How the attitude of America to Scots has changed over the years

Especially at the birth of the birth of the new nation in the later 18th century, Scots were bitterly reviled as the enemies of American freedom and patriotism. Ironically, at the time it was not uncommon to praise the Irish while at the same time while denouncing the Scots. The Virginia Gazette reported in October 1774:

Irish influence is of the downright, genuine and unadulterated sort. The Scotch influence is of a different species. A Scotchman, when he is first admitted into a house, is so humble that he will sit upon the lowest step of the staircase. By degrees he gets into the kitchen, and from thence, by the most submissive behaviour, is advanced to the parlour. If he gets into the dining room, as ten to one but he will, the master of the house must take care of himself, for in all probability he will turn him out of doors, and, by the assistance of his countrymen, keep possession forever.

Two aspects of the anti-Scots image come through here strongly. First was their perceived grasping and rapacious nature which threatened a kind of Scottish economic hegemony in the colonies. Indeed, in terms of Scottish success in the tobacco trade in the South, there was more than a degree of truth in such accusations. In November 1777, for example, the president of Yale, Ezra Stiles, fulminated that “the Scotch had got Two Thirds of Virginia and Maryland mortgaged or otherwise engaged to them or was owned in Scotland”. He went on to assert: “I have had it often suggested to me by Scotch Merchants and Factors that the Scotch would in a very few years have all the property in Virginia if not in Gen. of No. America”. The second aspect, and a perennial part of the same negative contemporary stereotype, was the supposed clannish behaviour of the Scots, seen to be supporting one another against non-Scots and engaged in an ethnic conspiracy of exploitation against the greater good of colonial America.

Hence dislike of “the Scots nation” became integral to the political landscape of the US in its early years of existence. A statute of the Assembly of Georgia of August 1782, for instance, banned Scots from settling or trading in the colony unless they were declared patriots. The reason was simple, they were acknowledged as the enemies of the revolution. After all, Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence contained the notorious reference to “Scotch and other foreign mercenaries who were being sent by the British government to invade and destroy us”. John Witherspoon, one of two Scottish-born signatories, secured the deletion of this insult to his fellow countrymen in the final version. Nevertheless, “A free exportation to Scotchmen and Tories” became a favourite revolutionary toast.

Scottish loyalism rested on a number of foundations. The American Revolution would have jeopardised the remarkable success of Scottish transatlantic trade and emigration, as British Atlantic commerce rested on the Navigation Laws which directed that American commodities should first be shipped to British ports. An independent America could deal directly with Europe, with Scotland rendered irrelevant in this new commercial scenario. Imperial law also secured the whole superstructure of credit and debt on which trade depended and on which much of Scottish success was founded. On the face of it, therefore, freedom for the Americans threatened a catastrophe for the Scottish economy.

By the early years of the new century such rabid hostility was already fading into the past. But suspicions did not entirely disappear and were briefly reawakened by the outbreak of war between Britain and the US in 1812, which Americans saw as “a second war of independence”. British-born immigrants were now regarded as aliens and potential enemies. Males aged 14 and over were required to register at US marshals’ offices and, later, British immigrants had to sign special oaths of loyalty But these antagonisms were ephemeral. Soon a more positive stereotype of the Scot started to emerge and, in contrast to the prevailing indigenous attitudes of hostility towards the Catholic Irish, was more or less fully-formed by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. One American historian has even gone so far as to claim that “by c. 1920 the Scots had become America’s favourite immigrant group”. How is this transformation in attitude to be explained?

The old negative images faded away to be replaced by a view of Scotia first as “the land of Rationalism” and then “the land of Romance”. It was soon recognised that the Scottish Enlightenment had been an important foundation for American intellectual and political culture. The writings of the Scottish literati were not only widely read but had practical effect, notably in the way they influenced the curricula of US universities.

Over time, however, this intellectual appeal was first paralleled and then subordinated to the new romantic image of Scotland. There had long been an American readership for Scottish literature, but with Sir Walter Scott, this interest became a burning fascination.. One contemporary estimate in Blackwood’s Magazine had it that “half a million of the great Scotch novels, we dare say, have issued from the American press”. Even if this figure was no more than informed guesswork, there can be little doubt that Scott made a huge popular impact well outside the ranks of the American intellectual and literary élite. His skilful recreation of a romantic and idealised past had powerful appeal in societies, both in Europe and America, experiencing revolutionary and sometimes threatening changes. Above all, “Scott consummated a cultural tradition which converted Scotland into the most romantic country in Europe. … for many Americans Scott endorsed, confirmed and authenticated what they long suspected – that Scotland was beyond compare the land of romance”. The effect could be seen everywhere in American life. Mark Twain famously contended that Scott was responsible for the Civil War because his romantic nationalism inspired the South with a bogus sense of identity based on notions of nobility, loyalty and honour. The point may be wildly exaggerated, but plantations and even children in the southern states did frequently owe their first names to characters and places in Scott’s novels. Moreover, his success ensured that he became a model for American writers and a flood of romances cast in the mould of the Waverley Novels soon poured from the presses. Such was Scott’s unparalleled fame and the admiration for his works that those American tourists who travelled to Europe began to visit Scotland in large numbers. Scott’s home at Abbotsford on the Tweed became a place of pilgrimage and was reckoned to be second only to Shakespeare’s birthplace as the most popular site in the cultural grand tour of Britain. Another great magnet was “the sacred ground’ of the Highlands”.

