A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities Since the Eighteenth Century 9780755618743, 9781848859654

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Tom Brooking is Professor of History at the University of Otago, Dunedin, where he teaches New Zealand history. He is the author of eight books, including biographies of two prominent Scottish settlers in New Zealand, and co-editor of The Heather and the Fern: Scottish Migration and the Settlement of New Zealand (2003). Tom has also written numerous book chapters and articles on rural land settlement and environmental history. He is currently working on the reconstruction of the New Zealand grasslands and Scottish migration to New Zealand with two large teams of researchers, and is writing a biography of New Zealand’s longest serving Prime Minister, Richard John Seddon. Douglas Catterall is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History and Government at Cameron University. His teaching and research interests encompass the social and cultural history of Scotland, the Dutch Republic, and the cultures of the North Sea zone generally as well as the Atlantic world and World History. Doug’s current research projects address constructions of identity and mentalities of migration in Scottish networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world; the role of social memory among common folk in early modern Europe; and the development of strategies for the control of migration in the preindustrial world. He is the author of Community without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic, c.1600-1700, a study of Scots migration to and its impacts on the port of Rotterdam (2002). David A. Gerber is Professor of History at the State University at Buffalo. A social historian with interests in personal identity, group formation, and relationships among non-elite populations, David has researched African Americans, Jewish Americans, and European immigrants in nineteenth and twentieth century America. He has also published widely on military veterans who have incurred disabilities or chronic illness while in the service. Currently, David is finishing a book on the personal correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century. Sarah Katherine Gibson is a doctoral student in the History Department at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, where she is studying the process of cultural exchange in post-conquest Quebec. She is also a fellow of the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal.

Douglas Hamilton is Curator of Eighteenth-Century Maritime and Imperial History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. His research interests lie in the history of the Atlantic World, and focus particularly on British-Caribbean connections in the eighteenth century. Doug has published several articles and is the author of Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, 1750-1820 (2005). A. James Hammerton is Honorary Research Associate in History at La Trobe University. He is the author of Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830-1914 (1979) Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth Century Married Life (1992, 1995), and, with Alistair Thomson, ‘Ten Pound Poms’: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (2005). He is currently writing a history of postwar British migration to Canada, and is engaged in research on the British ‘mobility of modernity’: emigration to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand since the 1960s. Andrew Mackillop obtained his PhD in Scottish History from the University of Glasgow in 1996 and is currently a Lecturer in History at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715-1815 (2000) and co-editor of Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers c.1600-1800: A Study of Scotland and Empires (2003). His research focuses on the Scots and Irish in the English East India Company from 1695-1813 and forms the theme of The Scots, the Irish and British Imperialism in Asia, 1695-1813, to be published by Manchester University Press’s Studies in Imperialism Series. Angela McCarthy has published several articles on modern Irish and Scottish migration and is the author of Irish Migrants in New Zealand, 18401937: ‘The Desired Haven’ (2005). She has held posts at the University of Aberdeen and Victoria University of Wellington and in 2006 will join the History Department at the University of Hull. Angela is currently completing a major study of Irish and Scottish migration in the twentieth century, to be published by Manchester University Press. Eric Richards has been Professor of History at Flinders University of South Australia, since 1975 and before that taught at Stirling and Adelaide universities. The author of numerous books on the Highland clearances and Australian immigration, his most recent publication is Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland Since 1600 (2004). Eric is also a Research Affiliate at the Australian National University.

PREFACE The idea for this book emerged from two quarters. First, Don MacRaild and Enda Delaney had conceived a volume focused on Irish networks and identities for which I was a contributor. Second, during a diaspora workshop that I organized in January 2003 during my time as Research Fellow at the AHRB Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, the propensity of Scots participating in similar practices over time and space was abundantly apparent. Yet analyzing networks and identities from the perspective of individuals involved in the process of migration remained relatively rare, and the blending of these conceptual and methodological approaches struck me as a promising combination. I am grateful to those scholars who readily agreed to contribute to this collection, and am appreciative of their ongoing willingness to address many queries and suggestions raised throughout the editorial process. I am sure they all join with me in warmly thanking Professors David Fitzpatrick and John M. MacKenzie, both of whom generously supported this book from its inception, and also T. M. Devine for his comments on preliminary drafts of the chapters. The volume was completed during my tenure as J. D. Stout Research Fellow in New Zealand Studies at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where a lively atmosphere was inspiring. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Hocken Library, Dunedin, New Zealand, for generously making the wonderful frontispiece image available for reproduction, and the awesome team at I.B.Tauris for believing in this book and bringing it to fruition.

Angela McCarthy Wellington

EDITORIAL NOTES Contributors were asked to supply, where possible, the names and locations of writers and recipients of letters. The reproduction of the spelling and grammar contained in the original sources remains unaltered throughout (unless individual contributors have specified otherwise), though sentence and paragraph breaks have been incorporated. Editorial excisions have been kept to a minimum but are as follows: Authentic oddities: Clarification: Illegible words: Illegible words with suggestion: Words deleted or omitted:

reminiscinces both Pat and he [Robert] are anxious [word illegible] [?missing] [erased: to] [omitted: to]

1 INTRODUCTION: Personal Testimonies and Scottish Migration

Angela McCarthy Many accounts of Scottish migration have focused on broad explanations derived predominantly from analyses of demographic data and official sources.1 Such approaches have largely been concerned with documenting who went, in what numbers, and why. Briefly, while Scots were mobile in the medieval period, it was only after 1600 that they became increasingly migratory. Estimates put Scottish migration between 1600 and 1650 at approximately 85,000-115,000.2 This outflow was predominantly directed towards Europe (especially Poland), Ireland (particularly Ulster), and England.3 Unlike other Scottish migrations to Europe, which were heavily military oriented, those going to Ireland had rough gender parity, more families, and less mercenary involvement.4 The following century saw Scottish migration gradually redirected from Europe to the New World, though Ulster remained of utmost significance in the early decades. Mobility to America, though, increased significantly. Whereas prior to 1700 only about 6,000 Scots went to American shores, in the century thereafter around up to 150,000 sought settlement there.5 This was a socially inclusive outflow composed of the gentry, servants, and unemployed.6 Moreover, it was an outflow balanced by age and sex that was twice as likely as their English counterparts to move in family groups, and comprised a higher proportion of children.7 By contrast, Scots in India and the Caribbean during the century were young single men (echoing the pattern in Europe the previous century). In the Caribbean, Scots were typically transient planters, merchants, colonial officials, attorneys, doctors, overseers, and tradesmen, while in India they were usually the sons of the landed gentry or mercantile families.8 Their potential to reap massive returns was, however, balanced by huge mortality rates.9 Throughout the nineteenth century the number of Scots migrating increased substantially. Between 1825 and 1938, for instance, an estimated 2.33 million Scots sought non-European destinations.10 The outflow was part of a broader European movement which saw approximately 60 million people leave for overseas shores between 1815 and 1930.11 It was also

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during this period that the Scottish influx to Canada took shape. Australia and New Zealand were likewise important destinations. Migration during the century was clearly paradoxical for several reasons: Scots left during a time of urban industrial expansion; they were predominantly skilled migrants leaving urban districts; and there was a counter flow of Irish migrants into Scotland.12 From the mid-nineteenth century until 1930 Scotland usually ranked third, behind both Ireland and Norway, among European countries exporting migrants. In certain periods, such as 1901-10 and 1913, Scotland was second only to Italy, while between 1921-30 the exodus from Scotland was proportionately greater than other European countries.13 Indeed, the interwar years witnessed a departure of almost half a million Scots.14 A further half a million left in the 1950s and 1960s.15 Use of Testimonies Although the broad sweep of Scottish migration provides an important context, by and large the experiences of those involved in the processes of relocation and settlement have been astonishingly neglected. This volume is an initial step in remedying that dearth. It does so by deploying personal testimonies, such as letters, interviews, and memoirs, to present a vivid and engaging picture of Scottish migration across time and space. Such material has only been sporadically utilized in the past to explore notions of individual movement, while recent syntheses have deployed such sources for colour and drama.16 Current forays in the field of twentieth-century Scottish migration have, however, shown ways in which these sources can be approached.17 The value of such source material has most profitably been used for other migrant groups. Personal letters, in particular, have been most extensively utilized with the English, Irish, German, and Dutch all receiving critical attention.18 Such works succinctly summarize the uses and functions of personal letters. For David Fitzpatrick, the eminent historian of Ireland who examined Irish-Australian correspondence, letters were ‘a cultural institution’ and involved consolatory, functional, and manipulative applications.19 More recently, David Gerber has suggested new pathways for examining the emigrant letter. In an overview of approaches to the emigrant letter, Gerber proposed the usefulness of gender and modernization perspectives in exploring concepts of the self.20 Gerber has also looked at the modification and maintenance of significant relationships through the exchange of letters and the ways this sustained a ‘culture of emigration’.21 It is just such themes that he returns to in his chapter for this collection.

