CHAPTER NINE


MONEY!


‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’

The Gospel according to St Mark




There had been English attempts at colonising the New World of the Americas since the time of Elizabeth I. She had asked Walter Raleigh to take charge of the project and in 1587 just over 100 English souls established a settlement at Roanoke, south of Albermarle Sound in the territory of modern North Carolina. They did not last long in their new home, but were of course only the first of many.


Jamestown was set up, in what is now Virginia, in 1607, and Popham Colony began to find its feet in Maine three years after that. Some of those early footfalls became permanent; others were overcome by hardship, disease or the local natives and disappeared. The point is that by the time the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, New England, in 1620, the New World was hardly new to the English.


Between 1630 and 1640 there was a flood of English newcomers, all of them driven from their homes by religious persecution. Perhaps as many as 100,000 Puritans scattered themselves in colonies in New England and also in the Caribbean. Some attempted - unsuccessfully in the long run - to make homes along Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast, but it was to places like Barbados that most early settlers headed. Apparently prizing liberty above all things, the early settlers made the hazardous crossing to the Americas so that they might be free to live and worship as they saw fit. Before the middle of the seventeenth century some of those champions of freedom were making themselves rich by buying, selling and generally exploiting black Africans. The abused grow up to become abusers.


In the early years of the American colonies all servants - black, white or brown - were commonly known as slaves. Those whose crossings had been paid for by wealthy colonists were termed ‘indentured’ servants, so called because their contracts were folded and creased in the middle - ‘indented’ - and then torn in half along the line. The master kept one part, the servant the other. The same rules were applied to the Africans at first, with hopes of eventual freedom after the completion of a fixed term of labour. But gradually they were seen as too useful and too plentiful ever to be set free. Thus was the slave trade born and the supposedly God-fearing, freedom-loving Puritans were quickly in the thick of it.


Other European nations would witness an exodus to the west in the seventeenth century - Germany, France and the Low Countries among others - but by the start of the 1700s the English parliament was becoming concerned about the steady haemorrhage of their fit, useful men and women to the colonies and had begun to discourage them. Fortunately for the colonies, any shortfall of fresh blood was about to be met from the populations of Scotland and Ulster.


Scots were no strangers to the New World either by 1700. As early as 1621, during the reign of James VI and I, a Scots colony had been established in ‘Nova Scotia’: Newfoundland in Canada. The effort foundered, however, and within a decade the French had absorbed the territory and its Scots. By the 1680s Lowland Scots began to arrive in the North American colonies in considerable numbers. They brought both their Presbyterian and Episcopalian faiths and established themselves in prominent positions within the fledgeling society. Several became colonial governors.


It was during the middle years of the eighteenth century that Lowland Scots - and Scots-Irish from Ulster - began to wash across the colonies in a great wave. Famine, or the threat of it, was the spur for the first of the Ulster Protestants and from the 1720s onwards they amounted to a veritable flood of humanity.


A quarter of a million or so Scots-Irish made the perilous ocean crossing and then penetrated deeply into the west and south of the new lands, to Pennsylvania, to North and South Carolina and beyond. It was not famine that was pushing them across the Atlantic by then - rather the promise of land to be bought and fought for and riches to be made. Fierce they were too, at least as far as their new neighbours were concerned. As the middle fifty years of the century wore on, the Scots-Irish developed and maintained a reputation for hard work, hard drinking, uncompromising religious certainty and a determination to sort out any disputes with fists, blades and guns. Their rabid brand of Presbyterianism had survived a century in Ulster in an undiluted form. It was as though a cutting from John Knox’s personal tree of faith had been transported across the Irish Sea at the start of the seventeenth century. Kept sheltered from any subsequent wishy-washy liberalism, it had grown into something impossibly tough and unyielding.


They brought it with them, root and branch, when they travelled to the Americas and there established a reputation for fire and brimstone outdoor prayer meetings. These were the spiritual offspring of the conventicles that had caused so much trouble during the years of Covenanting and the Killing Times - and they sowed the seeds of the big-tent, revivalist tradition that is so synonymous with the practice of the Protestant faith in the southern states of America today. These Scots-Irish dared to challenge any brand of orthodoxy that attempted to raise its voice within range of their hearing; they taught their neighbours it was possible - indeed right - to challenge authority and in so doing they laid the foundations for the American Revolution itself.


The last of the Scots to leave and cross the Atlantic were the Highlanders, survivors of a world finally destroyed after 1746. Just as the Scots-Irish had brought with them an old-fashioned form of the Protestant religion, so the Highlanders carried another relic. In the case of the MacDonalds, MacDougalls, MacGregors, MacLeods, MacRaes and the rest of the thousands of Gaelic-speakers who settled in the Carolinas and beyond during the second half of the century, it was a memory of the old Stewart Scotland they transplanted.


One of those who took ship for the Americas in the early days was a teenager named John Wedderburn. He had joined his father, also John, in rising on behalf of Charles Edward Stuart. Wedderburn senior, a Perthshire baronet, was fighting as a Colonel in the Jacobite army when he was captured by government forces at Culloden and dragged off to London for imprisonment and trial. Young John, having managed to survive the butchery of that sordid battle, secretly witnessed his father’s subsequent gory execution for treason - by hanging, drawing and quartering - before fleeing the capital. Perhaps, as he swung like a pendulum counting down his own last moments and those of his old world, the man caught a glimpse of the boy. If he did, then the father’s eyes would have closed for the last time upon those of a son who belonged - or was condemned - to a new kind of future, one that the elder and his ilk would never rule again.


Cut off from his tainted inheritance, the teenager saw no future in Scotland and made his way instead to the port of Greenock, on Scotland’s west coast. It took him some weeks, hiding where he could, sleeping rough and evading government troopers, before he finally made it to the docks. There he approached a ship owner and struck a deal whereby he would work his passage to the Caribbean. It was just a month or so after Culloden and eighteen-year-old John Wedderburn had placed himself among the first of what would shortly become a general exodus of the clans.


By the time Butcher Cumberland was putting the ailing beast of Old Scotland out of its misery, a New Scotland was already experiencing its growing pains. Minister and lecturer Francis Hutcheson, who had succeeded his old master, Gershom Carmichael, in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1729, had been one of the midwives. Of equal importance in the delivery room was the advocate and judge Henry Home, who became Lord Kames, a pioneering philosopher, historian and improving farmer based in Edinburgh. Through their writings and teachings Hutcheson and Kames brought forth the next generation of Scottish Enlightenment figures - men like the philosopher David Hume, the historian William Robertson and the father of modern political economics Adam Smith, whose magnum opus An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is still central to the study of the subject today.


As well as an intellectual revolution that self-consciously and deliberately set about advancing human mastery of the arts and literature, biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics, medicine and the rest, its champions believed they were also committed to designing and building a better, more efficient, fairer society. It was nothing less than an effort finally to understand the world, accurately to describe it and then to improve it for the benefit of mankind.


