How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Preface

  PART ONE - Epiphany

  CHAPTER ONE - The New Jerusalem

  I

  II

  CHAPTER TWO - A Trap of Their Own Making

  I

  II

  CHAPTER THREE - The Proper Study of Mankind I

  I

  II

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Proper Study of Mankind II

  I

  II

  III

  CHAPTER FIVE - A Land Divided

  I

  II

  CHAPTER SIX - Last Stand

  I

  II

  III

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Profitable Ventures

  I

  II

  III

  CHAPTER EIGHT - A Select Society: Adam Smith and His Friends

  I

  II

  III

  PART TWO - Diaspora

  CHAPTER NINE - “That Great Design”: Scots in America

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  CHAPTER TEN - Light from the North: Scots, Liberals, and Reform

  I

  II

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Last Minstrel: Sir Walter Scott and the Highland Revival

  I

  II

  III

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Practical Matters: Scots in Science and Industry

  I

  II

  III

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Sun Never Sets: Scots and the British Empire

  I

  II

  III

  III

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Self-Made Men: Scots in the United States

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Acknowledgements

  Conclusion

  Sources and Guide for Further Reading

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  People of Scottish descent are usually proud about their history and achievements. Yet even they know only the half of it.

  They can recite many names and details in the familiar story of their people. “Braveheart” William Wallace and Robert the Bruce; the Arbroath Declaration and Mary Queen of Scots; Robert Burns and Bonnie Prince Charlie. They point out how James Watt invented the steam engine, John Boyd Dunlop the bicycle tire, and Alexander Fleming penicillin. Yet no one else seems to pay much attention. Scots often complain that Scotland’s place among nations deserves more exposure than it gets. But their complaints have an ironic, rather than a beseeching, tone. They seem to take a perverse pride in being so consistently underestimated.

  The point of this book is that being Scottish is more than just a matter of nationality or place of origin or clan or even culture. It is also a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it. This Scottish mentality was a deliberate creation, athough it was conceived by many minds and carried out by many hands. It is a self-consciously modern view, so deeply rooted in the assumptions and institutions that govern our lives today that we often miss its significance, not to mention its origin. From this point of view, a large part of the world turns out to be “Scottish” without realizing it. It is time to let them in on the secret.

  This is the story of how the Scots created the basic ideals of modernity. It will show how those ideals transformed their own culture and society in the eighteenth century, and how Scots carried them with them wherever they went. Obviously, the Scots did not do everything by themselves; other nations—Germans, French, English, Italians, Russians, many others—supplied bricks and mortar for building the modern world. But it is the Scots who drew up the blueprints and taught us how to judge the final product. When we gaze out on a contemporary world shaped by technology, capitalism, and modern democracy, and struggle to find our own place in it, we are in effect viewing the world through the same lens as the Scots did.

  Such an understanding did not come easily. Sir Walter Scott said, “I am a Scotsman; therefore I had to fight my way into the world.” The history of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one of hard-earned triumph and heartrending tragedy, spilled blood and ruined lives as well as great achievements. In 1700 Scotland was Europe’s poorest independent country (Ireland, after all, was governed by Englishmen, and Portugal still owned Brazil). Yet the story of how this small, underpopulated (fewer than two million people as late as 1800), and culturally backward nation rose to become the driving wheel of modern progress is not only largely unknown, it may even be inspiring.

  For if you want a monument to the Scots, look around you.

  Prologue

  The Tron Church stands on Edinburgh’s High Street, almost at the midpoint of the Royal Mile, which rises to Edinburgh Castle at one end and slopes down to Holyrood Palace at the other. In 1696 the Tron Church was in many ways a monument to the strength and success of Scottish Presbyterianism, or as the Scots themselves call it, the Kirk. In 1633 the Edinburgh Town Council had decided they needed a new place of worship near the “tron,” or public scales, where merchants and officials established the true weight and measure of commodities sold in the city markets. It would be designed as a specifically Presbyterian church. Unlike the larger St. Giles Cathedral, or the former monastery site of Greyfriars Church off Candlemakers Row, it carried no taint of association with Scotland’s Roman Catholic past. Nor would it be under the sway of the new Bishop of Edinburgh, appointed by King Charles I to thrust a foreign Anglican creed down the people’s throats.

  Construction got under way in 1637. Then, the next winter, High Street was filled with the sound of drums and psalm-singing crowds, as citizens flocked to sign a National Covenant to take up arms against King Charles. The Covenanters took over the city in defiance of their English oppressors. The Tron Church sat unfinished while the Scots routed Charles’s army in the Bishops’ War. It withstood the siege of Edinburgh by Oliver Cromwell’s troops in 1652. It was still unfinished when Charles I’s son, Charles II, sailed across the English Channel to be restored to his throne in 1660. Not until 1678 did builders finally complete its unpretentious steeple, “an old Dutch thing composed of wood and iron and lead edged all the way up with bits of ornament,” and set Edinburgh’s coat of arms above the doorway, with this inscription in Latin:

  THE CITIZENS OF EDINBURGH DEDICATE

  THIS BUILDING TO CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH.

