How the Scots Invented the Modern World (67 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE LAST MINSTREL—
SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE HIGHLAND REVIVAL

Why is there is no full-length literary biography of Sir Walter Scott, apart from Edgar Johnson’s
Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown,
two volumes (London, 1970), which is now more than thirty years old? One reason, without a doubt, is that Scott remains the most underrated major author in modern literature; this is a sad fate for an author of whom William Hazlitt said, “his worst is better than anyone else’s best,” and whose novels, which have been ignored by serious critics for generations, have been turned into popular movies (witness
Ivanhoe
and
Rob Roy
). So the curious reader still needs to turn to
The Journal of
Sir Walter Scott,
published in one volume in Edinburgh in 1950, and his son-in-law James G. Lockhart’s biography,
The Life of Sir Walter Scott,
which appeared in seven volumes in 1837–8—although Lockhart himself has been savagely attacked in a curious little book by Eric Quayle,
The Ruin of Sir Walter Scott
(New York, 1968), who puts the blame for Scott’s financial disasters later in life squarely on Scott himself, and accuses Lockhart of covering up the facts.

Scott has also suffered from the scorn of Scottish nationalist writers because of his associations with the Royal Visit in 1822. However, Paul H. Scott’s
Walter Scott and Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1981) is actually a sympathetic and deeply perceptive treatment—the reader’s only wish is that it were longer. The same is true of David Daiches’s
Sir Walter Scott and His World,
mentioned under Chapter 10, above. Graham McMaster’s
Scott and Society
(Cambridge, 1981) gives a good overview of Scott’s reliance on the Scottish historical school, including John Millar. For Scott’s relations with other folklorists and collectors of Scottish heritage, including Hogg and James Wilson, the scholar turns to Jane Millgate’s
Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist
(Toronto, 1984) and Donald Carswell, Scott and His Circle (Garden City, N.Y., 1930).

There are by one count over nine hundred biographies of Robert Burns— just about one for every possible taste. I turned to the study by the editor of Burns’s letters, James MacKay: RB: A Biography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh, 1992). But any biography by David Daiches is worth reading, including his
Robert Burns
(New York, 1966), and Hugh Douglas offers a new version of Burns’s life in
Robert Burns: The Tinder Heart
(1999). Anything else relating to Burns studies can be found in
The Burns Encyclopedia,
edited by Maurice Lindsay in 1959, but reissued in paperback more recently in 1996. Burns’s poems, of course, are available nearly everywhere, including in the heads of most literary-minded Scotsmen.

The best book on James McPherson is by Fiona Stafford,
The Sublime
Savage: A Study of James McPherson and the Poems of Ossian
(Edinburgh, 1988), who also wrote the introduction to the best modern edition of
The Poems of Ossian,
edited by Howard Gaskill for the Edinburgh University Press and available since 1996 in paperback.

John Prebble told the harrowing story of the Highland Clearances in his book of that title in 1963, but it needs to be balanced with Thomas Devine’s
Clanship to Crofters’ War
(Manchester, 1994). Also useful is Alexander MacKenzie’s History of the Highland Clearances, which first appeared in 1883 but which has been reissued by Mercat Press in Edinburgh; it contains Donald MacLeod’s description of the clearing of Strathnaver in Sutherland quoted in this chapter. James Robertson’s biography of David Stewart,
The First
Highlander: Major-General David Stewart of Garth
(Edinburgh, 1998), is not only informative about his career and writings, but also has a detailed description of his role in the Royal Visit—which the reader can supplement with John Prebble’s
The King’s Jaunt.
Books on the “invention” of Highland traditions and Scottish identity abound, and even on the “invention” of the Highlands themselves (meaning the construction of an ideological myth surrounding them)— anyone curious on the subject can find a author to match his own opinions and feelings, which usually range from mild amusement to outrage. I think Robert Clyde’s
From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander
(see Chapter Five, above) does as well as any other, but it is safe to say that no one has had the last word on this tendentious and volatile issue.

CHAPTER TWELVE: PRACTICAL MATTERS—
SCOTS IN SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY

My sources for this and the next two chapters are so many and various as to defy adequate summary. So I will limit myself to pointing out where certain quotations and facts came from, and what books are particularly useful for the discriminating reader.

I have relied on two sturdy classics on James Watt: John Lord’s
Capital and
Steam Power,
first published in 1923 and reprinted in a second edition in 1965, and Thomas Marshall’s 1925 biography. The discussion about the relations between Glasgow professors and local industrial entrepreneurs is from David Daiches’s essay in
Hotbed of Genius,
which also has a valuable article on James Hutton. The starting point for any discussion of the roots and impact of Scottish medicine is David Hamilton’s
The Healers: A History of Medicine in
Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1981). For Boerhaave and his students, the standard work is G. A. Lindeboom’s
Hermann Boerhaave: The Man and His Work
(London, 1968). The background to the relationship between medicine and science is carefully delineated in A. L. Donovan’s Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1975).