Partly a product of the high levels of literacy amongst Scots of all classes - itself a consequence of Knox’s Reformation and his insistence that all people learn to read the Word of God - the light that burned in Scotland’s cities during the eighteenth century was brighter than any in the world, and perhaps at any time before or since. It was a light that revealed, in stark and unforgiving relief, the limitations of all that had gone before … Old Scotland. Ignited first in the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, the flame eventually spread out into the lives of Scots in every walk of life. Scottish universities - Glasgow in particular - attracted and welcomed not just the sons of nobility and gentry, but also those of merchants and tradesmen. The sort of people who were still excluded from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were, by the middle of the eighteenth century in Glasgow, devouring the lectures of men like Hutcheson and then setting out to make their own marks on the world.


While Knox’s Reformation had taught everyone to read, it had also applied its own rigid shackles around Scots’ lives. These too began to be broken by the teachings of the Scottish Enlightenment, so that the smartest thinkers were able to value the rights and freedoms of their fellow human beings (at least white, usually male human beings of the right sort) and to value them as essentially and fundamentally good. Religious faith was still there, but God was no longer being seen as vengeful and absolutist; neither was he at the centre of everything any more. Inquiry and exploration of the natural world of creation began to take the place of slavish adherence to religious dogma. Steps like these, away from God, were not to everyone’s liking.


Hutcheson was an Ulster Scot - Scots-Irish - and the son of a Presbyterian preacher. But from the moment of his arrival to teach in Glasgow he led the way in insisting it was best to treat everyone as someone of value, who should be encouraged to find happiness in helping those around him.


On the other side of the country, in Edinburgh, advocate and judge Lord Kames was coming to a more realistic and practical view of human nature. He was happy to agree with a lot of what Hutcheson had to say about man’s innate understanding of right and wrong, about the satisfaction to be had from being and doing and being ‘good’. But he also argued that human beings came together to form societies out of a desire to protect their property. Men and women - and children too - naturally desire to own more and more things, he said. But no one could sleep safe at night unless their belongings, their property, were safe from theft and damage. For this reason, Kames said, human beings were prepared to create and to submit to laws - to surrender some aspects of their freedom to an overarching society in return for peace of mind regarding their homes and valuables.


Kames was also the first to identify four stages in the development of human societies. Hunter-gatherers were the lowliest, followed by those pastoralist groups that kept herds and flocks of domesticated animals. In these primitive groups, argued Kames, there was no need for the rule of law. Order could be maintained via the discipline of individual fathers over their own families. More sophisticated, and therefore requiring the creation of - and obedience to - systems of laws, was the third form of society: that of the agriculturalists.


Kames argued that farming societies enjoyed a surplus not just of food, but also of time. This spare time enabled the emergence of specialist crafts people who could devote all their time to making the items of property that would be coveted by the rest of society. Even more importantly, arable farming depended upon people co-operating with each other and relating to one another in increasingly complicated ways. These relationships needed to be defined and, as the whole system became increasingly complex, so the members of the group empowered certain individuals to make decisions on behalf of the many. Here were the seeds of legal systems and of government - of ‘society’ itself.


In the fourth and final stage, according to Kames, society moved beyond the fields and enabled the growth and organisation of interconnected villages, towns and cities devoted to industry, trade and commerce. Here was the environment within which true civilisation could grow and so enrich the lives of its people.


These philosophies of life, developed by Hutcheson, Kames and their contemporaries, had taken root in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Soon they spread far beyond, becoming part of what underpinned the thinking of the New Scotland. James Hutton, from Edinburgh, who pioneered the study of geology, was among the first men in the world to consider the age of what truly underpinned Scotland: the rock itself. After four and half billion years, it was a Scot who began to draw close to estimating the planet’s date of birth.


Enlightenment figures like the chemist Joseph Black, of Glasgow University, laid the foundations for the discovery of the chemical building-blocks of the natural world. His disciples would discover, among many other fundamentals, the bleaching qualities of chlorine that would revolutionise Scotland’s linen industry. James Watt, born in Greenock, was a mathematical instrument maker by training and irresistibly attracted to the intellectual bright lights of Glasgow. He benefited from the company of Joseph Black, as well as from John Anderson and John Robison, and would of course attain immortality for his work with steam power. Many Scots believe their man invented the steam engine, when in fact his achievement was to make a crucial improvement to Thomas Newcomen’s ‘atmospheric engine’ by adding to it a separate condensing chamber that made far more efficient use of the steam’s heat and energy. Every Scot also knows, correctly, that the steam engine eventually powered the Industrial Revolution; but fewer remember that it was not until his partnership with the English manufacturer and engineer Matthew Boulton that Watt found access to enough practical and financial resources to develop his masterpiece.


Precisely because the products of the Scottish Enlightenment had such practical applications, its advocates and their followers were firmly grounded in the real world.


Kames’s work on improving farming techniques - which he practised and perfected on his own lands - were at the root of Scotland’s Agricultural Revolution. By his efforts and those of others like him, the Scots’ approach to farming was changed utterly. Instead of ancient subsistence practices, innovations like the enclosure of arable land and rotation of crops began to generate surplus and the potential for ever-increasing profit.


Contributions like Watt’s improvement of the steam engine would likewise make possible the growth of factories all across the central belt of Scotland as the seemingly unquenchable fires of Industrial Revolution began to burn as well. The vast majority of Scots had always lived and worked in the countryside, and in the first half of the eighteenth century only perhaps one in every eight people lived in a town of more than 4,000 inhabitants. The spread of industry between Glasgow and Edinburgh would rapidly turn Scotland into a country with more urban dwellers per head of population than most other countries in Europe. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a third of Scots were town or city dwellers.


The stars of the Scottish Enlightenment provided the intellectual scaffold capable of holding up a sophisticated, modern society that could be heartily exploited, for personal gain, by merchants, trades people and men of industry. Visionaries like Adam Smith would argue of course that by allowing men of business to maximise their profits, so society as a whole would be enriched.


This was the Scotland that Highlanders like John Wedderburn had chosen to leave behind when they took ship for the colonies. The cutting they carried with them and grafted onto the New World was that of the Old Scotland. While ‘enlightened’ Scots back home championed the union more passionately than any Englishman and had taken to calling themselves North Britons, many of those who crossed the Atlantic remained committed to ‘old’ traditions like independence, family loyalty and knowing their place in the social hierarchy.


Perhaps it was these characteristics, and an inbuilt willingness to obey a strong leader, that explain how well so many Highlandmen adapted to life within the British Army, their former nemesis. As early as 1724, General Wade had set out to exploit the martial heritage of the Highland Scots and to turn it to His Majesty’s advantage.


As part of his effort to pacify the Highlands he had pulled hundreds of Highland men together to form a force that might be used to keep ‘watch’ over their neighbours’ rebellious instincts. Originally known as the 42nd Regiment of Foot, they were clad in dark green and black tartan kilts that soon inspired their more familiar name of ‘The Royal Highland Regiment (The Black Watch)’. Ironically, it was in 1745 that the officers and men of the Black Watch first went into action - not in Britain against Jacobites but at the Battle of Fontenoy, against the French, in Flanders in modern-day Belgium. They were part of a combined British, Dutch and Austrian army led by the Duke of Cumberland and deployed against the French during the War of the Austrian Succession.