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Scholarly concerns about the methodology of utilizing personal letters are naturally warranted.22 Whether the information contained in correspondence is trustworthy and the extent to which letters are representative of migrant groupings as a whole have been issues of particular concern. Letters, for instance, are composed by the literate and those who wish to communicate. Yet the random and haphazard endurance and acquisition of letters means that those that have survived are exceptional and therefore unlikely to be representative of either migrants or letter-writers. Methodological concerns surrounding the authenticity, editing, and presentation of transcripts are also important. In this volume, contributors have drawn on both published and unpublished materials and careful distinctions between the two are necessary. In their respective chapters, contributors have also pointed out drawbacks with the various materials deployed. As Andrew Mackillop indicates, relying on letters alone can provide a false impression of Scots as ‘excessively clannish’. Tom Brooking, meanwhile, suggests that letters tell us about the general migrant experience, rather than what was particularly Scottish about it. The latter, he suggests in this volume, is only discernible through Presbyterianism, happenings in Scotland, and comparisons between origin and destination. Despite such concerns, the major benefit of emigrant correspondence is in illuminating quite vividly and emotionally the varied migration experiences of individuals. Indeed, the benefits of personal letters in studies of migration are immeasurable. They often provide a two-way perspective even though many preserved sequences contain correspondence sent in just one direction. Indeed, being an intimate, conversational means of communication, correspondents actively sought responses from recipients. Depending on the recipient, however, tone and content could vary. In addition, letter writers decided what information they would disclose and, despite their private nature, letters could be read aloud. By contrast with the longevity of scholars’ use of personal letters in providing an innovative and popular means by which to explore the selfidentification of migrants, interviews are a more recent methodological approach adopted by historians in migration studies. Even if the nature of the source means that its application is largely confined to movements in the twentieth century, interviews have proved particularly attractive for studying the process of migration. In part this is because of a shortage of other forms of personal testimony, but it is also due to the desire of scholars to penetrate the lives of ‘ordinary’ individuals. Yet blossoming fascination with the use of oral history in migration studies has prompted Alistair Thomson’s concern as to whether ready recourse to record migrant

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stories ‘has displaced historians’ efforts to unearth other forms of personal testimony’.23 An ‘unexpected byproduct of” an oral history project conducted in Australia, for instance, was the discovery of letters, diaries, and other family sources.24 Authors in this collection have also endeavoured to supplement the dominant personal testimony. Mackillop, for instance, utilizes wills and business correspondence, while Doug Catterall draws upon a memorial and petition to parliamentary committee. While arguments could be made that such material is personal testimony, these documents, official in character, served a different purpose to other forms of private testimony like letters, diaries, and interviews. Other authors incorporate a range of personal testimonies in their analyses. Thus, Brooking and Eric Richards utilize letters, memoirs, and autobiographies, while Angela McCarthy and Jim Hammerton blend both oral and written sources. Unlike written migrant material, interviews are mediated by the intervention of an interviewer who typically sets the agenda for discussion, edits the interview, evaluates it and either stores it for posterity or discards it.25 The level of comfort a respondent feels with questions directed towards them also shapes the interview process. Further complications include the reliability and consistency of memory, yet these can be counteracted by recourse to documentary evidence or comparison with other interviews on the same topic. Whether or not the interviewee has a personal agenda in articulating a specific version of events also needs to be considered. Despite such drawbacks, interviews have critical benefits for scholars of migration. They not only enable exploration of aspects of the migration experience through individual stories that would otherwise be lost to scholars, but the longitudinal nature of oral testimony gives it ‘a crucial competitive edge’ over the contemporary document.26 By mapping individual accounts over time the consequences of past events can be examined. Quite apart from their notable differences, letters and oral testimony have similarities. Both, for instance, depend on the selective memory of the correspondent and interviewee, who shape their stories for specific audiences. Letters and interviews also contain silences and evasions. While the correspondent might well choose to ignore penning seemingly unsuitable or sensitive topics for discussion, a deft interviewee can also elect to evade an uncomfortable issue, or avoid supplying relevant, but delicate, data. On the other hand, interviewees are more likely to discuss intimate issues with an empathetic interviewer while correspondents, though perhaps silent about their own affairs, could be forthcoming about personal matters relating to their associates.

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Testimonies and Themes Overall, these sources are most beneficial for the penetrating insight they provide into a range of significant themes associated with migration including motives for moving and issues of integration. Such topics arise peripherally in this collection, along with a number of other important issues. Three substantial areas of investigation emerging from these chapters relate to gender, child migration, and return migration, vital aspects requiring greater analysis within studies of migration more generally. What, however, does a focus on Scottish migration reveal? Several of the chapters are predominantly based on testimonies from Scottish men. In places such as eighteenth-century India and the Caribbean this is not surprising, for the demanding physical environment acted against widespread female settlement. Richards’ chapter on the Scots in Australia is also heavily reliant on the sources composed by Scottish men, essentially due to his focus on mercantile and pastoral networks which were male dominated. Whether their womenfolk established network ties, albeit of a different form, readily awaits exploration. Other chapters, however, document the challenging female experience of migration and pose the query of whether migration was a gendered experience. Gerber’s exploration of the letters exchanged between Mary Ann Archbald and her childhood friend are especially illuminating in terms of Archbald’s seemingly passive role in the relocation. So too is Hammerton’s and McCarthy’s documentation of the influence of Scottish women in the decision-making process. More systematic and sustained analysis of migration through a gendered lens, however, is required. The extent to which gender relations at home influenced migrants after settlement abroad and vice versa are further major aspects of migration requiring investigation. Personal testimonies also illuminate themes rarely considered in Scottish migration. While the official relocation of British orphaned children has preoccupied some scholars,27 few have looked at the bulk of children who migrated with or to their parents. Hammerton’s chapter makes an important contribution in this respect, by drawing on the testimony of migrants who left Scotland as children and their resultant ambivalent loyalties. McCarthy also uses the oral testimony of those who went to the United States as children, and reveals that they faced significant challenges, particularly in school settings. Chapters by Gerber and Catterall, meanwhile, provide brief but scintillating insights into the secondgeneration experience abroad, one of the most neglected topics within the historiography of Scottish migration and studies of migration more generally. We still await, for instance, sustained investigation of the entire

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Scottish multigenerational ethnic group in their varied destinations of choice. A further theme linking a number of chapters is that of the return flow, an area of analysis strikingly overlooked in aspects of Scottish migration, though a recent collection has made a necessary and welcome contribution to that area of neglect.28 This disregard is surprising given that an estimated one-third of Scots returned to their homeland.29 Qualitative evidence of earlier and later migrant flows shows a conspicuous Scottish disposition for return, even if not always fulfilled. Mackillop and Hamilton, for instance, document the desire for sojourners in India and the Caribbean to return with abundant resources, a wish that rarely met fruition, especially for those in India. John Rose, on the other hand, successfully returned to Britain after a period in the United States, as Catterall outlines. A hankering to return to Scotland also suffused Mary Ann Archbald’s correspondence from the United States, though the practical achievement of this desire remained a fantasy. So too is evidence of return migration found in Sarah Gibson’s exploration of the Brodies and their connections in Canada. Examples of a yearning to return and actual examples of reverse movement occurring likewise feature in Richards’ chapter on the Scots in Australia. While not documented in any depth in the remaining chapters, the propensity among migrants to return to Scotland was presumably substantial throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Another theme, really only alluded to in passing by some contributors, is Scottish perceptions and engagements with indigenous populations and other races. At times, as Mackillop reveals, interaction with South Asians could result in sexual liaisons. Yet practical rather than sentimental motives spurred most relationships Scots maintained with South Asians. Moreover, Mackillop points out how erroneous the assumption is that past oppression of the Scots made them sensitive to other racial groups. This verdict is reiterated by Hamilton in connection with Scottish engagement with slaves in the Caribbean. So too do Scottish perceptions of Australia’s indigenous population suggest that Scots indulged ‘in the prevailing disdain for the indigenous populations whom they decisively displaced.’ In New Zealand, on the other hand, there is evidence that Scots were quick to adapt Maori patterns of engagement with the land. These preliminary remarks reveal the urgent requirement for a systematic exploration of Scottish encounters with and perceptions of indigenous populations throughout all regions of the Scottish Empire. How did Scottish perceptions of indigenous groups differ from those migrants emanating from other areas of Europe? Did Scots perceive themselves as having better relations with indigenous groups than other migrants? To what extent did they permit professional indigines

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membership of Scottish lodges and institutions? And how did the prevalence of other racial groups at Scottish rather than English universities influence the perceptions of indigenous people by highly educated Scottish migrants abroad? Apart from these issues in Scottish migration, inter alia, two critical themes in personal testimonies relate to networks and identities. These conceptual aspects are focused upon in this volume in order to give it intellectual and conceptual coherence. They are also explored through the lens of personal sources to provide accounts of what migrants thought, rather than attempt to ascertain their mentalities and experiences through the words of others. In adopting this approach, the idea of a homogeneous community of Scots as derived from popular discourses of identity is challenged. As at home, Scots were marked out by religious, linguistic, cultural, and geographical differences. So too could these networks and identities alter over time. Efforts are also made to establish what was particularly Scottish about migrant networks and identities by making preliminary comparisons with other ethnic groups. This comparison is undertaken as studies that focus on a single ethnic group are susceptible to accusations of exceptionalism and parochialism. Networks Within studies of migration personal and formal networks are significant areas of analysis. Scholars have indicated that such networks differ in their origins, development, function, and operation. Networks also influence social mobility and the development of economic niches, and their longterm significance is often dependent on geographical concentration.30 The workings of networks can, of course, be gleaned from numerous sources. Formal networks, as revealed in this volume, could comprise business contacts, religious connections, and clubs and societies. Such contacts could be charitable or simply an entry into the business and political sphere. Informal networks were predominantly composed of family and friends, who frequently assisted with accommodation, employment, money, and friendship. At times, both informal and formal connections could blend. These various social networks enabled migrants to maintain contact with their homeland through a process scholars have termed ‘transnationalism’.31 The concept also embraces contact between family and friends at various destinations. These connections played important economic, political, and social roles particularly with regard to such issues as remittances, marriage, and citizenship.32 The various contributors to this collection have conceptualized networks in novel ways. Crucially, several essays demonstrate that Scots were not

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always reliant on networks, formal or informal. This is most evident in Gerber’s exploration of the correspondence of Mary Ann Archbald who deliberately avoided creating and nurturing such linkages. Instead, Archbald sought interaction with native-born Americans descended from other ethnic groups. This was primarily the consequence of her settlement in an area dominated by native-born Americans. While polite in her engagements, Archbald remained unsatisfied, thus generating a quest for solidarity with her old friend in Scotland. This action suggests that some migrants formed networks to fulfil emotional and sentimental rather than practical needs, admittedly not a feature peculiarly Scottish. So too does Richards identify Scots who operated in Australia without the support of such connections. This was predominantly due to the isolated character of their settlement in which they sought to tame unappropriated land. These ‘colonial isolates’, as Richards terms them, also largely operated outside other non-ethnic networks. Despite this, these migrants maintained contact with their close connections living elsewhere, thus revealing a sense of community despite physical absence. Other contributors challenge the importance of a sole focus on Scottish networks. In his assessment of Scottish participation in the English East India Company throughout the eighteenth century, Mackillop supports the earlier conceptualization of Alan Karras, that networks were focused on old world goals. Yet Mackillop develops this conceptualization further, his main thrust being that ‘Scots in Asia developed cyclical networks and identities that evolved (or revolved) in response to the process of departure, residence abroad, and the prospect of returning home’. Although Scots co-operated with South Asians their networks were predominantly composed of Europeans, mainly because this contact enabled their profits to be conveyed back to their origins. This arose from the constant threat of mortality and the necessity to have their estate administered in the event of death. Relying on other Scots for such practical and financial realities, Mackillop stresses, could be unrealistic and counterproductive. In addition, the placement of kin in diverse locales in India meant Scots could not rely exclusively on these family connections. This, together with the rapid turnover in arrival and departure of staff, meant that Scots did not solely depend on kin and local affiliations. The maintenance of Scottish networks, however, was not incompatible with contact with other migrant groups. Scots in India, for instance, associated with Indians, Europeans, and Britons. Yet these connections could be discarded more easily than Scottish associations. Local mistresses, for example, were readily expendable. Scots in the Caribbean also worked with other groups and attended English church services. Mary Ann