These favourable changes in the perception of Scots and Scotland may have eased the reception of many immigrants to the New World. But they were not by any means the only reasons why Scots had a much more positive image in the US than the Irish or indeed other European immigrants. The Catholic Irish were unambiguously alien, not only because of their faith but as poor and unskilled and, especially during the famine years and afterwards, arriving in such massive destitute numbers that they inevitably caused immense social problems in the American cities where they first settled. The Scots, on the whole, like the English and Welsh, shared the Protestant traditions of the American majority, were much fewer in number and tended not to concentrate in semi-ghettoised urban areas. Five million Irish entered the US between 1820 and 1930. The Scots numbered 726,000 immigrants over the same period. Indeed, the peak percentage of the US population of Scottish birth was reached as early as 1791. Thereafter, it was a mere 3.1 per cent in 1850, 2.4 per cent in 1900 and 1.9 per cent in 1920. They settled mainly in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and California. At the time of the 1920 Census seven states had Scots-born populations of more than 10,000: New York (with 37,654), followed by Massachusetts (28,448) and then Pennsylvania (18,448).

But the Scots were also more scattered than the Irish. Over a quarter of those who settled in the middle of the 19th century pushed on to Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois. In addition, despite their marked preference for employment in manufacturing and mining, unlike the Catholic Irish, Scots could also be found in the mainly agricultural states of Montana, eastern Oregon, Idaho, western Washington state and southern California: “Although never a statistically large group, Scots pioneered in the West as explorers, fur traders, gardeners, farmers, clerics, miners, cattle-ranch managers and especially sheepmen”. Numerous Scottish place names spread across the country and some concentrated settlements of Scots clearly did exist on the frontier. But territorial integration rather than ethnic separation was the norm.

Perhaps, however, the differentiation in the immigration experiences of the two peoples derived in the final analysis from the deeply contrasting paths of development of the countries from which they had come after the 1850s. At that time Scotland had become one of the most advanced industrial societies in the world with over 43 per cent of the country’s male workforce employed in either mining or manufacturing (compared with a 41 per cent average for the UK as a whole). In 1860, almost 40 per cent of Scots lived in town and cities of 5,000 or above. The skills base, both in industry and agriculture, was deep, wide-ranging and sophisticated. There were rich resources of “social capital”, as illustrated by the fact that even before compulsory education was established in 1872, Scottish levels of school attendance were only matched in Europe by Prussia, where compulsion was already in place. By 1901 Scotland and Ireland had virtually the same population, in large part due to the unprecedented and sustained volumes of emigration from Ireland. But Scotland had an industrial sector about four times the size of the other country, and an agriculture about twice as productive. Indeed, from the 1820s the Irish manufacturing base had shrunk as textile production retreated to Belfast and east Ulster. For most of the period considered here, Ireland remained a rural economy, dominated by agriculture, with population concentrated in the countryside rather than in the towns and with deep pools of endemic poverty. These marked contours of economic and social difference between the two nations were to have decisive impact on the life-chances of their emigrants as they made their way from homeland to host-land.

The key material fact of American history after 1860 was the unprecedented expansion of manufacturing industry. Production quadrupled by 1900 and US output exceeded that of all competitors, including the original British Workshop of the World, by that date. Indeed, in the years before the Great War American industrial production had become larger than that of Britain, France and Germany combined. It followed from this gigantic leap forward that the US developed a voracious appetite for labour, particularly of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Several aspects are therefore clear. Between 1875 and 1914, around a half of male Scottish emigrants to the United States were deemed “skilled” and a substantial number “semi-skilled”. In 1885-8, eight out of ten Scottish emigrants to America were from “industrial” counties at home. They were not fleeing subsistence crises or even for the most part escaping grinding poverty into “exile”. Instead, they were drawn by higher wages (often three- to four-fold increases), opportunity, advancement and the search for “independence”. And again, unlike the Irish, emigrants of a middle-class category from “commerce, finance, insurance and professional” sectors can also be traced in the passenger lists. Indeed, between 1875 and 1914 Scotland provided the highest proportion of professional and business emigrants of all the four UK nations. Not surprisingly, therefore, Scots in the US were to be found in skilled jobs in shipbuilding, construction, granite-working, engineering and mining. Like the English and Welsh (but unlike most Irish) they tended to end up in the better-paid working class occupations. Often, indeed, employers in the US had recruited them directly from Scotland.

Their privileged position did not always go down well. One American journal in 1805 complained bitterly: “They are arrogant, boastful and continually prating about “the Clyde” and what wonderful achievements are performed on that classic stream, or else eternally sounding the praises of Maudsley and Fields, Napier, etc – to the disgust of our own mechanics who think, not unreasonably, that what ‘Napier’ may do or not do is of very slight importance”. It would be surprising if all of these immigrants succeeded. But on average, Scots did have a clear head start on the Catholic Irish.