The battle was a defeat for Cumberland and his so-called ‘Pragmatic Army’ but the Black Watch had been conspicuously brave, earning the admiration not just of their own commander but of the French forces as well. One French officer described the men of the Black Watch at Fontenoy as ‘Highland Furies’ who had rushed in upon him and his men ‘with more violence than ever did the sea driven by a tempest’. It was the first time a Highland regiment had frightened the living daylights out of a foreign army, but it certainly would not be the last.


The flames of Scottish Enlightenment were already well aglow by the time Charles Edward Stuart sent his own fiery cross through the Highlands in 1745. Hutcheson, Kames and others had been at work for years by then, so when the Jacobites arrived in Glasgow and Edinburgh they found cities where their old-fashioned ways were neither appropriate any more, nor wanted.


It was in 1746, while John Wedderburn was turning his back on the land of his birth, that another young Scotsman was on his way home. Adam Smith had been born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, and received a sound education in the Burgh School there between 1729 and 1737. At the age of fourteen he became a student at Glasgow University and there attended Francis Hutcheson’s lectures on moral philosophy and the philosophy of law and politics. He quickly became imbued with the fundamental belief that freedom is an inalienable human right.


He left Glasgow for Balliol College, Oxford in 1740 but found the atmosphere there did nothing to improve his Scottish education or increase his understanding of the world. Such was his unhappiness at Oxford he departed the place in 1746, before his scholarship was even completed. He exhibited some of the symptoms of an early nervous breakdown, and of the oddities of character that would soon mark him out as an eccentric. He returned initially to his mother’s home in Fife but by 1748 had begun teaching at Edinburgh University, where Lord Kames became his patron. Hutcheson had died in 1746 and in 1748 Smith succeeded his former mentor on the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University.


Smith’s thinking was affected and, in part shaped, by three of the brightest lights of the Enlightenment. But by using his own unique genius to synthesise and filter the work of Hutcheson, Kames and also of David Hume, he created a philosophy all his own. Most of us think of Smith as an economist - author, of course, of The Wealth of Nations - but that work would not be published until 1776. By personal inclination, he was a moral philosopher and humanist too.


While Hutcheson had said all human beings were born with a moral compass capable of keeping them on the path of righteousness, Kames and Hume argued society was created and accepted by people so their personal property might be kept safe, and the worst of human nature kept in check. In parallel to, but separate from, these ideas, Smith formed the opinion that civilised society teaches its members to behave in acceptable ways. Individuals were not necessarily good or bad; they learned by example that they could get along better in life by mimicking the successful ways of others. Society was a mirror that showed a man what he was like, how he differed from others and what he might do to be more like the best and most successful of his fellows.


By the time Highlanders like Wedderburn were starting new lives in North America, and geniuses like Kames, Hume and Smith were holding court in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland was finally enjoying some of the economic success that had been promised to her in 1707.


By a fluke of geography Glasgow was in the vanguard of the economic advance. For most of her history Scotland had looked east for trading partners. Scots were vagabonds long before the time of the Jacobites or of the ‘Clearances’, and from as early as the 1400s had sought fortune and military adventure in countries like Poland, Sweden and elsewhere in northern Europe. For all that period, towns and cities on Scotland’s east coast had had the most to gain from foreign trade.


With English warmongering causing so much disruption to relations with their Continental neighbours during the late seventeenth and then the eighteenth centuries, entrepreneurial Scots eyes had learned to look westwards as well. The disaster that was Darien had taught Scots a severe lesson about making their way in the west, but it was not their first foray into the New World and it hardly discouraged such ambitions either. With her west coast location, Glasgow was perfectly placed to gain a head start on any trans-Atlantic voyage. The city itself had no Atlantic port as such, but via the River Clyde it had easy connections to those at Greenock and Port Glasgow. Successful efforts to dredge and so deepen the river made such access even more useful. As they say in those parts, ‘Glasgow made the Clyde and the Clyde made Glasgow’.


England had long had the whip hand in North America, with control of the seaways, but from tentative forays in the sixteenth century Scots merchants had steadily gained a foothold. In the years following the union, Scots agents were dispatched to the Chesapeake in Virginia and to North and South Carolina in search of supplies of tobacco. By the time the dust was settling after the 1715 Jacobite rising, the first ships were arriving in Glasgow loaded with their precious cargo.


Tobacco became a key element of the three-way trade’ system. On the first leg of the triangle, ships left Scotland bound for African ports where they collected slaves. On the second leg the human cargo was transported across the Atlantic in hellish conditions in the ships’ holds. (John Paul Jones, the Scot who would later lay the foundations for the US Navy, learned some of his seamanship while serving on ‘black birders’, as the slave ships were known. The stink from such ships, with their living cargoes chained helplessly in their own filth, was such that it was said that other vessels could smell them before they could see them.) The slaves were unloaded into servitude in the plantations of the West Indies or the North American colonies before the ships were reloaded with tobacco, sugar or cotton for the return trip. Fortunes were certainly made, but the profits were shaved slice by slice from the naked backs of fellow human beings. It is to the Scots’ eternal shame that a people who could write so lyrically about freedom in the fourteenth century grew fat in the eighteenth century by buying and selling other mothers’ sons and daughters.


The evils of the slave trade notwithstanding, William Cunninghame was one of those who rose from relatively modest beginnings to become one of the giants of the tobacco trade. Others of his ilk - Andrew Buchanan, James Dunlop, Archibald Ingram and the mighty John Glassford - left their names behind on Glasgow city streets. Antigua Street, Jamaica Street, Tobago Street and Virginia Street remember where some of their vast overseas estates were once located.


Cunninghame, born in 1715, would one day spend £10,000 - a vast sum at the time - building one of the most lavish and spectacular private homes in Scotland. When he bought the plot it was on a muddy track called Cow Lone. In time it would be renamed Queen Street and the house that tobacco built is now more familiar to residents of modern Glasgow as the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). The uniform grid of streets and buildings known as the Merchant City, between the High Street and Buchanan Street, was built as the first new town and is more of their legacy. Manhattan has its famous gridiron of streets and city blocks because the system had already proved a success in Glasgow.


For John Wedderburn, however, making landfall in the British colony of Jamaica in the bitter aftermath of Culloden, such a future for his homeland would have sounded as foreign as the land in which he found himself. As well as the unfamiliar heat, smells, plants and animals, he would certainly have noticed the seeming armies of black men, women and children breaking their backs in fields growing sugar cane and tobacco plants. Foreign it all certainly was, but for a young man like Wedderburn - determined to put his past behind him and carve out a bright future - it would also have smelled of opportunity.


If Wedderburn junior was thinking about reinventing himself, he was not alone. Following the success of the Black Watch in Flanders in 1745, scores of other Highland regiments were eventually raised. It was during the conflict known as the Seven Years War that the story of their legendary bravery really began to be written.


The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle brought the War of the Austrian Succession to an end in 1748. In reality, however, no one had been satisfied by its terms and all it really did was give Empress Maria Theresa of Austria time to regroup her armies and agitate for more trouble. Disgruntled by the loss of Silesia to Emperor Frederick II of Prussia, she eventually joined forces with France, Russia, Spain and Sweden. Lined up on the other side would be Britain, Hanover and Prussia and for the seven years between 1756 and 1763 they fought what is regarded by some as the first ‘world war’.