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Archbald likewise engaged more willingly with native-born Americans, though her correspondence contained frequent complaints about them. Despite these divergent interpretations it is clear that many Scots made their journeys abroad in families or groups. As scholars have established for the eighteenth century, Highland migration took place predominantly in large parties, while Lowlanders moved as individuals or in families or small groups.33 Most evidence from the testimonies points to the latter flow, highlighting the overall importance of Lowland migration which has typically been neglected in favour of the more emotive flow of Highlanders. The chapters that follow reveal that even when migrants moved as individuals they did so within tight networks of advice and support that drew upon a wider range of connections than those moving as collectives. Young male sojourners in India and the Caribbean, for example, were facilitated before and after their moves by their connections. Yet family migrations were a rarity in both cases, thus sparking the need for substitute networks, comprised of professional attachments. Later movements reveal the importance of family migrations as highlighted in chapters on the Brodies, Mary Ann Archbald, and Scots going to the United States in the twentieth century. Indeed, as McCarthy reveals, many Scottish men sought lodging and employment in the United States before being joined by their family. Yet these family connections extended beyond the usual nuclear family, perhaps because Scots going to the United States had to draw on a broader range of kin contacts due to strict immigration regulations requiring sponsorship. So too does Hammerton reveal the propensity of Scots to migrate in family groups to Australia, a feature which distinguished them from their English and Welsh counterparts. A distinctive element of Scottish migration, compared with other ethnic groups, is the perception of clanship and clannishness. As Hamilton’s investigation of Scottish migrants in the Caribbean illuminates, letters show an ongoing emotional connection to home regions. It was particular areas of origin, rather than an all-encompassing Scotland to which migrants were attached. Kinship and locality, therefore, were substantially stronger than national ties. Whereas these connections could also bind other migrant groups, Hamilton argues that Scots were distinguished by ‘near kinship’ and that clanship (not being blood related) rather than clannishness (blood related) distinguished the Scots in the Caribbean. In arguing that clanship was remade in the Empire, Hamilton posits that Lowlanders configured themselves in ways similar to Highlanders by maintaining patterns of patronage and support, but without adopting a broader Gaelic culture. In this formulation the patterns of clanship are therefore Scottish-wide but still encompass those who are not strictly blood related.34

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Historically, of course, clanship is perceived as being bound up with Gaelic culture, derived from feudalism, kinship, and local association, and in decline before the ’45.35 This association between clanship and Gaelic culture, however, would only reappear in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after the demise of clanship in the eighteenth century as a result of mass clearances and commercialization. Clearly there is an irony in all this. Most Scottish migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Lowlanders, while the cultural form of Scottishness (tartan, pipes, kilts) that they exhibited after the demise of clanship was Highland in origin.36 This is especially evident in McCarthy’s chapter on Scottish migrants in the United States, which contains brief references to clan associations. Again, it is evident that clanship is reconfigured abroad, with members of thriving modern clan incarnations claiming association usually through surname. Chapters on the Antipodes, on the other hand, deal primarily with the idea of Scottish clannishness. Richards, for instance, indicates that Scots were viewed as clannish because of the focus they gave to their genealogies, origins, and kin. In New Zealand, by contrast, Lowlanders were perceived as being more modern and less clannish than Highlanders. It must be noted, however, that concepts like clanship and clannishness remain contested and controversial. Not only do conceptual issues relating to clans vary in their definition over time, but also migrants generally failed to deploy such terms. The fundamental role played by local kin and neighbourhood connections, a feature also applicable to other migrant groups, is therefore critical in analyses of Scottish migration. Such associations are evident in nineteenth-century Australia where Richards discusses the deep ties to Kirkcaldy. Meanwhile, in Otago one migrant sought to maintain links with other Peebleshire migrants. So too do intimate local connections appear in twentieth-century North America. Ernest Younger, for instance, associated primarily with natives of Tillicoultry in Toronto. A broader sense of affiliation, however, is evident in Catterall’s discussion of John Rose. Catterall indicates that unlike other European groups who formed networks founded on religion, Scottish networks on the Continent were more prone to be based on ethnicity. This is an intriguing point, given that in later centuries Scots were identified through their Presbyterianism. Yet Catterall also demonstrates that Rose not only drew upon an eighteenthcentury incarnation of network and enclave based migration, but also upon patronage, respectability, and participation in the Scottish enclave at Charleston. Such varied networks played a number of significant roles for migrants and many contributors point to such practicalities as providing

PERSONAL TESTIMONIES AND SCOTTISH MIGRATION 11 accommodation, employment, and finance. Networks were also communication conduits with established migrants offering newcomers advice as to what to bring or what to expect. The social dimension of networks is also highlighted, and was often just as important as the financial and practical benefits provided by family and friends. Networks, though, were not without negative elements, a feature considered by some contributors. Hamilton, for instance, points to difficulties arising out of the execution of estates and the sheer scale of requests for assistance. Catterall, meanwhile, reveals that through Rose’s marriage and his business partner’s death Rose allegedly violated the vital network values of patronage, kinship, loyalty, and mercantile propriety. By reorienting his business strategy away from his network and marrying ‘beneath him’ Rose invoked piercing criticism. Persistent and often acidic gossip resulted from close connections, evident from McCarthy’s analysis of the letters of Ernest Younger who settled in Toronto. Not surprisingly, such rumours were repeated to home contacts. Formal networks were also essential for many migrants in facilitating and maintaining their social connections, but appear to have been cyclical in their importance. For Scots sojourning in the eighteenth century in both India and the Caribbean, for instance, formal networks were necessary to ensure entry into Company service. Thereafter, they were less vital. As Hamilton reveals, migrants were reluctant to establish churches in the Caribbean so as to prevent Christianity spreading to slaves. Studies of individual Scots in Canada and the United States in the nineteenth century also fail to document Scottish participation in formal networks. Instead, the most sustained evidence of Scottish involvement in formal networks emerges from the personal documents emanating from Scots in Otago, New Zealand. There, as elsewhere though, societies were less important than the Presbyterian church. Scottish networks were also distinctive when tied to the Presbyterian church and the Gaelic language as Richards emphasizes. It is, however, only with forays into the twentieth-century experience that substantial evidence of Scottish involvement in societies appears in the personal testimonies cited in this volume. Though some societies in the United States had a local or regional emphasis, most were national as McCarthy reveals, thus shaping a sense of collective identity that bridged homeland differences. Further exploration is required, however, to ascertain to what extent such involvement was a continuation of practices prior to migration. There is no evidence, however, of Scottish involvement in masonic lodges, despite their prominence in these institutions worldwide.37

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Identities As social anthropologist Steven Vertovec has indicated, networks are generally located in a perception of shared identity, with the latter generally being a conception of the self and others.38 Moreover, both formal and informal networks enabled migrants to convey and maintain collective ethnic identities. The flip side is that migrants could also exploit their identities to acquire influence within networks so as to further their economic and social desires. The authors in this volume are alert to the fluid nature of identities, which are constructed, imagined, multilayered, and refashioned. Contributors have also endeavoured to consider what was distinctive about Scottish identities compared with other ethnic groups. Admittedly, this is more discernible than the ‘Scottish’ approach in which they created and nourished their networks. Generally, visible and audible forms of Scottishness are less evident in earlier centuries, a curiosity given that Scotland during the earlier period was a distinctive component of the Union, with a different society and economy to England, whereas similarities with England were more striking in the latter period. A suggestive answer might be that changes in migrant destinations forced greater distinctiveness. Despite this, several aspects are identified by the contributors to this volume as being peculiarly Scottish. For Scots in India, Scottishness was not reliant on outwards symbols, ethnic badges, or societies. Instead, a Scottish identity persisted because of the desire for sojourners to return. The threat of death was immense and meant that Scots had to nourish such connections in order to have their estate administered. As Mackillop states, a Scottish identity in India was often practical rather than sentimental. This form of Scottishness was also cyclical, important upon initial arrival, and declining somewhat thereafter, before being vigorously reasserted prior to a migrant’s anticipated return. In the Caribbean, Hamilton argues that an assimilationist Britishness rather than distinctive Scottishness was sought, though this was not incompatible with Scots stressing local rather than national connections. Indeed, local connections were highly critical in the profusion of Scottish identities. In her exploration of the Brodie correspondence, Gibson states that rarely were cultural symbols mentioned. Instead, ‘the strength and density of the Brodie network meant that they did not have to appeal to Scottish cultural symbols in order to root their relationships’. Yet Gibson adds a caveat: physical proximity was not essential in maintaining a Scottish identity. Gibson also points to a Scottish identity being rooted in the Church of Scotland’s international links. As well as churches, Richards adds business

