Scotland's Mark on America

Part 1

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SCOTLAND'S MARK ON AMERICA

By GEORGE FRASER BLACK, PH.D.

With a Foreword By JOHN FOORD

Published by

The Scottish Section of "America's Making" New York, 1921

FOREWORD

It has been said that the Scot is never so much at home as when he is abroad. Under this half-jesting reference to one of the characteristics of our race, there abides a sober truth, namely, that the Scotsman carries with him from his parent home into the world without no half-hearted acceptance of the duties required of him in the land of his adoption. He is usually a public-spirited citizen, a useful member of society, wherever you find him. But that does not lessen the warmth of his attachment to the place of his birth, or the land of his forbears. Be his connection with Scotland near or remote, there is enshrined in the inner sanctuary of his heart, memories, sentiments, yearnings, that are the heritage of generations with whom love of their country was a dominant passion, and pride in the deeds that her children have done an incentive to effort and an antidote against all that was base or ignoble.

It is a fact that goes to the core of the secular struggle for human freedom that whole-hearted Americanism finds no jarring note in the sentiment of the Scot, be that sentiment ever so intense. In the sedulous cultivation of the Scottish spirit there is nothing alien, and, still more emphatically, nothing harmful, to the institutions under which we live. The things that nourish the one, engender attachment and loyalty to the other. So, as we cherish the memories of the Motherland, keep in touch with the simple annals of our childhood's home, or the home of our kin, bask in the fireside glow of its homely humor, or dwell in imagination amid the haunts of old romance, we are the better Americans for the Scottish heritage from which heart and mind alike derive inspiration and delight.

It is as difficult to separate the current of Scottish migration to the American Colonies, or to the United States that grew out of them, from the larger stream which issued from England, as it is to distinguish during the last two hundred years the contributions by Scotsmen from those of Englishmen to the great body of English literature. We have the first census of the new Republic, in the year 1790, and an investigator who classified this enumeration according to what he conceived to be the nationality of the names, found that the total free, white, population numbering 3,250,000 contained 2,345,844 people of English origin; 188,589 of Scottish origin, and 44,273 of Irish origin. The system of classification is manifestly loose, and the distribution of parent nationalities entirely at variance with known facts. That part of the population described as Irish was largely Ulster-Scottish, the true Irish never having emigrated in any considerable numbers until they felt the pressure of the potato famine, fifty years later. There is excellent authority for the statement that, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War one-third of the entire population of Pennsylvania was of Ulster-Scottish origin. A New England historian, quoted by Whitelaw Reid, counts that between 1730 and 1770 at least half a million souls were transferred from Ulster to the Colonies--more than half of the Presbyterian population of Ulster--and that at the time of the Revolution they made one-sixth of the total population of the nascent Republic. Another authority fixes the inhabitants of Scottish ancestry in the nine Colonies south of New England at about 385,000. He counts that less than half of the entire population of the Colonies was of English origin, and that nearly, or quite one-third of it, had a direct Scottish ancestry.

These conclusions find powerful support in the number of distinguished men whom the Scots and the Ulstermen contributed to the Revolutionary struggle, and to the public life of the early days of the United States. Out of Washington's twenty-two brigadier generals, nine were of Scottish descent, and one of the greatest achievements of the war--the rescue of Kentucky and the whole rich territory northwest of the Ohio, from which five States were formed--was that of General George Rogers Clark, a Scottish native of Albert County, Virginia. When the Supreme Court of the United States was first organized by Washington three of the four Associate Justices were of the same blood--one a Scot and two Ulster-Scots. When the first Chief Justice, John Jay, left the bench, his successor, John Rutledge, was an Ulster-Scot. Washington's first cabinet contained four members--two of them were Scotch and the third was an Ulster-Scot. Out of the fifty-six members who composed the Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence eleven were of Scottish descent. It was in response to the appeal of a Scot, John Witherspoon, that the Declaration was signed; it is preserved in the handwriting of an Ulster-Scot who was Secretary of the Congress; it was first publicly read to the people by an Ulster-Scot, and first printed by a third member of the same vigorous body of early settlers.

George Bancroft will hardly be accused of holding a brief for the Scot in American history but, with all his New England predilections, he frankly records this conclusion: "We shall find the first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain, came not from the Puritans of New England, or the Dutch of New York, or the planters of Virginia, but from Scotch-Irish Presbyterians." It was Patrick Henry, a Scot, who kindled the popular flame for independence. The foremost, the most irreconcilable, the most determined in pushing the quarrel to the last extremity, were those whom the bishops and Lord Donegal & Company had been pleased to drive out of Ulster.

The distinguished place which men of Scottish or of Ulster origin had asserted for themselves in the councils of the Colonies was not lost when the Colonies became independent States. Among the first of the thirteen original States two-thirds were of either Scottish or Ulster-Scottish origin. Of the men who have filled the great office of President of the United States, eleven out of the whole twenty-five come under the same category. About half the Secretaries of the Treasury of the Government of the United States have been of Scottish descent, and nearly a third of the Secretaries of State.

But it is perhaps in the intangible things that go to the making of national character that the Scottish contribution to the making of America has been most notable. In 1801, the population of the whole of Scotland was but little over a million and a half, and behind that there were at least eight centuries of national history. Behind that, too, were all the long generations of toil and strife in which the Scottish character was being molded into the forms that Scott and Burns made immortal. It is a character full of curious contrasts, with its strong predilection for theology and metaphysics on one side, and for poetry and romance on the other. Hard, dry and practical in its attitude to the ordinary affairs of life, it is apt to catch fire from a sudden enthusiasm, as if volatility were its dominant note and instability its only fixed attribute. And so it has come about that side by side with tomes of Calvinistic divinity, there has been transmitted to Scotsmen an equally characteristic product of the mind of their race--a body of folksong, of ballad poetry, of legend and of story in that quaint and copious Doric speech which makes so direct an appeal to the hearts of men whether they are to the manner born or not. It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living from a stubborn soil, and still harder work to defend their independence, their liberties, their faith from foes of their own kindred, should be best known to the world for the romantic ideals they have cherished and the chivalrous follies for which their blood has been shed.

But, it is well to remember that long before the Reformers of the sixteenth century founded the parish school system of Scotland, the monasteries had their schools and so had the parish churches; there were high schools in the burghs and song schools of remarkable excellence. The light of learning may have waxed dim at times, but it was not from an illiterate land that Scottish scholars carried into Europe all through the Middle Ages the name and fame of their country, any more than it was from a people unversed in the arts of war that Scottish soldiers went abroad to fight foreign battles, giving now a Constable to France, a General-in-Chief to Russia and still again a Lieutenant to Gustavus Adolphus. If evidence were needed of the vigor of the Scottish race, it is readily forthcoming in the fact that for five hundred years the Land O'Cakes enriched the world with the surplus of her able men.

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