How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  CHAPTER SIX: LAST STAND

  I found the Jacobite song that opens the chapter in Robert Chambers’s History of the Rebellion of 1745–6 (1840; Edinburgh, 1869). The new scholarship that clarifies the importance of Jacobitism, both in England and in Scotland, is too extensive, and probably too scholarly, to cite at length for the general reader. But any works by Evelyn Cruickshank (such as Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ’45) and Paul Monod’s Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989) will give the reader some idea of how historians are coming to appreciate the crucial role of Jacobitism as a political ideology in the Age of Reason.

  Oddly enough, no such scholarly work exists on Jacobite ideology and sentiment in Scotland, although there are literally shelves of books on the Jacobite risings in Scotland, both in 1715 and in 1745. The usual starting place for learning about the Forty-five is a biography of Bonnie Prince Charles. Almost every writer of British history for a popular audience eventually tries his or her hand at recounting the prince’s story. Everyone has his candidate for the best version: David Daiches’s Charles Edward Stuart: The Life and Times of Bonnie Prince Charlie (London, 1973) seems to me to have the right balance between readability and scholarly accuracy. I have not hesitated to use it in shaping this chapter, although I also relied on Frank McLynn’s more detailed Charles Edward Stuart (London, 1988) and Chambers’s History of the Rebellion and his Jacobite Memoirs of the Rebellion of 1745, published in Edinburgh in 1834.

  The stories about the Edinburgh volunteers come from John Home’s The History of the Rebellion in the Year 1745 (London, 1802) and Alexander Carlyle’s Anecdotes and Characters of Our Times, which is available in various editions. For the battle of Culloden itself, John Prebble’s Culloden cannot be surpassed, just as Prebble offers the definitive account of the battle’s bloody aftermath. However, I have also relied on Katherine Tomasson and Francis Buist’s Battles of the ’45 (London, 1962) for its lucid discussion of the military aspects of the campaign as a whole.

  Eric Linklater’s The Prince in the Heather (London, 1965) is a vivid account of Prince Charles’s escape and time in hiding in the remotest corners of Scotland, although there is a more recent version in Hugh Douglas and Michael J. Stead’s The Flight of Bonnie Prince Charlie (Edinburgh, 2000). The final remarks by Samuel Johnson come out of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which exists in several editions, although I chose to use the Yale University Press version, edited by Mary Lascelles and published in 1971.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: PROFITABLE VENTURES

  The invaluable book on the Glasgow tobacco trade and its participants is Thomas Devine, The Tobacco Lords (1975; Edinburgh, 1990), and what it sometimes lacks in discussion of personalities I more than made up for by turning to George Stewart’s Curiosities of Glasgow Citizenship, as Exhibited Chiefly in the Business Career of Its Old Commercial Aristocracy (Glasgow, 1881), C. A. Oakley’s Our Illustrious Forbears (Glasgow, 1980), and Margaret Lindsay’s Portrait of Glasgow (London, 1972). Adam Smith’s relations with commercial Glasgow are covered in Ian Ross’s biography (see Chapter Three, above), as are his relations with Robert Foulis. For the Foulis brothers themselves, I relied on David Murray’s Robert and Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press (Glasgow, 1913), and Some Letters of Robert Foulis (Glasgow, 1917), and Richard Sher’s “Commerce, Religion, and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Glasgow,” in Glasgow, Volume I: Beginnings to 1830, edited by T. M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (Manchester, 1995).

  The book I found most helpful for understanding the physical evolution of Glasgow was Andrew Gibb’s Glasgow: The Making of the City (London, 1983). For Edinburgh, A. J. Youngson’s classic study, The Making of Classical Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1966), is still indispensable; Charles MacKean’s Edinburgh: An Illustrated Architectural Guide (Edinburgh, 1992) is a handy street-by-street, almost house-by-house guide to the evolution of this fascinating city. On James Craig, see Kitty Croft and Andrew Fraser’s James Craig, 1744–1795 (Edinburgh, 1995).