PERSONAL TESTIMONIES AND SCOTTISH MIGRATION 13 ties, schools, and literacy as areas that distinguished Scots. This is reiterated by Brooking for nineteenth-century New Zealand in which being Scottish is discernible through church, home, and school, institutions which were fundamental in shaping identities, values, and lifestyles. Brooking also points out that Scots were allegedly more adept at learning skills such as growing potatoes in a Maori fashion, unlike their English counterparts. So too does Brooking indicate that Scottish identities were formulated in response to differences encountered with the new land and continuities of tradition. Houses, for instance, were erected in the Scottish style and many migrants pointed out similarities between the landscapes of Scotland and New Zealand. As renowned imperial historian John MacKenzie has commented, ‘Nature, landscape, and perceptions of environmental change have themselves been increasingly recognised as cultural constructs which play their own part in notions of identity’.39 In the twentieth century, however, Scottishness is demonstrated through highly visible displays of stereotypical Scottish symbols and icons. For the Scots in North America, for instance, Scottishness was visibly and audibly conveyed via clans, societies, pipes, kilts, and dancing. It was, then, a colourful and noisy expression of their cultural identity, thus heightening Scottish visibility. Their Irish counterparts, by contrast, failed to articulate such a symbolic degree of Irishness. In Australia, meanwhile, whereas English migrants initially socialized through institutions focused on dancing, Scots gravitated towards Scottish societies. Scots in Australia also incorporated Scottish symbols and icons into their stories but, as Hammerton argues, this declined in importance as Scots integrated into their new homes. Instead, Hammerton contends that the Scottishness of such testimonies lies in the ‘ways in which migrants often narrate their sense of nostalgia and longing for the homeland’. It was, instead, English migrants who focused on an idealized English countryside. The paradox is clear: Scots typically romanticized Scotland’s hills and glens, but such sentiments are absent from their testimonies in Australia. A further feature of Scottish exceptionalism, evident in a number of chapters, is language. The use of Scots, Gaelic, and speaking English with a Scottish accent audibly differentiated Scottish migrants from other ethnic groups. The Scottish rather than Gaelic language is mentioned in chapters by Gibson and Gerber. Gaelic, on the other hand, is emphasized in Richards’ chapter on Australia, though its fading there echoed its decline in Scotland. The language mentioned by Janet Schaw, the Caribbean diarist, is presumably Scots and separated her fellow ethnics from their British counterparts. These findings affirm MacKenzie’s statement that Scottish linguistic divisions embraced Scots as well as Gaelic, despite the scholarly

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tendency to emphasize Gaelic in connection with Scottish migrants.40 Both Hammerton and McCarthy raise the importance of accent in connection with Scottish migrants. In Australia, audibly professing a Scottish accent enabled Scots to differentiate themselves from ‘whingeing Poms’. In the United States, on the other hand, child migrants sought to swiftly abandon their accents in order to avoid aggressive teasing at school. Issues relating to language also emerge from analyses of earlier centuries. Essentially, however, what transpires from these investigations is that a strong sense of Scottishness was not incompatible with other identities. Indeed a range of identities was frequently complementary. Rose’s identity balanced the values of his network, his ties to Carolina lowcountry, and his family’s Jacobite heritage. Belonging to a Caledonian lodge in Australia, wearing a kilt, attending the Presbyterian church, and participating in Scottish dances were not inconsistent with deep attachment to Australia. So too does Hamilton argue that assimilation and ethnicity were not incompatible in a Caribbean setting though he adds that if Scots developed a new consciousness there it was British not Scottish. Likewise, Hammerton demonstrates a careful approach which conveys the ambivalence and confused loyalties of Scots in Australia. Through this method he too challenges the excessive emphasis given to versions of identities which rely on institutional records of churches and ethnic organizations. Instead, Hammerton focuses on how a Scottish identity was played out in the family sphere. He does so by focusing on two life stories of child migrants who ‘fashioned their parents’ well-rehearsed iconic stories into their own’. Other contributors challenge identities as being connected to ethnicity. For Gerber, Mary Ann Wodrow’s ethnicity was not based on identification with her fellow Scots either formally or informally. Instead, her Scottishness was ‘a deeply personal attachment to a past that was as mythic as it was historical’. She had little time for intellectual or literary culture, folk traditions, or contemporary Scottish society or politics. Instead, Wodrow emphasized her family lineage, and the places and landscape connected with her birthplace. Through the lens of personal testimonies, this collection reveals the various forms of social networks and mutability of individual and collective identities among Scottish migrants over time and space. So too does it reinforce findings among other scholars that transnationalism and the accompanying role of social networks are historical in character.41 The collection also enables similarities and differences relating to the Scottish migrant experience at various destinations to be gleaned. So too does the book highlight the agency of individual movers within broader structural

PERSONAL TESTIMONIES AND SCOTTISH MIGRATION 15 forces. That the migration and settlement of Scots abroad was a highly complex undertaking is evident in the lack of a clear consensus among the contributors relating to issues of social networks and identities, among other themes. Nevertheless, this complexity demonstrates that Scottish migration is an aspect of the history of Scotland that requires deeper analysis at all levels. The importance of integrating personal testimonies in such analyses is clearly evident from the chapters that follow. Notes I am grateful to John MacKenzie and Andrew Mackillop for their comments on an earlier draft of this Introduction. 1 The major works are Marjory Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003); Marjory Harper, Emigration from Scotland Between the Wars: Opportunity or Exile? (Manchester, 1998); Marjory Harper, Emigration from Northeast Scotland, 2 vols. (Aberdeen, 1988); T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600-1815 (London, 2003); T. M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (Edinburgh, 1992). 2 T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman, and T. M. Devine, ‘Scottish emigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Nicholas P. Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800 (Oxford and New York, 1994), Table 5.1, p. 85. 3 Smout et al, ‘Scottish emigration’, p. 77-8. Approximately 30,000-40,000 moved to Poland between 1600-1700 (Smout et al, p. 82) while an estimated 25,000 Scots were active in military service in Scandinavia before 1650 (Smout et al, p. 83). As many as 100,000 Scots went to Ireland in the seventeenth century (Smout et al, p. 88). 4 Smout et al, ‘Scottish emigration’, p. 90. 5 R. A. Houston and C. W. J. Withers, ‘Population mobility in Scotland and Europe, 1600-1900: a comparative perspective’, Annales De Démographie Historique (1990), p. 298. 6 Devine, Scotland’s Empire, p. 230. 7 Houston and Withers, ‘Population mobility’, pp. 297-8. Family migration from Scotland has been conceptualized as ‘provincial’, while the outflow of young men to America from the Thames Valley region is labelled ‘metropolitan’. See Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), pp. 202-3. 8 Devine, Scotland’s Empire, p. 230, 252. 9 Ibid., pp. 242, 254-5. 10 Eric Richards, ‘Varieties of Scottish emigration in the nineteenth century’, Historical Studies, 21:85 (1985), p. 474. 11 Dudley Baines, Emigration from Europe, 1815-1930 (Basingstoke, 1991), p. 7. 12 T. M. Devine, ‘The paradox of Scottish emigration’, in Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society, pp. 2-3. 13 Baines, Emigration from Europe, Table 6.1.1, p. 441.

16

14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21

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Michael Flinn (ed.), Scottish Population History from the 17th Century to the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977), Table 6.1.1, p. 441. M. Anderson, ‘Population and family life’, in T. Dickson and J. H. Treble (eds), People and Society in Scotland, Vol. 3, 1914-1990 (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 14. The most sustained use of such material is contained in Harper, Emigration from Scotland Between the Wars. Brief use of such materials also appears in Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj: private and public celebrations of Scottishness in late imperial India’, Scottish Historical Review, 81:2 (2002), pp. 212-39; and Michael E. Vance, ‘The politics of emigration: Scotland and assisted emigration to Upper Canada, 1815-26’, pp. 37-60, and Ted Cowan, ‘From the Southern Uplands to Southern Ontario: nineteenth-century emigration from the Scottish borders’, pp. 61-83, in Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society. Two recent syntheses which utilize personal testimonies are Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, and Devine, Scotland’s Empire. For a range of extracts from personal testimonies among other sources see Allan I. Macinnes, Marjory-Ann D. Harper, and Linda G. Fryer (eds), Scotland and the Americas, c.1650-c.1939: A Documentary Source Book (Edinburgh, 2002). See the following, all by Angela McCarthy: ‘Scottish national identities among inter-war migrants in North America and Australasia’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (accepted; forthcoming 2006); ‘Personal letters, oral testimony, and Scottish migration to New Zealand in the 1950s: the case of Lorna Carter’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23:1 (2005), pp. 59-79; ‘National identities and twentieth-century Scottish migrants in England’, in William L. Miller (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1900 to Devolution and Beyond (Oxford, 2005), pp. 171-82; ‘Personal accounts of leaving Scotland, 1921-1954’, Scottish Historical Review, 83:2 (2004), pp. 196-215; ‘“For spirit and adventure”: personal accounts of Scottish migration to New Zealand, 1921-1961’, in Tom Brooking and Jennie Coleman (eds), The Heather and the Fern: Scottish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (Dunedin, 2003), pp. 117-32. The essential works are Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1972); David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork, 1995); Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer (eds), News From the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca and London, 1991; 1st German edn. 1988); Herbert J. Brinks (ed.), Dutch American Voices: Letters from the United Sates, 1850-1930 (Ithaca and London, 1995). Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation. David A. Gerber, ‘The immigrant letter between positivism and populism: the uses of immigrant personal correspondence in twentieth-century American scholarship’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 16:4 (1997), p. 4. David A. Gerber, ‘Epistolary ethics: personal correspondence and the culture of emigration in the nineteenth century’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 19:4 (2000), pp. 3-23. This paragraph draws largely from the discussions contained in Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, especially pp. 18-36; Gerber, ‘The immigrant letter’, pp. 334; Dirk Hoerder, Creating Societies: Immigrant Lives in Canada (Montreal and