William Pitt the Elder, British Prime Minister from 1757 until his resignation in 1761, fought the war with great skill. Highland regiments were to the fore in battle after battle as fighting raged across Europe and in India and North America as well. While Austria and Prussia fought for supremacy in Germany, France and Britain vied with one another for control in the Americas and India.


During the bloody aftermath of Culloden, Cumberland is said to have spotted a wounded Lieutenant-Colonel of the Jacobites. The dying man, said the Duke, was giving him an ‘insolent’ stare. He turned to one of his officers and ordered him to shoot the ‘scoundrel’. That officer promptly offered to resign his commission but refused point blank to murder a man in cold blood. ‘I will not be an executioner,’ he said. That decent and honourable officer was Major James Wolfe. In 1759, during his legendary Quebec expedition that culminated in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, he would have men of the 78th Regiment - Fraser’s Highlanders - at his side until his death at the moment of his greatest victory.


1759 was a year of victories for Britain. Not only did Wolfe capture Quebec, but Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick smashed the French at the Battle of Minden and Sir Edward Hawke led twenty-three ships of the Royal Navy to victory over their French counterparts in Quiberon Bay, off the coast of France, near St Nazaire. Robert Clive of India had defeated the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 - securing British East India Company control of the continent for the best part of the following century - and in 1760 the last French-controlled city in Canada, Montreal, surrendered to the British. The Seven Years War was finally brought to an end by the Treaty of Paris on 10 February 1763 and Britain and Russia were the victors sharing the spoils.


The massive, global conflict had provided the backdrop against which the awesome reputation of the fighting Highlander had shone so very brightly. In 1746 the Highlanders had been rebel barbarians, synonymous with the Stuarts; and when Pitt first supported their use as British soldiers he remarked it was ‘no great mischief if they fall’. By 1763 and ever after, however, they were the disciplined and rightly feared shock troops of the British Empire. It was a stunning transformation. Now the same folk who had once despised and dismissed the Highlanders as alien barbarians could enjoy heaping praise and admiration upon them instead.


For Britain, the Seven Years War had been about claiming colonies, securing trade routes around the globe and winning the rights to the most lucrative commodities. Rehabilitated Jacobites had been at the forefront of the necessary fighting time and again. While the rest of the combatants had limited their military ambitions to Europe, Britain and France had taken the opportunity to battle it out for control of the ‘Empire of the West’. France had meddled in British affairs during the time of the Jacobites and now the British government had taken the opportunity to repay them amply. The Seven Years War caused the deaths of a million and a half people but victory for Britain opened up trade links to territories stretching from Canada to the Caribbean. Now at the helm of an empire on the rise, Britain was poised to become one of the richest nations on earth.


It took an outsider, however, to observe that not all of Britain’s people were thriving - certainly not all Scots. Benjamin Franklin, polymath and diplomat, had travelled to England and Westminster in 1757 on a mission to secure better representation and fairer taxes for the colonists. His father had been born in England and Franklin junior had lived on both sides of the Atlantic.


In 1759, as part of his sojourn during the year of victories, he visited Edinburgh and there spent time with David Hume, Lord Kames and Adam Smith, among other Enlightenment figures. 1759 was also the year that saw the founding of the Carron Iron Works and Franklin would doubtless have learned how much industry was springing up across the central belt connecting Scotland’s two greatest cities. West and south of Glasgow, in towns like Ayr, Kilmarnock and Paisley, was where the great textiles industries would take firm root. Herein lay another part of the secret of Glasgow’s success: the city’s west coast location was a lucky starting point for trade with the Americas, but the long-term economic growth of the place owed more to the way it became the hub for industry in the wider territory of western Scotland - the linen industry in particular.


During the second half of the eighteenth century the construction of two canals, first the Forth and Clyde and then the Monklands, made possible the efficient movement of raw materials and finished products into and out of Glasgow. The completion of the Union Canal in 1822, linking the east of the country with the west, would further accelerate the speed of change. Carron Iron Works, and later the textiles complex of New Lanark, were both located near sources either of power or raw materials, or both - but were also, and crucially, tied into the larger industrial complex of which Glasgow was the beating heart.


Franklin would write to Lord Kames to say how much he had enjoyed his time in the Scottish capital and how impressed he had been with those individuals he had visited:

On the whole, I must say, I think the time we spent there was six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life, and the agreeable and instructive society we found there in such plenty has left so pleasing an impression on my memory that did not strong connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.



Franklin was a wonder of his own age - and any other. Nothing was beyond the reach of his talents and over the years he would excel as an author, civic activist, inventor, musician, political theorist, politician, publisher, satirst and scientist, as well as a statesman and diplomat. But while he enjoyed the company of the fellow geniuses he encountered in Edinburgh, it did not stop him noticing that Scotland’s society was also far from perfect. He would later write to a friend, lamenting some of what he had seen:

I have lately made a Tour thro’ Ireland and Scotland. In these Countries a small Part of the Society are Landlords, great Noblemen and Gentlemen, extreamly opulent, living in the highest Affluence and Magnificence: The bulk of the People Tenants, extreamly poor, living in the most sordid Wretchedness in dirty Hovels of Mud and Straw, and cloathed only in Rags …

Had I never been in the American Colonies, but was to form my Judgment of Civil Society by what I have lately seen, I should never advise a Nation of Savages to admit of Civilisation: For I assure you, that in the Possession and Enjoyment of the various Comforts of Life, compar’d to these People every Indian is a Gentleman: And the Effect of this kind of Civil Society seems only to be, the depressing Multitudes below the Savage State that a few may be rais’d above it.



Franklin had come to Britain, in part, to decide whether his fellow colonists might benefit from a full union with the old country. But while he would concede that the Anglo-Scots union had laid the foundations for an imperial superpower, he lamented the divisions and weaknesses within the society it had created. The French philosopher Voltaire would say that ‘We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’, but Franklin felt the country had failed to shake off its ancient yokes of hierarchy, patronage and class. Disappointed by the way in which the rich of the land were getting richer while the poor got poorer, he left for home convinced America could do better.


While Franklin was forming his opinions about Scotland and Britain, Adam Smith was paying close attention to developments in the American colonies, and those closer to home. The burgeoning tobacco trade that was so enriching Glasgow in general - and the city’s new breed of oligarch, the self-styled ‘Tobacco Lords’, in particular - drew much of his interest. He certainly loved the energy and buzz of it all and enjoyed every minute he spent among the hubbub of the thriving world of commerce developing on the banks of the Clyde. The Broomielaw had been so named in honour of the broom bushes that grew in profusion along the water’s edge, but by Smith’s time it was dominated by the rattle and hum of the business of making money.