  The Adam family, father and sons, still have not received the kind of systematic scholarly attention they deserve. It is possible to find editions of Works in Architecture, whose preface gives the best idea of their political and social agenda, as well as their aesthetic creed. Otherwise, the scholar still relies on a wonderful little book by John Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (Cambridge, MA, 1962), which is a model of what professional historical scholarship should be: careful, detailed, but also gracefully written. Also useful for this chapter were Joseph and Anne Rykwert’s Robert and James Adam: The Men and the Style (London, 1985), Steve Parissien’s Adam Style (London, 1992), and Sterling Boyd’s The Adam Style in America, 1770–1820 (New York, 1985). Those curious about Charles Cameron can check Dimitri Shvidkovsky’s The Empress and the Architect (New Haven, 1996).

  CHAPTER EIGHT: A SELECT SOCIETY— ADAM SMITH AND HIS FRIENDS

  The bibliography on Adam Smith is, of course, vast—especially since those who write about him come at their subject from three, or even four, different directions. Historians conjure up an Adam Smith who is slightly different from the one philosophers discuss, while economists manage to come up with yet another version, and sociologists still another—compare, for example, the Adam Smith described in Donald Winch’s Adam Smith’s Politics (Cambridge, 1978) with the one in Robert Heilbronner’s The Worldly Philosophers (1953; seventh edition, 1999). However, the best place to start for understanding Adam Smith in his own time and place might be in a book in which he appears only as a minor character: Richard Sher’s Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, 1985). It is the indispensable guide to the intellectual milieu of Edinburgh in the second half of the eighteenth century, and offers the proper context for understanding the reception and impact of Smith’s ideas. The two best introductions to Smith himself are Donald Winch’s book mentioned above, and Jerry Z. Muller’s Adam Smith in His Time—And Ours (New York, 1993).

  Ian Ross’s biography of Smith (see Chapter Three, above), was of course crucial for writing this chapter, as was Dugald Stewart’s Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith, which first appeared in 1793 but which was reprinted from the collected works of Dugald Stewart in 1966. Adam Smith’s two major works, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, are generally available, while even his lectures on jurisprudence and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, both of which are based on notes by former students, can be found in modern editions. The edition of Wealth of Nations I found most useful for this chapter is the University of Chicago Press edition, edited by Edwin Canaan.

  William Robertson’s celebrity as historian and author is all but forgotten now: but Stewart Brown’s edited volume, William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (London, 1997), helps to set the record straight, especially Richard Sher’s brilliant little article, “‘Charles V’ and the Book Trade.”

  The amount of scholarship on David Hume is almost as staggering as that on Adam Smith—although in this case it is the philosophers who enjoy the main right of way (an excellent overall guide is David Norton’s The Cambridge Companion to Hume, which became available in paperback in 1993). A key advantage of all this attention is that, as in Smith’s case, almost all of Hume’s works are in print in one form or another, even his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, of which the best edition is the one edited by Eugene Miller for the Liberty Press in 1985. Even Hume’s History of England can be found in abridged form for the general reader—although no one should take on Hume as historian without first reading Duncan Forbes’s Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975) and the relevant section on Hume in J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), which has decisively shaped my approach to Adam Smith, as well.

  My interpretation of Hume is bound to strike some as controversial; not surprising, since Hume is always controversial, even two hundred years later. A dif
ferent approach to mine, and in some ways a compelling one, can be found in Donald Livingston’s Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, 1981). In any case, the basis for any serious treatment of Hume as a historical figure is Ernest Mossner’s unsurpassed biography, The Life of David Hume (Oxford, 1954), which is now available in paperback, and his collection of essays on Hume, The Forgotten Hume, first published in 1943. A biographical shortcut is Nicholas Phillipson’s stimulating and intelligent Hume, published by Cambridge University Press in 1989 but now unfortunately out of print. The general reader will enjoy perusing Hume’s short autobiography, which is reprinted in the Liberty Fund edition of the Essays, and even The Letters of David Hume, published in Oxford in 1932.