PERSONAL TESTIMONIES AND SCOTTISH MIGRATION 17

23 24 25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32 33 34 35

Kingston, 1999), especially pp. 16-21; and from papers and discussion at the ‘Reading the emigrant letter: innovative approaches and interpretations’ conference held at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 7-9 August 2003. Alistair Thomson, ‘Moving stories: oral history and migration studies’, Oral History, 27:1 (1999), p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. For useful summaries of the applications of migrant interviews see Eric Richards, ‘Hearing voices: an introduction’, in A. James Hammerton and Eric Richards (eds), Speaking to Immigrants: Oral Testimony and the History of Australian Migration (Canberra, 2002), pp. 1-19; Thomson, ‘Moving stories’, pp. 24-37. Richards, ‘Hearing voices’, p. 8. See, for instance, chap. 5 in Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, and two articles by Stephen Constantine: ‘The British government, child welfare, and child migration to Australia after 1945’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30:1 (2002), pp. 99-132; ‘Child migrants as ancestors: child migrants and identity in Canada’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 16:1 (2003), pp. 150-9. A number of chapters on Scottish return migration appear in Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000 (Manchester, 2005). M. Anderson and D. J. Morse, ‘The people’, in W. Hamish Fraser and R. J. Morris (eds), People and Society in Scotland, Vol. 2, 1830-1914 (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 16. Two seminal works on networks are Monica Boyd, ‘Family and personal networks in international migration: recent developments and new agendas’, International Migration Review, 23:3 (1989), pp. 638-70; Douglas S. Massey, Joaquín Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor, ‘Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal’, Population and Development Review, 19:3 (1993), pp. 431-66. For recent explorations of immigrant organizations see the articles in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31:5 (2005). See, for instance, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina BlancSzanton, ‘Transnationalism: a new analytic framework for understanding migration’, in Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (eds), Towards A Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (New York, 1992), pp. 1-24. See also essays in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds), Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism (Cheltenham and Northampton, 1999). See, for instance, Steven Vertovec, ‘Transnationalism and identity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27:4 (2001), pp. 573-82. Richards, ‘Varieties of Scottish emigration’, p. 476. For further discussion see Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750-1820 (Manchester, 2005), pp. 25-7. For discussions of clanship see, for instance, T. M. Devine, From Clanship to Crofters’ War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester and New York, 1994); R. A. Dodgshon, ‘“Pretense of blude” and “place of thair duelling”: the nature of Scottish clans, 1500-1745’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 169-98; and

18

36

37

38 39

40 41

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chap. 1 of Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce, and the House of Stuart, 16031788 (East Linton, 1996). For a succinct summary of this appropriation see T. M. Devine, ‘The invention of Scotland’, in David Dickson, Seán Duffy, Cathal Ó Háinle, and Ian Campbell Ross (eds), Ireland and Scotland: Nation, Region, Identity. A Record of the TCD Conference September 2000 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 18-24; and chap. 11 and pp. 285-98 in T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700-2000 (London, 1999). John M. MacKenzie, ‘Foreword’, in A. MacKillop and Steve Murdoch (eds), Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers, c.1600-1800 (Leiden and Boston, 2003), p. xix. Vertovec, ‘Transnationalism and identity’, p. 573. John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities: the case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 8 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 216. Ibid., p. 221. See, for instance, Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven, 2000).

2 EUROPEANS, BRITONS, AND SCOTS: Scottish Sojourning Networks and Identities in Asia, c.1700-1815

Andrew Mackillop This chapter explores the personal correspondence, networks, and identities of Scots in the service of the English East India Company between c.1700 and 1815. Scots in south and south east Asia and China during this period were sojourners, ‘career’ emigrants who left with the intention of returning home at a later date. The themes of sojourning and return emigration have been described recently as the ‘Cinderella of Scottish diaspora studies’, and this neglect is only now being rectified.1 Furthermore, it has been suggested that in motivational terms, socioprofessional background, and networking practices, the movement of Scots into Britain’s eastern empire paralleled temporary migration within the Atlantic world.2 Though Scottish transients in Asia are, like their counterparts in the west, only now attracting detailed investigation it is clear that sojourners across the empire did share key basic characteristics and methods of networking.3 Temporary migrants were usually single males from landed, middling, or artisan backgrounds endowed with considerable educational and occupational skills.4 Above all, mobility was predicated upon the hope of making a fortune and returning home with the means to secure or enhance the sojourner’s social status. This objective of return ensured that patronage links, business, educational, social, and cultural networks were not aligned towards the sojourner’s temporary destination, but rather ‘worked toward “old world” goals.’5 The effort to remain connected with home manifested itself in various ways. Webs of sojourning association developed as ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ mechanisms, with successive migrants directed to particular destinations through a process of chain mobility. Networks, however, were never merely conduits of employment; they constituted a flexible resource that provided migrants with housing, financial and social credit, as well as the more informal needs of friendship.6 Transient networks in the Eastern and

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Atlantic empires were also shaped by political patronage, often channelled by ‘managers’ like Henry Dundas or by Scots serving as colonial governors.7 But the importance of state employment notwithstanding, it is generally agreed that kinship and local association, and the secondary patronage such connections supported, were ultimately more important in the formation and effectiveness of sojourning networks.8 Yet interpretations that stress the central role of kinship and regional affiliation, or the broadly similar character of Scottish sojourning throughout the British Empire create as many questions as they solve. The suggestion that Scottish sojourners shared similar social backgrounds and basic economic objectives detracts from the fact that different destinations forced the adoption of particular networks and identities. Scots arriving in the East faced a context quite unlike any other sector of British imperialism. The East India Company did broadly mirror the monopolistic, corporate authority of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but drew its Scottish personnel from higher up the social spectrum.9 The Caribbean, meanwhile, offers some superficial similarities with Asia, particularly the low numbers of whites relative to the bulk of the population and the high mortality rates that afflicted Europeans.10 But none of these comparisons are useful beyond drawing attention to the fact that sojourning had certain basic characteristics. The Asian sector of the empire involved the greatest imbalance between ‘British’ and ‘native’ peoples. Nor did the encounter with Asians usually take place in a rural context, but rather in cities that were substantially larger than most urban centres in the Atlantic world. Moreover, unlike the situation in the Caribbean, Eastern sojourners faced non-white populations that retained considerable economic, military, and political independence.11 Above all, the Atlantic world witnessed the unregulated movement of British subjects, even within the fur trading territories nominally controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was an obvious reason why the kin and regional networks exemplified by the North West Company could evolve and replenish themselves.12 The East India Company, by contrast, maintained a high degree of control over its servants, dictating who went where, and when. Although increasingly unable to regulate ‘free’ merchants and mariners after 1780, the Company also retained its right to licence British subjects in Asia until 1813.13 Given the unique political, economic, demographic, and cultural structure of the British presence in Asia, it is hardly surprising that sojourners there developed identities and associations that differed from transient networks in the Atlantic. If Asia provides a distinctive context for revisiting Scottish sojourning, it also offers an alternative perspective on more fundamental debates. There

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is considerable disagreement among scholars over whether or not Scottish emigrant networks were distinctive and indicative of a ‘provincial’ or ‘ethnic’ approach towards British imperialism.14 The alternative argument is that emigration and empire should not be viewed through a ‘Scottish’ or ‘national’ prism but, rather, seen as a process of integration that operated primarily at the regional, local, and kinship level.15 The testimonies, networks, and identities of transients in the East throw new light on these thorny questions of Scottish ethnicity and putative exceptionalism. This chapter argues that Scottish sojourning in India is best understood by investigating how ethnic, national, regional, and kinship identities were mutually influential rather than somehow distinct from each other. Using sources such as family and business letters, journals, and wills, it examines how Scottish influences, together with professional, European, and British networks, provided a dynamic context that affirmed yet also reshaped a sojourner’s identity. It will conclude that Scots in Asia developed cyclical networks and identities that evolved (or revolved) in response to the process of departure, residence abroad, and the prospect of returning home. A Culture of Communication: Sojourning in the East Indies Any attempt to understand the nature of Scottish sojourning in Asia is made easier by the quantity and quality of the written sources that transients left behind. The survival of so much material is surprising given the immense distances that separated those in Asia from their families. Information from Europe normally came by sea round the Cape of Good Hope and could take up to six months to arrive.16 Letters miscarried on a regular basis. In 1808 Archibald Seton of Touch in Stirlingshire, a diplomat in Delhi, was informed by his Scottish factor that nine out of ten letters sent between them had failed to arrive at their respective destinations.17 Even if a letter did arrive safely, the time lag between outgoing missives from Britain and the reply from India reaching home again was often a year or more. This produced a constant sense of frustration and anxiety among correspondents in Europe and in India, with sojourners and their families often ignorant of what each was doing or thinking. Writing in 1781 to John Macpherson in Bengal, Hugh Blair in Edinburgh noted of his own nephew John Drysdale: ‘I am uneasy about him: he sailed for Bombay in March 1779, and we have never heard anything in one way or other, concerning him’.18 The maintenance of contact under such exacting conditions produced a unique culture of emigrant letter-writing.19 On just one ship in December 1782 Claud Alexander from Ayrshire sent home from Calcutta over 40

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letters in quadruplicate under the care of Captain John Gordon from Banffshire.20 It can be argued, of course, that these sources are not representative. The majority of Scots in India, after all, were ordinary soldiers whose literacy levels meant they left little record beyond some wills and, crucially, Gaelic poetry.21 Yet the literacy and numeracy required for sojourning mean that the surviving body of correspondence is generally representative of transient Scots in Asia. The reason why these accounts provide so much analytical potential is that different types of sources survive. Personal correspondence enabled the maintenance of intimacy with family members, with written dialogue used to overcome vast physical separation. Above all, communication served a shifting set of objectives, enabling the sojourner to appear both exceptional and exotic while simultaneously transplanting him (and more rarely her) back into the domestic and familiar embrace of home and family.22 As a result, missives were often strikingly open and heartfelt. The anguish of Thomas Graham from Fife, writing from India to his brother George regarding their father’s death, is typical. The emotional strain of separation is clear, as is the extent to which Thomas thought constantly about the pros and cons of venturing to the East: What a happiness must you experience in your own mind in having the satisfaction of embracing him in the land of the living after so long an absence and after escaping the danger of both the Eastern and Western oceans. This alas my dear George is a blessing which I can never now enjoy. And which among many others, has proved one of the most grating reflections that has occupied my thoughts.23 But letters to family members were not always as forthcoming. Sojourners often avoided giving details of their income in an effort to reduce expectations of an imminent return home or to avoid begging letters. In 1778 Alexander Pringle of Whytebank in Selkirkshire, a Company servant in Madras, told his sister that ‘the present prospect is rather flattering but so fluctuant are all one’s concerns in this country that I am determined not to be too sanguine or to say anything about them to my friends until I see how they wind up’.24 Business accounts and correspondence provide an alternative perspective to family letters by illustrating the extent to which Scots interacted beyond their own immediate circle and which activities witnessed them rely on Scottish or non-Scottish contacts. The 1779 ledgers of Archibald Campbell of Inverneil show that 43 per cent of his debts in India were due from Scots, so clearly his business activities transcended