With their ships at sea for months at a time, the city’s tobacco merchants had plenty of spare time. They spent much of it in the new Tontine Hotel, at Glasgow Cross, sipping coffee or fashionable rum drinks, often promenading along the riverside in their trademark purple cloaks, gold-topped canes in hand. They were among the celebrities of their day and they liked to be seen and heard. Smith admired the newness of the society evolving on the other side of the Atlantic, its energy and optimism. But he was easily intelligent enough to see that there were lessons to be learned from Glasgow’s tobacco trade - and that not all of them made for comfortable reading.


He had, after all, grown up knowing the lengths to which some men would go in pursuit of wealth. His father had been a customs officer in Fife, and the stress of trying and failing to deal with the local smugglers had driven him to an early grave, six months before his son was born. This knowledge, that even punitive laws were insufficient to discourage illicit trade and the pursuit of self-interest, would persuade Smith that the money-making urge ought to be harnessed rather than discouraged.


During the 1750s, Glasgow’s hold upon the American tobacco trade grew tight as a vice. Before 1740 Glasgow merchants were importing no more than 10 per cent of Britain’s share of the crop, but by the late 1750s they were handling more tobacco than all English ports combined. By far the majority of the trade was controlled by a handful of Glasgow men and their families. William Cunninghame, John Glassford and Alexander Spiers were the big three and they were to become legends in their own lifetimes.


In the years running up to the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775 even the least of the Scots tobacco merchants grew rich. For the giants among them, the fortunes being made were on a scale almost beyond belief. Mr Darcy, the fictional hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, was wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice on an income of £10,000 a year; Glassford, a real-life figure living in the time Austen wrote about, was earning up to £500,000 a year.


The Tobacco Lords were among the first members of the newly formed Political Economy Club, where businessmen met to discuss the skills of their trade. By working his way into their company Smith was able to develop contacts and learn about commerce. He befriended Glassford and was therefore able to base his study of the tobacco trade on first-hand research. He saw that his friend and his ilk had secured their stranglehold by bold, cut-throat business practices: while English tobacco traders acted as middlemen - selling the stuff onto the European markets on behalf of the growers, for an agreed commission - Glasgow’s Tobacco Lords bought the crop at source for pre-arranged prices. When the time came to sell their wares on the Continent, the profit margins were colossal.


All year their placemen would allow the tobacco growers to buy luxury goods and other commodities from their stores in the colonies. Most, if not all, of the purchases were made on credit - on the understanding that the Glasgow merchants would, in return for the favours, be given first refusal on the eventual harvest. It was a brilliant scheme and one that required the Tobacco Lords to have access to large amounts of capital from home. This was achieved by building networks of family backers who were made shareholders in the companies as quid pro quo for investment.


This access to family money meant the Scots firms were heavily capitalised, without the need to seek funding from outside their own clique; but it also exposed them to massive personal risk in times of crop failure or loss of ships and cargo. Another ingredient in the Scottish recipe for success was that the merchants owned and operated their own fleets of ships rather than chartering vessels, like the English merchants did. This innovation let the Scots push for very speedy turnarounds in a system that was described as the ‘Clockwork Operation’. Ships arrived in harbour in the colonies, offloaded their own cargoes and reloaded with the tobacco, sugar or cotton for the return trip in as short a time as possible. As well as speeding up the round trip of 7,000 miles, it also minimised the time ships spent in colonial harbours infested with worms capable of causing untold damage to ships’ wooden hulls.


Twice a year the Cunninghame - William Cunninghame’s pride and joy - would arrive in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. William Cunninghame junior, serving time in the colonial side of his father’s operation, would be there to meet it. Beside him on the dock were hogsheads of tobacco, recently purchased for the lowest possible price and ready for the trip home. Before they could be put aboard his father’s ship, however, William would have to oversee the unloading of the Cunninghame’s cargo of leather-covered chairs, silver tea sets, china dinner services and the rest of the luxury goods destined for the company stores.


For an apprentice like William, mosquitoes, stifling heat and the stress of meeting his father’s exacting standards were all part of the established Scottish way of training the next generation of masters of the universe. Hard graft - learning the business from the bottom up - was demanded of those who would make a mark on the New World. They were also expected to be dealmakers - and ruthless dealmakers at that. The tobacco price was set once a year at a meeting of growers at the county court house. The price arrived at became the central point in a gentleman’s agreement, but the Tobacco Lords did not grow to dominance by being gentlemen.


Most of the growers were small-scale operations, often run by émigré Scots of a few generations’ standing. Their life and work was hard and payday only came once a year, when their crop was sold. For such men, the insidiously seductive influence of the Glasgow merchants was all but irresistible: they offered access to all manner of goods in their stores and all that luxury could be had on credit.


In the hands of skilled dealers - of the sort young William was fast becoming - the credit system became a trap for the growers. By the end of a season they might be hugely in debt to the stores and their owners and obliged to accept whatever price the merchants might bid for their tobacco. Cunninghame was known to offer as much as 20 per cent below the agreed market price and his debtors had no option but to accept. It was a simple trick but one made even more complicated by the fact that all the Glasgow merchants were at it. Correspondence from Cunninghame senior contains references to all manner of dirty tricks: growers should be befriended, offered drink, their trust won so that they might be exploited later on. By the later decades of the eighteenth century the Scots had earned a reputation for unscrupulous deviousness.


All of this brave, entrepreneurial endeavour created the possibility of huge rewards but also carried the risk of complete financial disaster. The Bogies were just one Glasgow tobacco family whose fortunes rose and then fell catastrophically in the face of unpaid debts. Several other families had similar experiences. The Glasgow tobacco trade certainly was not for the faint-hearted.


For all that Adam Smith admired the drive and the work ethic of his friend Glassford, he also warned that a great deal of power - something resembling the old-fashioned, autocratic power of the nobility of days past - was once again in the hands of a very few men. He valued the free market but believed it was part of the responsibility of civilised society to ensure the few were not left to forget themselves, and to reach giddy heights of wealth and position at the expense of the rest of humanity. Smith was an economist, but always a philosopher and a humanist as well.


He was not alone in fearing for the eventual consequences of all that was catching fire in the white heat of Enlightenment. John Witherspoon was born in East Lothian, in 1723, and studied divinity at Edinburgh University. He followed the teachings of Hutcheson and others but, while ready to accept some of their wisdom, he also criticised what he saw as the creation of yet another elite. Men like Hutcheson, Kames and Hume were clever for sure, he could argue, but they were in danger of losing touch with the needs, wants and rights of the mass of their fellow Scots. They and their kind were, after all, sponsored by men like Lord Islay - the sort that had always run Scotland.


Dr Witherspoon was a man of the people, a simple family man and the father of ten children with his wife Elizabeth. Only five survived to adulthood and his experience of life had taught him to value all mankind. In 1753 he wrote the satirical Ecclesiastical Characteristics, in which he turned a light on the dark, elitist side of the teachings of Hutcheson and others. Fearing the consequences of supposedly learned men, men of God among them, becoming distanced from their fellows and their flocks, he wrote that for some, religion would only be perfect ‘when we shall have driven away the whole common people … and captivated the hearts of the gentry to a love of our solitary temples’.