  Thanks to his connections to Hume and Smith, who were also his harshest critics, Adam Ferguson is the recipient of a tidy little scholarly industry. There are two modern editions of his Essay on the History of Civil Society; there is a trail of excellent critical studies, of which the best might be Duncan Forbes’s Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Community (Paisley, 1979); and even a fine study of Ferguson’s influence on European thought, in Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Dicourse in Eighteenth Century Germany (Oxford, 1995), which clearly shows Ferguson’s influence on German thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel—and by extension, on Karl Marx. Edward Gibbon’s relations with the Scottish school are detailed in J.G.A. Pocock’s magisterial study, Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 2000). The quotation about Gibbon’s debt to Hume comes from The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, edited by John Murray (London, 1896).

  CHAPTER NINE: “THAT GREAT DESIGN”— SCOTS IN AMERICA

  I must mention two invaluable guides to the Scottish diaspora at the outset. Duncan Bruce’s Mark of the Scots (Seacaucus, 1996) is a comprehensive reference guide not only for tracing the Scottish impact on American life, but its effect around the world. Mr. Bruce’s more genealogical approach is different from mine, and we disagree on certain details—such as whether the Scots actually discovered America before Columbus! But my work was made much easier by being able to turn to his comprehensive catalog of famous Scots in history, which he supplemented with The Scottish One Hundred: Portraits of History’s Most Influential Scots (New York, 2000). There is an older prototype of Bruce’s project, Scotland’s Mark on America by George Fraser Black (New York, 1921), which is still useful.

  The standard guide to the Ulster Scot influence in America is James Leyburn’s The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1969). It is a dated work in many respects; Leyburn also refused to see the Scotch-Irish as Scots. It is a view which, as I hope the chapter makes clear, I reject. In fact, both groups had a great deal in common with settlers from the English Border region, a point David Hackett Fisher makes in his Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989), a principal source for the first half of this chapter, especially my discussion of words and things, along with Layburn and Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, 1988).

  Otherwise, two fine books cover the relationship between Scots and Americans in the eighteenth century: W. R. Brock’s Scotus Americanus (Edinburgh, 1982) and Andrew Hook’s Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations (Glasgow, 1975). My source on the Scottish impact on the Great Awakening is Marilyn Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (Oxford, 1988). For Benjamin Rush, I looked to Donald D’Elia, Benjamin Rush: Philosopher of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1979); the quotation from President Samuel Davies comes from John Kloos’s A Sense of Diety: The Republican Spirituality of Doctor Benjamin Rush (Brooklyn, 1991).

  Most Americans are totally unaware of John Witherspoon’s role in the making of their revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Even scholars rarely include him among the charmed company of “Founding Fathers,” perhaps because of his anomalous status as a clergyman. Nevertheless, an academic subculture of Witherspoon studies continues to thrive. Thomas Miller edited The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon (Carbondale, 1990), including the central text of The Dominion of Providence; L. Gordon Tait recently published a study of Witherspoon’s thought, The Piety of John Witherspoon: Pew, Pulpit, and Public Forum (Geneva Press, 2000); Witherspoon plays a major role in several articles that appear in Richard Sher and Jeffrey Smitten, Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1990). However, the only detailed biography remains Varnum Collins’s President Witherspoon: A Biography, two volumes (Princeton, 1925). The story of Witherspoon’s recruitment to preside at Princeton is found in Lyman Butterfield’s John Witherspoon Comes to America (Princeton, 1953).

  Tracking the Scottish Enlightenment’s impact on the Founding Fathers follows a more familiar path. Even general readers can enjoy Douglass Adair’s brilliant and stimulating article “‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’: David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist,” which is republished in Essays by Douglass Adair, edited by Trevor Colborn (New York, 1974). In it Adair states my central point definitively: “The young men who rode off to war in 1776 had been trained in the texts of Scottish social science.” Garry Wills made the same point somewhat differently in his Inventing America: Je ferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978). Wills was justly criticized for casting his net too wide in his search for Scottish influences, and for trying to make all the Scottish Enlightenment’s disparate elements fit into a single communitarian mold. But he deserves great credit for forcing everyone to pay attention to the crucial role thinkers like Hutcheson, Reid, and Hume played in shaping the mental frame for the American Revolution.