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23

ethnic boundaries.25 Finally, because acquiring a fortune constituted the motivation for most sojourners, many made wills that sought to secure material gains made in the East. Wills enabled individuals to express themselves openly and honestly without fear of recrimination.26 They therefore provide a final snapshot of how Scots wanted to be remembered, who they considered important, who they trusted, and whether Scottishness was still important to them at the end of their lives. The need to maximize the transfer of information meant that personal correspondence served different functions and multiple audiences.27 Missives that began as private letters were translated into the oral medium and then dispersed as community news. In a 1776 letter to his mother, Alexander Pringle mentioned six other Scots, adding that he supposed they had all written home but that he wished to confirm their welfare anyway. In 1780 Lieutenant Archibald Fergusson, laird of Dunfallundie in Atholl, wrote home about the careers, deaths, and salaries of five other Atholl sojourners scattered across India. His Scottish regional networking and identity in Bengal come across clearly in his letters: I have lost a very worthy friend in this country, Captain Stewart [of] Shearglish who died of a fever at Barrackpore some distance from Calcutta in September last. Lt MacGlashan who was present at his death has wrote his friends the particulars and will inform them better than I can do what fortune he has left. When you see the Ladys of Cluanbeg, Lt MacGlashan’s sisters, present my compliments to them, their brother is very well. Likewise to Craig’s family, their son is well and now at Calcutta and a few days ago made a Captain. I am under many obligations to him since my arrival in Bengal. I had a letter from Mr MacGlashan the schoolmaster’s son some days ago, he writes just now in one of the best offices in Calcutta and has a salary of £50 per month. As he is constantly at Calcutta he will see Mr Adam with every opportunity and let you know how we go on in the Eastern World.28 The consequence of these attempts to pass on news was that correspondence routinely noted how Scots encouraged others out to the East, if the author met fellow Scots, if they did business together, socialized together, or lent or borrowed money from each other. Conversely, sojourners were also keen to hear news of home. As Sergeant John Burns, serving in the Bengal army in the 1760s and 1770s, noted to a

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correspondent, ‘I should like to have a catalogue of all the little alterations about Paisley. Pray how does trade go on, how does provisions sell these two or three years past, what new magistrates or ministers have you now and whom of my acquaintances are dead or married, etc, etc’.29 One of the inherent risks in this abundance of evidence is that if personal correspondence alone is relied upon, an artificial impression can emerge of Scots as excessively clannish. Yet this culture of communication also makes it possible to reconstruct with an unusual degree of accuracy how Scottish sojourners operated in the East, how they envisaged themselves and those they encountered, and the extent to which their identities were shaped by their networks and vice versa. Indeed, on occasion it is even possible to track individuals through the entire cycle of their sojourn, from departure, to the return home, or death. The Limits of Sojourning Networks: Scottish-Indian Relations All Europeans, be they French, British, or Scots, formed connections with South Asians to a greater or lesser extent. It has been argued that this interaction was facilitated by the fact that the eighteenth century was not characterized by racism based exclusively on colour, but rather on concepts of morality, industry, and environmental determinism.30 There is some evidence to support this supposition. Research has shown, for example, that one in three wills left by Britons dying in Bengal between 1780 and 1785 made provision for a local wife and offspring.31 Scots differed little, if at all, from their British colleagues in their willingness to associate with Indians, and indeed they had sound reasons for doing so. Good European-Indian relations facilitated the accumulation of wealth and thus the likelihood of the sojourner returning home. The 1748 Madras journal of Lieutenant John Grant from Strathspey noted that European merchants ‘kept twenty to thirty of these black people’, including two dubashes (commercial agents) who were charged with carrying on trade with the ‘country black merchants’. Indian concubines also were a means by which Europeans initiated commercial opportunity. Grant noted of Company merchants, ‘if he is unmarried he keeps a black girl to take care of himself and if a trading man [she] is very useful to him in carrying on his trade’.32 It is clear that Indians could form an important element of a sojourner’s commercial network. Captain Alexander Patterson, for example, even left his dubash £80 for ‘his fidelity and faithful services’.33 Major Peter Davidson at Madras asked that a Hindu merchant act as his executor.34 That Patterson and Davidson were prepared in their last will and testament to publicly acknowledge their Indian connections confirms how

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sojourning in the East generated new associative tendencies among Scots. Relations with local mistresses also immersed Europeans in commitments that complicated or even undermined their financial motives for going to India. In the autumn of 1792 Alexander Callander, of Westertown in Midlothian, died in Bombay. While he left only £200 per annum to his three nieces in Scotland, he bequeathed £14,000 to his children by a ‘bramin’ woman called Coar.35 Although the amount left by Callander was unusual, others felt a similar commitment to the links they had formed in India. A sample of 40 wills for deceased Scots at Madras and Bombay between 1780 and 1790 mirrors the British pattern of cohabitation with local women. One in five of these Scottish wills made provision for household servants, local commercial agents, Indian concubines, and the deceased’s natural children.36 Yet, in the final analysis, Indians were not a fundamental ingredient in a Scottish sojourner’s identity or network. The issue is not whether Scots networked with locals, but rather the extent and nature of the interaction. Operating through concubines or agents was not the equivalent of constructing inclusive and durable networks with South Asians. When he left India in 1775, for example, George Graham, a non-Company merchant from Fife, left behind £27,200 in loans and commercial ventures: yet of this total less than 13 per cent was lent to Indians.37 Moreover, however much eighteenth-century characterizations of race may have differed from those of the nineteenth century, Europeans still peppered their rhetoric with the hierarchy of colour.38 In an explicit 1771 confession to his sister in Scotland, Brigadier-General David Wedderburn of the Bombay army noted of his liaisons with females: ‘I look no further now than to the shading of my partys, from the jet black to the jaunatre – you may, perchance have an Indian nephew, or a niece, but, believe me, you have no chance of having an Indian sister’.39 Such sentiments demonstrate how race constituted one of the primary foundations upon which Scots evaluated those who were or were not acceptable associates in Asia. This attitude even extended to concubines, although not to the children of such relationships. Nonetheless, in Bombay and Madras between 1780 and 1790 only 5 per cent of Scottish wills that acknowledged commitments in India made any provision for natural children to be sent home to Scotland.40 No will made any provision for Indian women to be sent to Europe with their children.41 Concubines, in other words, formed an expendable part of a sojourner’s network, to be used while in India but ultimately to be disposed of.42 Far from remaining ethnically exclusive, Scots in the East established commercial and personal relations with peoples from radically different cultural backgrounds. Yet a form of social and cultural apartheid existed

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whereby these Indian and European connections were kept parallel but largely apart.43 The nature of relations between Scots and South Asians also contradicts the dubious assertion that, because of their previous experience of oppression, Scots exhibited a distinctive degree of tolerance and respect towards the Empire’s indigenous cultures and peoples.44 Whether or not such an attitude existed in North America is debatable; but the myth of the culturally and racially sensitive Scot does not stand up to scrutiny in a South Asian context. Europeans Although Scots cooperated with South Asians, the basic economic, social, and cultural parameters of Scottish networks and identities were European in nature. To suggest that Scots in India were Europeans runs contrary to the established understanding of eighteenth-century Britishness. After 1707, so it has been argued, a marked decline occurred in Scotland’s traditional alignment with mainland Europe. Indeed, Britishness has been summarized as in many ways an alternate identity based on the xenophobic stereotyping of continental Europeans as alien ‘Others’. Britishness also arose through the positive common experience of Empire, which brought Scots, English, and Welsh together in a material, economic, political, and ultimately ideological sense.45 But imperialism must not be linked exclusively to Britishness. In Asia there were simply far too many and more obvious ‘Others’ for the Euro-phobic underpinnings of Britishness to operate unimpeded. A Protestant Briton who in Europe denigrated a Catholic Frenchmen quickly came to understand the common ‘White’ and ‘Christian’ character of both nationalities when confronted with South Asian socio-cultural practices.46 This reconfiguring of identity has been described as the ‘colonial mirror’; a process of self re-assessment induced among Europeans by their encounter with other cultures.47 If applied to sojourning in India, this reshaping of identity warns against the presumption that Scots within the Empire adopted just one supranational ‘British’ identity. Instead, there seems to have existed a certain cultural, even racial, affinity among all European sojourners. George Bogle of Daldowie, a civil servant in Calcutta, noted in a 1770 letter to Scotland: Whenever a few persons are together and secluded from society with the rest of the world, they are naturally more attached to each other. The natives are so different in their manners, language and religion that it is impossible to have any intercourse with them but on business. So you see the Europeans are obliged to keep to themselves.48

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Other accounts by sojourning Scots noted this process whereby many Europeans felt themselves to be a deeply resented minority, under constant physical, social, and cultural siege. The 1761 journal of Lieutenant Gordon of the 89th Highland Regiment was typical of those written by Scots officers in South Asia. He felt that Indians ‘are all thieves from the highest to the lowest, especially if they can cheat or steal from a white man’. Gordon mirrored Bogle’s sense of being surrounded by an intimidating mass of native humanity, noting that in some cities on the Samorin coast ‘it is dangerous for a European to walk in the bazaar after nightfall’.49 Viewing the Scots as part of a European presence in South Asia does not detract from the hostility that existed between Europeans, especially between the British and the French. But even individuals like Major General Eyre Coote, whose career was predicated upon negating French military and political influence in India, still referred to the ‘French Europeans’.50 In 1777 Major General James Stewart from Lanarkshire, then serving in the Madras army, even socialized with the governor of Pondicherry and Lauriston de Law, a prominent second-generation Scot in French service.51 A sense of shared Christianity, rather than a strict emphasis on confessional difference, was another element in this European sojourning identity. In 1785 Captain George Campbell of the Madras army died. His will stipulated that his eldest daughter Ann was to receive £38 per annum and, upon her marriage, a tocher (endowment) of £320. But Campbell’s religious identity exerted considerable influence when he insisted that she was to be married by a Protestant Danish Missionary or else forfeit any financial provision.52 Given his status as an East India Company officer, Campbell ought to have had his daughter married by a Church of England chaplain at Madras; as a Scot, however, he in all likelihood found Danish Lutheranism a slightly more palatable form of Protestantism. His choice reveals how Scottish sojourners balanced their own Protestant identity on the one hand with an allegiance in extremis to a sense of broad European Christianity on the other. Practical reasons also brought Europeans into close interaction. A powerful inducement to cooperation was the issue of how monies made in Asia were remitted back to Europe. Death and the prospect of return aside, few problems more exercised the minds of sojourners than that of securing their fortune and transferring it safely home.53 In theory, British nationals were obliged to send their money home through the English East India Company, which sought to impose control over the remittance of all British capital.54 By contrast, the French, Dutch, and Danish East India Companies viewed the fortunes of Britons in the East as an ideal means of purchasing Asian goods for their own domestic markets, and so offered