  Edinburgh’s tron served the community in another way, as the town pillory, where the courts sentenced transgressors to be bound and punished. “Much falset and cheiting was daillie deteckit at this time by the Lords of Session,” wrote one diarist in 1679. He continued with relish, “there was daillie nailing of lugs and binding of people to the Tron, and boring of tongues; so that it was a fatal year for false notaries and witnesses, as daillie experience did witness.”

  Sixteen hundred ninety-six would be a fatal year for another kind of transgressor. August had been a cold month, in fact it had been raining and freezing all summer. As the Tron Church struck eight o’clock, four young men were hurrying past, huddled against the cold. One was John Neilson, law clerk in the Court of Session, aged nineteen; the next Patrick Midletoyne or Middleton, aged twenty, a student at the College of Edinburgh. With them were Thomas Aikenhead, almost nineteen, a theology student, and John Potter, also a university student at the tender age of thirteen. We do not know for certain, but they may have been coming from Cleriheugh’s Tavern, a favorite neighborhood haunt for students, law clerks, and members of the legal profession.

  As they passed the church, Aikenhead shivered from the cold wind blustering ar
ound them. He turned and remarked to the others, “I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell, to warm myself there.” Again, it is not known whether any of the other lads laughed at his little joke. But the next day one of them, or another of their circle, informed the kirk authorities of what Aikenhead had said.

  Aikenhead’s joke turned out to be no laughing matter. Other students revealed that, in between theology classes, Thomas Aikenhead had been systematically ridiculing the Christian faith. He had told astonished listeners that the Bible was not in fact the literal Word of God but the invention of the prophet Ezra—“Ezra’s romances,” as he called it. He asserted that Jesus had performed no actual miracles, that the raising of Lazarus and curing the blind had all been cheap magic tricks to hoodwink the Apostles, whom he called “a company of silly witless fishermen.” He said the story of Christ’s Resurrection was a myth, as was the doctrine of Redemption. As for the Old Testament, Aikenhead had said that if Moses had actually existed at all, he had been a better politician and better magician than Jesus (all those plagues of frogs and burning staffs and bushes and so forth), while the founder of Islam, Mohammed, had been better than either.

  All this would have been horrifying and insulting for a believing Presbyterian to listen to, but Aikenhead had expounded larger issues as well. He claimed that God, nature, and the world were one, and had existed since eternity. Aikenhead had opened the door to a kind of pantheism; in other words, the Genesis notion of a divine Creator, who stood outside nature and time, was a myth.

  Maybe Aikenhead had been bored. Maybe the theology student was merely showing off his ability to play fast and loose with issues that others treated with reverential care. The stunned silence and dumbfounded looks of his listeners must have been very gratifying to a young man who, at the ripe old age of eighteen, believed he knew it all. But the authorities were not amused. The truly damning evidence against Aikenhead came from his friend Mungo Craig, aged twenty-one, who said that he had heard Aikenhead say that Jesus Christ Himself was an impostor. When the Lord Advocate, the Scottish equivalent of attorney general, heard this, he decided that Aikenhead’s remarks constituted blasphemy as defined by an act of Parliament in 1695, which decreed that a person “not distracted in his wits” who railed or cursed against God or persons of the Trinity was to be punished with death.

  Scotland’s legal system operated very differently from the system in England. All power of criminal prosecution rested in the hands of one man, the Lord Advocate. He had full powers to prosecute any case he chose. He could imprison anyone without issuing cause, or decide to drop a case even in the teeth of the evidence, or pursue it even when the local magistrate deemed it not worth the effort. Lord Advocate James Stewart was learned in the law, heir to a landed fortune, and a keen member of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He also knew that the Kirk was deeply concerned about the wave of new religious thinking coming up from the south, from England, which its enemies called “latitudinarianism.”

  Latitudinarians were “big-tent” Anglicans. The name came from the supposedly wide latitude they were willing to give to unorthodox religious opinions that a more tradition-bound Protestant might see as lax or even blasphemous. They believed Christianity should be a religion of tolerance and “reasonableness” rather than rigid dogma. Although they were deeply despised in Scotland, the Latitudinarians had become quite powerful in the Church of England. Several were now bishops; one, John Tillotson, was even Archbishop of Canterbury. Tillotson and the other “Latitude men” were also closely wired into the new scientific ideas sweeping across seventeenth-century Europe. They were keen admirers of England’s two most famous scientists, the chemist Robert Boyle and the mathematician Isaac Newton, and saw no conflict between religious belief and rational scientific inquiry into the nature of man and the world. To a Scottish Presbyterian of the old school, Latitudinarianism was little different from atheism. And in Aikenhead’s jocose remarks, Lord Advocate Stewart sensed more than a whiff of both.

  Stewart had a formidable battery of laws with which to prosecute the case. In 1695 the General Assembly of the Reformed Church had recommended that ministers apply directly to civil magistrates for punishing cases of blasphemy and profanity. Scotland’s Parliament had then obliged by stiffening the old blasphemy statute with a “three strikes and you’re out” provision, in which after the third offense the unrepentant sinner could be put to death “as an obstinate blasphemer.”