From 1758 he was a minister in Paisley and also the figurehead of the so-called ‘Popular Party’ that grew up around him, a group of Presbyterian churchmen who preached against the ‘lordly dominion’ of fine men and women. Naturally charismatic and a passionate preacher, his congregation was made up of the ordinary working folk of Paisley. He was a product of the Enlightenment but so too, like it or not, were the labourers, tenant farmers and tradesmen who attended his church every Sunday. Witherspoon’s feet were always on the ground, among the lives and loves of everyman and, in time, he would attract the attention of men on the other side of the Atlantic - men looking to change the world.


By the time Witherspoon was sounding his warning in Paisley, and while Smith was coming to his own realisations about the pros and cons of Enlightenment, émigré Scot John Wedderburn had been settled in his new home near Montego Bay on the western side of Jamaica for more than a decade. The teenage runaway who had fled Culloden and the butchery of his father had by now grown to maturity far from home. He had tried his hand at a few professions, and had even been a doctor for a few years. He had had no qualifications whatsoever but since he was white and confident, he had been able to make a success of it; in fact, he had done well enough to set aside a deposit for investment in his future. Naturally astute businessman that he was, he had alighted on the sugar trade. Wedderburn made his fortune as a sugar plantation owner - and therefore as a slave owner.


The vast profits of growing crops like tobacco, cotton and sugar in the colonies depended upon access to cheap labour. And why spend any money at all on wages when there were whole lifetimes of free labour to be bought in the market places. For generations now, ships had been tying up in the harbours of the New World and disgorging thousands upon thousands of men, women and children stolen from their African homelands. On arrival, each new cargo of human beings became the focus of what was called a ‘scramble’ as prospective buyers flocked around them in hope of snapping up the strongest backs, the finest specimens. It has been calculated that a farm labourer tending tobacco plants had to bend down 50,000 times between planting and harvest each year. Why risk a white back on such toil when there were plenty of black backs to be had relatively cheaply?


Wedderburn considered himself a Christian but in his pursuit of wealth and position in his adoptive home he had learned to set aside any need to love all his neighbours. Was this the behaviour of an enlightened Scot? Was this the immortal wrong that Witherspoon had in mind when he warned of common people being ‘driven away’ - driven away like cattle, mere beasts to be bought and sold?


In the spring of 1762 Wedderburn attended a scramble and there spied a black boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen years. There was apparently something about the way the lad carried himself within the crowd - the manner in which he stood and walked upon the soil of an alien land, at the start of an evil cradling thousands of miles from all his kin - that caught and held the master’s eye. Wedderburn enquired after him and learned his name had been taken from him along with everything else, and replaced with that of the captain of the ship that had carried him across the Atlantic. We do not know whether he haggled over the price, but in any case he bought Joseph Knight for himself and took him home to his plantation. Five years came and went in the stolen life of Joseph Knight until, in 1769, Wedderburn decided to return to Scotland to show the land that had spurned him how much he had made of himself elsewhere. He took Joseph with him.


Having decided there was something about the boy that appealed to him, Wedderburn had never set Joseph to work in the fields. Not for him the back-breaking labour and the inevitable beatings that characterised the existences of the rest of Wedderburn’s slaves. Instead he had made Joseph a house-boy - had seen to it that he worked indoors away from the scorching sun, that he learned to speak, read and write in English. Later Wedderburn would even make sure that Joseph was baptised.


Perhaps he became a salve for a troubled conscience. Maybe by treating one of his slaves as a human being - albeit a human being possessed by another - Wedderburn could more easily turn a blind eye to the lives of the rest. Whatever the truth, when Wedderburn boarded a ship headed for the old country, Joseph - handsome, educated, Christian Joseph - walked a few paces behind him. Unbeknown to either of them, they were setting sail towards a pivotal moment in both of their destinies.


Two years before the master and slave began their journey, another traveller had crossed the Atlantic towards the land of his fathers. Benjamin Rush had been born of English stock near Philadelphia on Christmas Eve, 1745. He obtained the degree of Bachelor of Arts at the College of Princeton, in New Jersey, before beginning to study medicine. His studies eventually brought him to Edinburgh, renowned the world over as one of the best places in which to study for a life as a physician.


In time Rush, Witherspoon and Franklin would all be among the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence. In 1767, when Rush was deciding to obtain a Scottish education, he was taking some of the first steps towards that great destiny.


On arrival in Liverpool he was confronted with the sight of a cargo of slaves being loaded aboard a black birder in the harbour. Rush was outraged and would go on to become a strong voice in the eventual call for the abolition of the practice. In 1773 he would write An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping in which he dismissed the notion, prevalent at the time, that black Africans were naturally inferior to white Europeans. Slavery, he wrote, ‘is so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it’. In those words were the echoes of humanist teachings like those of Hutcheson - and of course of Witherspoon as well. But in 1767 when Rush arrived in Britain en route to Edinburgh, such sentiments were as yet unformed in his gentle, questioning mind.


He had not just come to study, either. His alma mater Princeton College was in need of a new principal and Rush had been pointed in the direction of a possible candidate by none other than Benjamin Franklin himself. The seemingly omniscient Franklin had become aware of the Popular Party, Dr Witherspoon and his down-to-earth take on the Protestant religion, and had suggested to Rush that he might make the trip to Paisley and approach him with a job offer.


On the face of it, emigration was an unlikely prospect: Witherspoon was already in his middle years, surrounded by family and well known and loved by his congregation. Why would he uproot himself and take his wife, who had a mortal fear of sea journeys, all the way across an ocean to begin a new life three and a half thousand miles away? Rush knew what tack to take, however, and told Witherspoon that in his opinion - and in that of many of his fellows in the colonies - Scotland had gone soft on religion. He said supposedly great men like Hume and Smith had undermined the foundations of the Protestant creed and that the influence of the Church over men’s lives was waning as a result. Scotland, said Rush, was a nation going to hell in a handcart.


Witherspoon was eventually persuaded and on 6 August 1768 he and Elizabeth arrived in Philadelphia. Having bade farewell to all he knew, and endured the arduous crossing, he was determined to make the trip worthwhile. He therefore set about nothing less than cultivating the college into a scion of the venerable oak from which he had grown, his own Edinburgh University. Much though he disagreed with some of what men like Hutcheson had had to say, he nonetheless transplanted some of the great man’s ideas into his new patch.


Hutcheson had taught that personal happiness was to be found in the happiness of others. Witherspoon for his own part urged his staff at Princeton to have their students’ happiness at heart when it came to furthering their education. When he sermonised and lectured, he spoke to his audience rather than reading to them from notes. This in itself was a revelation to his new hosts and began to make the process of learning into more of a conversation than a monologue. Under his stewardship, Princeton became an intellectually democratic place, where opinions were encouraged and freely shared.


No teachings were banned either. Although Witherspoon took issue with what he clearly saw as the elitism, based on nepotism and patronage, of the works of Hutcheson and other religious moderates, he insisted their books be read and digested along with all the others. (Books and language were always very dear to Witherspoon. He had brought with him from Scotland some 300 volumes and these became the basis for a library in Princeton’s Nassau Hall. He would support America’s independence from Britain in every way but one - language. To the end of his days he would lecture and cajole all Americans to avoid the use of what he called ‘Americanisms’ and to speak and write always and only in the king’s English. But of all the things Witherspoon carried with him to America, the most potent and powerful of all was his (distinctly Scots Presbyterian) understanding of freedom.