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competitive rates of exchange.55 In 1768 the Bengal civil servant, John Johnstone of Westerhall in Dumfriesshire, calculated that the use of French channels, as opposed to English Company bills, would save him an extra 15 per cent on his £50,000 remittance to Europe.56 Such arithmetic witnessed the development of sophisticated and multinational commercial networks that intersected with, and operated between, the nominally competitive East India companies. When dealing with the Danish Asiatic Company, in particular, Scottish sojourners possessed some relative advantages. In 1773 David Brown was appointed governor of the Danish base of Tranquebar. The new Danish governor was a scion of the Browns of Coulston, originally from East Lothian but by this time naturalized Danish subjects and prominent Copenhagen merchants.57 Combining his formal Danish status with informal Scottish networking, Brown established contact with Alexander Pringle of Whytebank, who commenced supplying textiles to the Danish Company. Pringle also formed an association with another Scot, David Boyd, who was employed as the Danish Company’s surgeon at Tranquebar.58 These Scoto-Danish links were successful in enabling the return migration of Pringle’s fortune to Britain; between 1780 and 1784, £6,435 worth of Danish bills was registered with Pringle’s Edinburgh agent.59 The only systematic study of this informal world of networking between British and Danish imperialism in Asia has revealed a strong Scottish presence. Of the 15 most prominent British merchants and India houses involved with the Danes between the 1770s and 1800, five – one third – were Scots.60 The extent of Scottish-Danish networking in the East shows that Scotland’s North Sea links, far from being irrelevant in the age of British imperialism, facilitated the emergence of global networks of sojourning commerce. Moreover, it is clear that inclusion within Britain’s Empire diversified rather than narrowed Scottish contact with Europeans. Interaction was simply relocated from its traditional North Sea locus into the global economy, of which Asia was such a fundamental part. Britons Although Scottish networking and identity in the East owed much to multi-national European influences, British factors were ultimately of greater importance. One reason for this was the fundamental change in the social and geographic origins of Company personnel in India. After c.1750 the number of Scots and Irish in Company service increased dramatically, especially in the army and in country trading activities. The result was that Britain’s demographic presence in South Asia became steadily less English and more accurately reflected the national diversity of the British Isles

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themselves.61 Yet, ironically, the political, social, and cultural world of the East India Company still remained very ‘English’ in its public discourse and aspirations. That the Company’s empire was an essentially English entity in socio-cultural as well as in formal constitutional terms is not surprising. Rather more intriguing is that this ‘ideal of [English] civility … seems to have been entirely acceptable to the Scots’.62 As their time abroad lengthened, Scots absorbed the rhetorical assumption that England was the home of all Britons in India. The meaning of England in this context is ambiguous. Given that upon their return to Europe a number of Scottish nabobs like Alexander Hume and Hugh Inglis chose to settle in the south rather than in Scotland, England could literally mean England. Indeed, the Scottish nabob John Michie’s ‘fondness for England was such that he declined any Scotch purchase’.63 Sir Archibald Campbell of Inverneil even wrote in 1787 from Madras to the Scottish nabob David Scott in London that ‘I have tried all countries and scruple not at this hour to give so strong a preference to old England, that I long most seriously to return to it’.64 Given Campbell’s interests and estates in Scotland, where he resided during part of the year, his use of ‘Old England’ was probably shorthand for the idealized home back in Britain that sojourners aspired to return to.65 There is little doubt that in many respects the East India Company created an Anglo-British rather than a British sojourning culture in India during the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, a discernable sense of common Britishness became increasingly evident from the 1760s onwards. The main settlements at Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay sustained a political culture which stressed that transients in the East retained all the rights and liberties of Britons.66 Public displays of Britishness, or indeed Scottishness did, however, face particular problems in the East. The constant demographic turnover resulting from deaths, new arrivals, and departures for Britain inhibited long-term commitments to the community and stymied the emergence of societies and clubs until the 1780s.67 Beyond the Company’s formal military parades and celebration of the monarch’s birthday, public activity centred on recreational pursuits like banqueting, or the theatre, and political rituals such as petitions and public subscriptions.68 Anglicans and Catholics had official religious provision, but the only spiritual support for the majority of Scots prior to the 1830s were the chaplains of Highland regiments or Presbyterians working for the London Missionary Society.69 But the lack of a permanent stake in their temporary society did not mean that sojourners remained rootless and deprived of the means of expressing their identity. Scots in India found ways to publicly display their sense of Scottishness. In the 1780s the Bengal civil servant

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James Graham, son of the laird of Airth in Stirlingshire, subscribed to the Highland Society of Scotland. In 1795, meanwhile, expatriate Scottish migrants in Bombay raised a subscription in aid of Edinburgh University’s New College.70 One reason for the emergence of a sense of British political community in Asia was that networks of Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English were a common, everyday occurrence. Because of the pronounced Anglicized nature of the Company’s corporate world, Scots were encouraged to court English friends and contacts. In this way Britishness became a stronger and more consistent element than European-ness in a Scot’s sojourning identity. In 1761 Alexander Mackenzie of Coul in Ross-shire obtained letters of introduction to a merchant in Madras, prompting him to observe to his patron in Scotland, ‘You have always recommended to me to cultivate the acquaintance of Englishmen more than Caledonians. I have begun it, and this is the first good consequence’.71 Political and financial realities meant that networks based exclusively on Scottish contacts could be unrealistic and even counterproductive. In 1729 Alexander Halkett Wedderburn from Fife was dissatisfied doing business with his fellow Scot, Captain James MacRae. Instead, he invested in a country voyage organized by an English merchant, Charles Bourchier.72 Business partnerships contributed to the development of British identity but, like the networks established with European nationals, they were often ad hoc, short-lived arrangements. But networks should not be mechanistically linked to identity formation without incorporating an understanding of social and professional loyalties. The English East India Company had elaborate recruitment rituals, a highly articulated corporate ethos, and the ideal of a ‘covenant’ or ‘indenture’ between the corporation and its ‘servants’ or ‘licensed’ free merchants.73 This offers an obvious contrast with the Atlantic empire where Britons were free to move where they wished in search of employment. The personal correspondence of men like Alexander Duncanson from Angus and Thomas Graham demonstrate that they believed themselves to be ‘honest servants’, while Alexander Elliot observed that ‘the Company’s senior servants were a set of men who were sent out to carry the even and fair trade of their employer’.74 A professional military and naval service ethic, similar to the servant ethos of the Company, was an element of domestic British identity. But back in Britain a greater degree of emphasis was placed upon concepts of monarchy, Protestantism, and liberty than was evident in the British communities in the East, at least until c.1800.75 It is possible to argue, therefore, that Britishness in Asia was far more reliant on a sense of professional and even employee identity than was the case at home. This

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interpretation underlines the need for caution when assuming that Empire produced one formulaic expression of Britishness, rather than a host of imperial varieties that frequently reflected specific colonial or sojourning contexts. Contemporary observers, including South Asians, were also struck by the status conscious nature of the Company’s main settlements. After the mid1770s the East India Company published an annual list of all its civil and military servants, ranking their seniority by the date of their arrival in the East, as well as those individuals not employed by the Company.76 This rigid (and public) hierarchy meant many Britons and Scots entered into associations based not on their nationality but their sense of common professional or occupational identity. James Mill from Montrose, second mate on The Sandwich East Indiaman, was unusual among Scots in India in that he did not nominate another Scot as an executor. His sense of occupational loyalty explains why in 1780 he chose instead to appoint the chief mate and purser of his own ship.77 In the case of Major James Mackenzie of the 73rd Highland Regiment, who died in Madras in 1780, nationality, kinship, and profession were all factors in the choice of his executors. These included his brother Robert, a Company officer, and four other Scottish officers in the 73rd.78 The exact relationship between professional and national British identity requires further investigation, most particularly in the context of the Eastern Empire. The last will and testaments of Scots who had returned from India show that sojourners retained a powerful and enduring sense of this service identity long after they had completed their time abroad. Men like Major Donald Cameron of Mount Cameron in Lanarkshire and Captain David Alston of Auchinhard in Mid Lothian, who both died in Scotland in the early 1800s, still saw themselves as servants of the Company. Alexander Aberdein, who died at Bervie in Kincardine in 1810, had his will describe him as ‘late Deputy Commissary of Ordinance in the service of the East India Company’.79 Such titles helped returnees sustain status and even a certain exotic reputation in their own localities. That an East India Company career also served as an epitaph illustrates a crucial difference between a Scottish sojourner’s European and British identity. European-ness was important in two distinct ways. Practically, it facilitated ad hoc financial networks intended to remit monies from Asia to Europe. By their very nature these associations were usually transient. Culturally, European-ness, which distinguished a sojourner from the indigenous peoples, had little relevance once back in Europe. British identity, by contrast, especially in its professional forms, was at once more defined and more durable.