  Now, Aikenhead was no third-time offender. This was the first time he had been up before the magistrate, and by law that was punishable only by imprisonment and public penance. But if it could be proved that he had “railed and cursed” against God and the Trinity, then he came under the special death-penalty provision. This is what Lord Advocate James Stewart decided Craig’s testimony established, and so when he ordered Aikenhead’s arrest on November 10, 1696, he fully intended to see him on the gallows.

  Aikenhead was taken to a cell in Edinburgh’s municipal prison, the Tollbooth. He realized at once that he was in a very serious position. At first he strenuously denied he had ever said such things. But when presented with the depositions, he claimed that if he did say them, he was just repeating doctrines he had read in some books (he did not specify which) that he had been given by another student—ironically, the chief witness against him, Mungo Craig. He instantly regretted everything. He did not only “from my very heart abhorre and detest” the words he had uttered, he wrote to the court, “but I do tremble” at the very sound of hearing them read aloud again. He stressed his sincere belief in the Trinity, in Jesus Christ as Savior, and in the truth of Scripture. As a native of Edinburgh, it was “my greatest happiness that I was born and educated in a place where the gospel was professed, and so powerfully and plentifully preached.” Thomas asked that his case be set aside, pleading his repentance and his extreme youth. But he was now in the grip of larger forces.

  The trial got under way, with Lord Advocate Stewart himself conducting the prosecution. There was no defense counsel.

  A Scottish jury had three options, not two, in offering a verdict, just as it does today. They are “guilty,” “not guilty,” and “not proven,” which jurors invoke when they decide the prosecution has failed to make a compelling case even when the prisoner is obviously guilty. Such a verdict might have enabled Aikenhead to escape the extreme penalty Stewart was demanding. But, confronted with the evidence absent a formal rebuttal, and with a prosecutor determined to make a public example of the boy, the jury found Aikenhead guilty of blasphemy.

  On December 23, Stewart asked for the death penalty. “It is of verity, that you Thomas Aikenhead, shaking off all fear of God and regard to his majesties laws, have now for more than a twelvemonth . . . made it as it were your endeavor and work to vent your wicked blasphemies against God and our Savior Jesus Christ.” Having been found guilty, Stewart added, “you ought to be punished with death, and the confiscation of your movables, to the example and terror of others.” The sentence was duly pronounced, and Aikenhead was condemned to hang on January 8 of the new year.

  By now the case was acquiring some notoriety. Two of Scotland’s leading jurists, Lord Anstruther and Lord Fountainhall, visited the boy in prison. They were disturbed by what they heard and saw. They found Aikenhead in tears and near despair. He told them he repented that he had ever held such beliefs, and asked for a stay of execution, “for his eternal state depended on it.” Anstruther in particular had his doubts about using a secular court to prosecute a case of blasphemy. “I am not for consulting the church in state affairs,” he wrote to a friend. The purpose of the courts, and of capital punishment, Anstruther said, was to punish crimes that disturb society and government, rather than sins against God. The law normally paid no attention to questions of cursing, lying, and drunkenness, and correctly so. “But,” he confessed, “our ministers generally are of a narrow set of thoughts and confined principles and not able to bear things of this nature.”

 
One of those who certainly could not was Thomas Hallyburton, later Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. His argument against Aikenhead was straightforward and brooked no opposition. God makes the laws, not man, and they must be obeyed. “We by our very beings,” he argued, “are bound to obey, submit, and subject ourselves to his will and pleasure who made us . . . and therefore his will, if he make it known,” as in scripture and the Gospels, “is a law, and the highest law to us.” Aikenhead, “this inconsiderable trifler,” had broken that law and so he had to be punished. Hallyburton’s attitude was, let him serve as an example to anyone who tries the same thing.

  A battle was shaping up between two different views of the proper relations between the civil and the religious law, with hard-liners like Hallyburton on one side and more secular-minded lawyers like Anstruther on the other. Someone who took an obvious interest in this, and in the Aikenhead case generally, was the Englishman John Locke. Locke was nearing the end of his career as a political writer and theorist, but his most recent work touched directly on these issues. This was A Letter Concerning Toleration, published in October 1689, which took the exact opposite approach to Hallyburton’s. “The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate,” Locke had written, “because his Power consists only in outward force; but true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.”

  Locke’s point was that it did not matter whether Aikenhead had broken God’s laws by saying that the Apostles were “witless fisherman” or Jesus was an impostor, or not. Religious belief was a matter of private conscience, and no public authority has the right to interfere in how it is exercised. It was a view closely allied with that of the Latitudinarians: “I esteem Toleration to be the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church,” Locke said. It also overlapped with Anstruther’s. Civil power was limited to “Civil Concernments,” as Locke put it, which by their nature excluded religious matters. Locke’s arguments, which form the basis of our modern idea of the separation of church and state, were beginning to have an impact in England, as the Act of Toleration of 1689 showed. But in Scotland, where witches were still being prosecuted in the courts and hanged (two would be executed that next year), as in Massachusetts (the infamous Salem witch trial had taken place in 1692), a different attitude prevailed.