Towards the end of the 1760s the British government was looking for ways to tighten its control over the North American colonies. In particular, there was an appetite in London for raising money by directly taxing the colonists. In 1767 the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, composed a series of Acts of Parliament to do just that. Opposition to the so-called ‘Townshend Acts’ was especially strident in Massachusetts and in 1768 British troops were sent into the city of Boston to discourage further unrest.


The events that unfolded on 5 March 1770 were later immortalised on an engraving by the legendary Paul Revere as ‘The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street, Boston’ and are more generally remembered as the Boston Massacre. For all the colourful language and polemic, it was in fact the relatively measured (by the military standards of the day) response by twenty British troopers who were being jostled and pelted with stones by a drunken, baying mob several hundred strong. Pushed beyond endurance, the soldiers opened fire, killing five colonists. Unfortunate it certainly was, but not quite the ‘massacre’ commemorated by Revere and used to such effect in helping to trigger the rising that eventually escalated into the American War of Independence.


Nonetheless, by 1771 Witherspoon was publishing his Thoughts on American Liberty - by which time he had thrown all his considerable intellectual and spiritual weight behind his adoptive colonists. His were some of the first words printed in support of defiance of any British taxation of the colonies; and his voice, his Scots Presbyterian voice, echoed among the earliest calls for the colonists to unite and form a nation. Like most critics of British taxation of the colonies, he did not start out wanting independence from Britain, far from it; but, like every opponent of tyranny down through the millennia of human history, he could not and would not ignore inequity. What became the United States of America owes at least some measure of its existence to a Presbyterian minister from Paisley, first President of Princeton.


Before the colonies could seek independence from the British crown, one man would embark upon a historic quest to regain a freedom far more fundamental.


When John Wedderburn returned to Scotland in 1769, accompanied by his house-boy Joseph Knight, he was determined to win back all the rights and status his family had held before Culloden. He went to Perthshire to reclaim the title of Baronet of Blackness. For over three years Knight continued to serve his master, but gradually it seems he began to be influenced by enlightened Scottish society. To make matters more acute, he met and fell in love with a servant girl from Dundee called Annie Thompson. Wedderburn allowed the pair to marry but for Knight it was not enough. Just as personal status mattered to the soi-disant baronet, so it mattered to the slave; and the status he coveted was that of a free man.


He went to his master and asked that he be given money as back pay for his years of unpaid service. Wedderburn refused. The final straw came in 1772, with Wedderburn’s decision to dismiss Thompson from his service when she became pregnant with Knight’s child. As well as sacking her, he insisted she leave his house, and Knight decided to go with her. Caught in the act of packing a bag for his departure, he was promptly arrested and thrown in jail.


It is thought Knight may have read in Scottish newspapers about a landmark judgment by Lord Mansfield, a Scot serving as Lord Chief Justice in England. Asked to adjudicate in the case of a slave refusing to return to the colonies with his Scottish owner, Lord Mansfield had ruled the master had no right to remove the man from Britain against his will. Whether or not Knight had learned there was precedent for a man in his predicament, he succeeded in persuading John Swinton, Sheriff Depute at Perth Sheriff Court, that he was entitled to his freedom.


Wedderburn claimed he had never treated Knight as a slave, that he had regarded him as a son and demanded only ‘lifelong service’. He appealed against the Perth ruling and eventually, in 1778, the case made it all the way to the Court of Session in Edinburgh. By then its notoriety was such that a twelve-judge panel, including Lord Kames, was assembled to hear the evidence and no lesser figures than man of letters Dr Samuel Johnson - a stern and vocal opponent of slavery - and his friend and fellow writer (and Scot) James Boswell took an interest in Knight’s plight.


Boswell even went so far as to help Knight’s advocate prepare his case and the judges were duly persuaded - by a majority of eight to four - to make him a free man. Lord Kames had told the court: ‘We sit here to enforce right, not to enforce wrong’. Sheriff Depute Swinton’s ruling was thereby confirmed: ‘That the state of slavery is not recognised by the laws of this Kingdom, and is inconsistent with the principles thereof, and finds that the regulations in Jamaica concerning slaves, do not extend to this Kingdom, and repels the master’s claim for perpetual service.’ It was a momentous decision, both for Knight and for Scotland. By refusing to accept that one man could own another, the supreme civil court of Scotland had shown the way towards the abolition of slavery. One of the judges had been Boswell’s own father - Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck - and he had argued that slavery was out of step with the demands of both Christianity and common humanity.


For the two men at the centre, the final decision meant an inevitable and final parting. The rest of Knight’s story, the story of the free man, is lost to history. His enslavement had brought him the notoriety that in turn led to his liberty - and that same liberty opened a door into the peaceful obscurity that is the lot of most free men. It is thought he lived out the rest of his life as a married man in Dundee, perhaps as a miner. If so, he had found for himself a world where the skins of all the working men are black.


There was blackness of another sort entirely for Wedderburn. Embittered by it all, he shook off any previous ambivalence he might once have entertained about slavery and for his remaining years would hold court as one fiercely committed to the right of some men to hold the lives of others as property. He also campaigned hard for the return of his father’s title - the title that had been cut away from the man along with the head. So it was that John Wedderburn ended his days as the 6th Baronet of Blackness.


Whether or not those supreme court judges had realised it, their decision in favour of one African man’s rights as a human being went straight to the heart of the British crown’s relationship to its North American colonies: was Britain treating the colonists as property too? Was it a tyranny akin to slavery that they sought to impose by naked force?


Even in a history of Scotland, it is worth remembering what most American colonists’ attitude was towards Britain when war broke out. On 19 April 1775, when the ‘shot heard around the world’ was fired on Concord Green, they were already far freer than most people in Scotland at that time. When only around one man in 250 in Scotland could vote for his choice of MP, every colonist in America held the right to register his choice of local representative. Much of the money to be raised by the infamous taxes was intended to pay for the colonists’ own defence in a dangerous world - hardly a lot to ask, you might argue - and in any case the average colonist paid something like a fiftieth of the taxes demanded of the average British man.


The vast majority of colonists had no quarrel with the notion of monarchy and it was well into the war before even Washington and his officers in the Continental Army stopped toasting the health of Great Britain. If any of them did have a problem it was with George III himself; George III the man, rather than George III the king. America and Americans were already free; what they were about to fight for was the continuation and extension of that freedom.


Once the fighting started, Witherspoon spoke out even more loudly in defence of ‘liberty’. In a rousing sermon in 1776 he called upon ‘all my witnesses’ to listen while he brought politics into the pulpit for the first time in his life:

At this season, however, it is not only lawful but necessary, and I willingly embrace the opportunity of declaring my opinion without any hesitation, that the cause in which America is now in arms, is the cause of justice, of liberty, and of human nature.

So far as we have hitherto proceeded, I am satisfied that the confederacy of the colonies has not been the effect of pride, resentment, or sedition, but of a deep and general conviction that our civil and religious liberties, and consequently in a great measure the temporal and eternal happiness of us and our posterity, depended on the issue.