  For Thomas Reid himself, the bibliography is almost, but not quite, as extensive as it is for David Hume. Perhaps the best place to begin is Knud Haakonsen’s stimulating introduction to his edition of Practical Ethics for Princeton University Press in 1990. D. D. Todd offers another good summary of Reid’s philosophy in his introduction to The Philosophical Orators of Thomas Reid (Carbondale, 1989). I also found quite useful Peter J. Diamond’s Common Sense and Improvement: Thomas Reid as Social Theorist, which is now available in paperback, and George Davie’s classic study, The Social Significance of the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Dundee, 1973).

  Finally, my discussion of James Wilson relies on Mark David Hall, The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson 1742-1798 (Columia MO, 1997), and Shannon Stimson’s brilliant piece, “A Jury of the Country,” in the Sher and Smitten volume on Scotland and America cited above.

  CHAPTER TEN: LIGHT FROM THE NORTH— SCOTS, LIBERALS, AND REFORM

  The best way to learn about Edinburgh’s so-called Golden Age, roughly the years from Adam Smith’s death in 1790 to the Royal Visit in 1822, might be to go direct to the source. This means Henry Cockburn’s Memorials of His Time, of which the edition by Karl Miller for the University of Chicago Press in 1974 is the most accessible; even though it is out of print, it should be available at any good library. Otherwise, Youngson’s The Making of Classical Edinburgh is still useful for this later period in Scottish architecture and city planning, including the construction of the new university and Charlotte Square. David Daiches’s Sir Walter Scott and His World (New York, 1971) neatly summarizes the cultural life that era, as does the section on Scotland in Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, 1815–1830 (New York, 1991)—which, unfortunately, talks exclusively about Edinburgh and neglects the other two powerhouses of new ideas and new men, Glasgow and Aberdeen.

  The full story of how Scotland emerged from the Enlightenment and took over the cultural controls of Britain in the early nineteenth century has not been told before. However, Anand Chitnis in The Scottish Enlightenment and Early Victorian English Society (London, 1986) points out the path and the principal features on the way. Chitnis fully grasps the importance of John Millar, just as John Burrow, Stefan Collini, and Donald Winch uncover the crucial role Dugald Stewart played in shaped t
he early Victorian mind, in their fascinating collection of essays, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983). We are still waiting for a single definitive study or biography of Stewart. So for understanding Stewart’s relationship to Thomas Reid, I looked to John Veitch’s “A Memoir of Dugald Stewart,” reprinted in the 1966 edition of Stewart’s Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith, William Robertson, Thomas Reid (see Chapter Eight, above). The quotation about Stewart’s appeal to the English mind comes from James McCosh in his essay on Stewart in Scottish Philosophy (1875), which can be found in various reprint editions and even online (www.utm.edu/ research/iep/text/mccosh/mccosh).

  Dugald Stewart languishes in a scholarly limbo. No such fate has befallen his gifted students who founded the Edinburgh Review. The classic study is by John Clive: Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (London, 1957). It can be supplemented with Joanne Shattock’s Politics and Reviews: The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly (Leicester, 1989) and Biancamaria Fontana’s Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinbugh Review (Cambridge, 1985). Several biographies of Brougham and Jeffreys exist, including Henry Cockburn’s invaluable portrait of his friend Jeffreys. I found Robert Stewart’s Henry Brougham (London, 1985) particularly useful. The quotation about the Lothian workers cheering “Henry Brougham forever!” when they learned the Tories were out and the Whigs were in, comes from that work.

  On Thomas Macaulay, one book does the job: John Clive’s Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (New York, 1973). Macaulay’s two most important parliamentary orations can be found in various collections of his essays, since these were once considered indispensable models of English prose. Today we have no need of Macaulay, since we have Joan Didion, or perhaps P. J. O’Rourke, so these collections are hard to find in print; but it is still possible to spring one loose from a used bookstore or public library.