompany emigrant parties:

  It would not only be ministers who would vouchsafe my hope for the Gaels. There is another special group of gentlemen that I would like to send along with them, that is the schoolmasters … The school is the hearthstone of the house of knowledge and information; and if the hearth of the house does not get swept clean and is not kept in good order, what hope do we have at all of gathering at the threshold? It is the schoolmasters who gird us up and prepare us to make our way through life as is proper for heroic men, and for Christians. It is they who make the ministers’ yoke, to a large extent, tolerable. 58

  In the realms of higher education too, Scottish ministers and teachers played an important — and overlapping — role. As early as 1693, the Reverend James Blair, a product of Marischal College, Aberdeen, and the University of Edinburgh, founded William and Mary College, where, as president, he introduced the concepts and curriculum familiar to him from his time in Aberdeen. The influence of the Scottish Enlightenment’s tradition of common-sense philosophy on eighteenth-century American education, culture and politics is well known. It is exemplified most clearly in John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey and signatory of the Declaration of Independence, but is also evident in the careers of men like William Smith from Aberdeen, first president of the University of Pennsylvania, and in the careers of several American students who returned to the United States after spending time in the Scottish universities in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scottish academics were head-hunted to help develop scientific instruction at Johns Hopkins University in the late nineteenth century, and in the same era a number of Scottish academics taught in American state universities. 59 Similarly in Canada, Scottish clergymen were prominent in the foundation and administration of institutions like the University of Manitoba. The powerful but paradoxical impact of a Scottish religious and educational heritage was also evident in both the life and fiction of Sir Andrew MacPhail. A graduate of McGill University in both Arts and Medicine, he was English Canada’s leading intellectual at the beginning of the twentieth century, first editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal and, through the mouthpiece of the University Magazine, which he founded, edited and financed from 1907 to 1920, a fierce critic of the social disintegration that he claimed resulted from the urbanization and industrialization of Canada. But although in The Master’s Wife he celebrated the stability of a traditional way of life based on the imported Scottish values of church and school, he recognized that education was also the gateway through which bright boys could expand their horizons and ‘escape from the land and the ice ’, as well as from the stifling sabbatarianism of rural Scotland transplanted to rural Canada. 60 MacPhail himself exemplified this tension, for while he spent much of his life in the secular, humanist academic world of Montreal, his heart remained in Orwell, to which he regularly returned and whose values he never repudiated.

  The interconnectedness of church and school was also demonstrated in Australia, where in 1826 John Dunmore Lang founded the Caledonian Academy, a primary school attached to the Scots Church in Sydney. This was to be super vised by a licentiate of the Church of Scotland and each day was to include prayer, Bible reading and religious education. That particular
venture was short-lived, but by 1844 there were thirteen primary schools in the vicinity of Sydney, nearly all with Scottish teachers. Thirteen years earlier Lang had opened his Australian College, staffed by three licentiates of the Church of Scotland, and of the 500 boys who passed through the college in its twenty-three- year existence, several went on to hold influential positions in the colony. The Scotch College in Melbourne, opened in 1851, performed a similar function for the sons of wealthy squatters in Victoria, particularly under Alexander Mor-rison of Morayshire, who, as principal from 1857 to 1903, modelled its curriculum on the lines of Elgin Academy, where he himself had been educated. Among the leading advocates of secular education — and a co-founder of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in 1833 — was Henry Carmichael, who had been brought out by Lang to teach in the Scots College but opposed his sponsor’s divisive denominationalism. Higher education in Australia benefited from a stream of Scottish professors, particularly at the University of Sydney, as well as from gifts and bequests from a variety of Scottish philanthropists. Aberdeen-born William Ormond, for example, a self-made pastoralist who left an estate of nearly £2 million, donated more than £100,000 to Ormond Theological College in the University of Melbourne, while the University of Adelaide benefited from the donations of Sir Thomas Elder from Kirkcaldy, another successful pastoralist, and the engineering school at the University of Sydney was developed with the aid of donations from Sir Peter Nicol Russell, another Fife emigrant, who had made his money as an engineer and ironfounder in Sydney. 61