The knowledge of God and his truths have from the beginning of the world been chiefly, if not entirely confined to those parts of the earth where some degree of liberty and political justice were to be seen, and great were the difficulties with which they had to struggle, from the imperfection of human society, and the unjust decisions of usurped authority.

There is not a single instance in history, in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.



Scots’ loyalties were severely tested by the fighting itself, with most deciding to fight on behalf of the Crown. It sounds incredible, but even refugees from Culloden and ‘The ’45’ apparently found their belief in tradition and monarchy left them no alternative but to side with the old country and the ruling House of Hanover. If the Seven Years War had begun the proud history of the Highland regiments in the British Army, it was war in the American colonies that established their legendary credentials.


Viewed from the distance of two centuries and more, the decision by Jacobites to stand shoulder to shoulder with the sons of their erstwhile tormentors looks utterly perverse. Yet at the same time it surely says something about the psychology of the Scot, and the Highland Scot in particular: whatever they thought of their chances when they took up arms in the New World, it mattered more to them to be loyal than to win.


No such qualms troubled the thinking of John Witherspoon. By 1776, eight years into his sojourn abroad, he had long since gone native. He was among the representatives at the meeting that year of the Second Continental Congress - the body tasked with governing the rebel colonies - when it called for full independence from Britain. When the subsequent ‘Declaration of Independence’ was brought forward for signatures in July, Witherspoon was among twenty Scots (and the only clergyman) who took up the pen and put their names to it. He had argued, cajoled and encouraged all around him throughout the discussions and, at the last, when some of the representatives voiced uncertainty about the wisdom of taking on the might of the British war machine, he had rallied them with these words: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, a nick of time. We perceive it now before us. To hesitate is to consent to our own slavery.’ (He was paraphrasing Brutus in Julius Caesar, but in Witherspoon’s case he was advocating stabbing the king in the front, rather than the back.)


Joseph Knight had refused to accept his designation as slave. Thanks in part to the will of John Witherspoon the fledgeling union of states - trojan horse of the United States of America - succeeded in throwing off the same yoke. The following year, British forces entered Princeton College and put Nassau Hall and Witherspoon’s precious library to the torch. All that act of vandalism achieved was to add more fuel to the rebellion’s flame. Witherspoon’s own son would be consumed by the fire before the end.


Back in Scotland, the merchants had their trading empires to consider and so generally backed the Crown. As was inevitable, the war disrupted and then temporarily stopped the trans-Atlantic trade between Britain and North America. Many of the companies built around tobacco, sugar, cotton or combinations of all three began to suffer and several would fail altogether.


It was Cunninghame who proved he had the measure of the situation when he held his nerve and bought up all of his rivals’ stores of tobacco at sixpence a pound. During the war the price would reach three shillings and sixpence a pound - and Cunninghame sold the whole vast lot of it back to them at a profit guaranteed to make even the lordliest eyes water. It was with some of the money made from that one deal that he built his magnificent home on Queen Street.


The Scottish Enlightenment’s philosophers looked beyond short-term profit and wondered instead about the long game. Hume foresaw only military, moral and financial ruin for the government if it insisted on trying first to browbeat and then to batter the colonists into submission. Adam Smith, with his economist’s hat on, said the whole sorry business of rebellion would have been avoided if the government had simply seen the folly of trying to squeeze taxes from them. He was probably right. Furthermore, he argued that free trade was an unstoppable, irresistible force and that by seeking to crush the revolt the government risked ultimate disaster. In The Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776 just as the first blood was being spilled, he said there were only two logical courses of action: either to give the colonists the representation they wanted at Westminster, or cut them adrift to govern themselves. His calls fell on deaf ears.


As is always the case, trade was brought quickly back to normal by the Treaty of Paris of 3 September 1783, the formal end to the hostilities. Wars come and wars go, but business is business and the market is invincible.


Tobacco was and has remained the poster-boy of Scotland’s rapid economic growth during the eighteenth century. Linen, however - less glamorous though it may sound - was the more significant earner for most Scots at that time and employed tens of thousands of men, women and children in many parts of the country. Cotton, too, was a huge industry and both textiles would rise to the peak of their significance as increased industrialisation of the production processes accelerated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.


Wars waged by Britain against European states during the earlier part of the eighteenth century had damaged and limited trade with the Continent. These were nations that had been markets for Scots goods for centuries and the loss of them was especially damaging for those north of the Border. It was the Glasgow merchants’ stranglehold on American tobacco that reinvigorated trade across the North Sea as smokers in France, Germany and the Low Countries consumed the lion’s share of the Tobacco Lords’ cargoes.


In truth the eight years of war with the American colonists was no more than a blip in a century of powerful and sustained growth in Scots commerce with North America and with the wider world. North America was a key market for Scots textiles before 1775 but when the fighting got in the way - and even after it was over - Scots merchants broadened their horizons. Soon there were new markets for linen, and for other Scots exports, in the Far East, in South America and beyond as far as Australia.


Scotland had spent the eighteenth century becoming a trading nation more significant and with a far greater global reach than her size and geographical location should ever have made possible. Her population was growing but by the turn of the nineteenth century still only numbered just over one and a half million. By any measure, Scots were punching well above their weight. It was undoubtedly the union of 1707 that had opened up a world of tax-free trade which enabled a tiny minority to become truly wealthy - and a fair proportion to consider themselves ‘middle-class’.


There had been revolutions, too - in the practice of agriculture and industry - and these had also played their part in enriching the land and lining the pockets of the few.


Something else had happened - something that in its way was more fundamental and more significant. Scotland had become newly confident and rightly proud of her importance on the international stage. In addition to new money, some of her people had found new wisdom. The luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment were the brightest of all their kind and their practical approach to understanding the ways of the world was being observed and copied elsewhere. Scotland and her children were beginning to change the world.


There is always a cost, though, a price to be paid. Defeat for the British cause in the American colonies left the majority of Scots loyalists no alternative but to flee. With first-or second-hand memories of Culloden still vivid in their minds, they were driven from hearth and home once more, this time abandoning the newly United States of America and either seeking to make new lives in Canada or returning to Scotland.


Those who crossed the Atlantic for the second time - and in the opposite direction - found a land strangely altered. Their mothers, fathers and grandparents had fought for what they thought was freedom. Many of the Highlanders had spilled blood for a king they hoped would release them from the grasp of a usurper. Many Protestants from the Presbyterian side had fought for the freedom to worship their God as they saw fit. Winners or losers, all had fought for a cause and for a Scotland.


Men and women from both sides had been cradled for a while in the colonies and had watched as a dream of an independent United States had been made into a reality; another freedom and another cause. Those who returned now to the old country would have noticed that in their absence Scotland had stopped fighting. Now Scots seemed to value no cause beyond personal advancement. Most individuals - the poor and the put-upon - were fighting only to survive, to work and to feed themselves and to live, as they always had done.


In the rush to keep up with the New World of the west - and the old neighbours to the south, in England - had Scotland forgotten what Scotland was? Had Scots forgotten what being Scots meant?