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Sojourning Scots: Multiple and Cyclical Identities. The existence of multiple European and British networks and identities raises the question of the degree to which Scots in the East actually saw themselves as particularly Scottish. How Scots constructed networks and developed their identity in the East demonstrates conclusively that, while they certainly could be Europeans and Britons, many retained and renewed their Scottish identity at the same time. As in the Atlantic, kin and local links facilitated movement eastwards and assisted the careers of Scots thereafter. Jonathan Duncan, from Wardhouse near Montrose, was appointed to the Bengal civil service in 1771 through the influence of his uncle, the Company director, John Michie.80 Writing to Michie from Calcutta in 1784 Duncan noted, ‘It reflects a credit upon me in the settlement to be known to be your nephew, to which circumstance indeed all my success in life has been owing’. Though pandering to his uncle’s ego, he later reiterated the influence this kin connection had wrought: ‘I am here on as good terms with all our men in power as my heart can desire, particularly with Mr Macpherson our Governor, who treats me always with a degree of confidence and kindness exceeding what can be expected from a more official connection’.81 One result of this reliance on kinship was a clustering effect as family members joined each other in India. Thomas Munro, later a governor of Madras, arrived in the Presidency in 1780. Thomas’s brother James joined him soon after, as did their nephew John, the son of their sibling Daniel, who resided in Calcutta with yet another brother Alexander.82 The proximity of close family members provided important, if intangible, benefits that included emotional support and friendship. In 1776 James Park from Fife joined his brother Alexander in India, an event that delighted both of them. Alexander wrote to an acquaintance in Scotland, ‘Figure to yourself my dear friend, our situation at our first interview, two affectionate brothers after a separation of 18 years meeting in a distant clime’.83 Yet kinship and regional links were not the only components of sojourning networks or identities. Scots in the East had to extend their networks in the hope of influencing associates within the Company directorate, parliament, London commerce, or public life more generally. Networks operated, therefore, through multiple layers of kin, regional, and more national Scottish influences. The attempt in the 1760s by William Campbell, son of Sir Archibald Campbell of Succoth from Dunbartonshire, to obtain a military commission illustrates this point. Kinship came in the form of lobbying by Lord Frederick Campbell, while regional links operated through the interest of the county’s MP, Archibald Edmonstoun.

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But William Campbell also relied on connections that were truly Scottish in character. William’s military commander in Portugal was Major-General Simon Fraser of Lovat, MP for Inverness-shire, whose influence in London was sought and obtained. Three other Scottish officers in Portuguese service, Colonel Farrier, Brigadier Hamilton, and General Francis MacLean, also gave William glowing references. None of these men were from Campbell’s locality; indeed, MacLean admitted to the East India Company that ‘he was particularly attentive to Captain Campbell as his countryman’.84 Another reason why Scottish sojourners did not rely exclusively on family or local links was that the Company often placed individuals in different locations from their kinsmen. In September 1780 John Maxwell of Broomholm in Dumfries noted that his two sons Patrick and Robert were now established as military officers in Bengal. He added, ‘both Pat and he [Robert] are anxious to have some of their younger brothers sent out. They say they could take them off my hand at their arrival in Bengall, but could do nothing for them in Bombay’.85 Yet two years later their younger brother Walter was posted to Bombay. Rapid turnover in arrival and departures reinforced the need to avoid excessive reliance on kin and local affiliation. In 1788 Captain John Baillie of Dunain wrote to a prominent Scot in Madras on behalf of his nephew, Ensign Alexander Baillie: ‘The court of directors on his uncle’s account were pleased to put him at the head of the last of the volunteers of ‘84. But my leaving that country [India] in ‘85 deprived him of that degree of support and protection which a young man requires’.86 The Scottish elements of a sojourner’s network can be viewed, therefore, as an intermediate layer between South Asian, European, and British dimensions on the one hand and kinship and regional imperatives on the other. The 1782 appeal for patronage by Lieutenant Malcolm Macpherson in Madras to Adjutant-General John Macpherson in Bengal reveals how sojourners meshed together putative kinship, local affiliation, professional standing, and common Scottishness. Malcolm noted: Although I have not the honor of being personally acquainted with you, yet on the score of our being countrymen and name sakes; (and also as I am told) connected, I take the liberty of writing you a second time. I am a Lieutenant in H.M. 78th Regiment of Highland Foot. James Macpherson Esq in London, commonly called in Badenoch James MacAndrew is my near relation. I dare say you might have known my father, who had a farm from the Duke of Gordon in a place called

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A GLOBAL CLAN Lynvilge, near Strathspey: his name is Evan Macpherson, generally called by the country people, Evan MacChallum.87

In Malcolm Mapherson’s case, the use of Scottishness to expand his network was little more than a vague, albeit successful, appeal to national sentiment. But sound practical reasons also existed that brought Scots together. With so many young Scots serving as military cadets, professional and national sensibilities combined to meet a sojourner’s need for cultural familiarity and companionship. In 1772 James Campbell, a sibling of William Campbell of Succoth, joined his brother in the Madras army. While on campaign he cheerfully informed his father that ‘since I left Madras I have entered into a mess with two very good lads, Sutherland and Grant, both Scotsmen’.88 Mutual support often took the form of established Scots agreeing to foster and accommodate newly arrived individuals. Claud Alexander from Ayrshire lent money to the civil servant John Kinloch on the basis that they both knew David Anderson from Berwickshire. Meanwhile, Alexander offered accommodation in his Calcutta house to the nephew of another Scottish associate, Claud Russell from Mid-Lothian.89 In this way, regional and professional loyalties created obligations that connected families from across Scotland. Scottishness was useful in other ways. As Scots in India established that they had mutual acquaintances at home, they placed a greater degree of trust in each other more quickly. Despite having no kin or local connections, Colonel John Cumming of Altyre lent money to Lieutenant John Rattray of Kinloch. Cumming noted to his lawyer in Edinburgh: Lieutenant Rattray (whom you formerly recommended to me) has apply’d to me to assist him with money to clear the present debts on an estate that is left him. It appears they amount to £3,500, for which he is desirous of giving hereditary security on the estate. I must beg leave Sir to observe to you that from Rattray’s youth and situation it is necessary this affair, with the advantages or disadvantages attending it, may be made clean to his friends and doers in Europe.90 Cumming and Rattray both understood that any financial transactions in India underwritten by an estate in Scotland would have secure legal status at home. Scotland’s legal profession provided another web of contacts that linked otherwise unacquainted Scots together in India. James Campbell of Succoth chose Oliver Colt as his Madras banker because his brother Ilay

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Campbell, a lawyer, happened to know Oliver’s brother Robert, an Edinburgh advocate. Such connections point to the importance of mutual obligation in linking Scots in India and their families back in Scotland. Scottish links emerged alongside local networks because individuals helped other Scots in the expectation that gratitude would result in reciprocal assistance for their family or interests at home. In 1790 Baillie of Dunain wrote to an associate in Madras noting that: ‘This letter will be delivered to you by Mr Ord, a young man who I can venture to recommend to your notice with full confidence and if you have any concerns in any part of Scotland that you wish a friend to interfere in I will be most willing to do it’.91 The career cycle of Alexander Elliot of Minto from Roxburgh-shire reveals the extent to which Scots networked with fellow Scots. It is worth stressing that Elliot exhibited neither ethnic exclusivity nor a rigid sense of concentric identity. He did not separate his world into sections or distinct segments of identity in the manner suggested by the concentric model.92 Rather he moved within and between multiple identities and networks in a seamless, almost effortless way. His Britishness, his Company loyalty, and his professional identity complemented and even reinforced his Scottishness. This is evident from the fact that his Scottish education helped him obtain a Company post in 1770 at the age sixteen but under the aegis of the English stockjobber, Sir George Colebrooke.93 Because men like Elliot were physically cut off from Scotland and Scottish influences while still impressionable teenagers, it might be assumed that they quickly lost their Scottishness. But this was not the case. Upon his arrival in India, Alexander joined a circle of other Scots who maintained what may best be described as a Scottish household identity. Along with younger counterparts like Harry Crawford, he lodged with the Scottish surgeon Gilbert Pasley and began his social and professional networking from this informal Scottish base. As he informed his father, ‘We were about two months together and I had an opportunity of seeing through his character [Crawford’s], which is truly noble. He gave me letters to his brother and some more of his Bengal acquaintances. From them I have received the very greatest civility’.94 Once in Calcutta, Elliot’s circle of British associates expanded. His father’s political connections at home won him the favour of the governorgeneral Warren Hastings and he acquired the esteem of his English superior, Samuel Middleton. Yet his contacts remained noticeably Scottish and were to be an essential part of his career. He joined the household of Thomas Graham, who, Elliot noted, ‘remains as firm as ever and seems to take pleasure in serving me’. He became friends with Hastings’s Scottish

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secretary John Stewart, as well as George Bogle who was well respected by Hastings. The effectiveness of Elliot’s new Scottish associates was striking, providing him with a lobbying interest that facilitated his advance within the Company’s Bengal hierarchy. He noted: Bogle with whom I have entered into the strictest intimacy of friendship, is private assistant to Mr Hastings and much in his confidence. The Governor upon the dismissal of the Collectors was so good as to remember me, and knowing the connection that was between Bogle and me, told him that I had better stay in Calcutta. He desired Bogle to write me and hinted that he would take care of me.95 Elliot rose quickly through the ranks of the Company’s civil service, maintaining his Scottish connections in a complementary relationship to his professional British affiliations. It is telling, however, that when he died in 1778 he did so in the company of three men from across Scotland, rather than just kinsmen or regional associates. They were Lieutenant James Anderson, a fellow Border, Dr Farquhar, and a Captain Campbell, most likely Captain William Campbell of Ballinabir in Islay.96 What is striking about the case of Elliot is not the emergence of his professional and British identity – it would have been extraordinary if this had not occurred. Rather, it is the persistence of Scottish associations throughout his sojourning experience, from beginning to end. Yet observing the existence of a sojourner’s Scottishness does not provide an analytical framework to explain why such identities persisted in Asia. The prospect of returning home was a crucial factor in perpetuating Scottishness in the East. The vast majority of the civil, administrative, and military officers could not wait to get out of India. As John Baillie of Dunain noted from Madras in 1783, ‘All I now think of is to get to the Highlands of Scotland there to live in quiet’.97 There was an implicit acceptance that ordinary Scottish soldiers stood little chance of return. As George Bogle noted, ‘The great difference between the members and subjects of the different Companies is that they [subjects] come out for life, have no expectation of ever redoubling the Cape of Good Hope and marry and settle; whereas there is not one of us that has not his heart fixed on his native land’.98 Rather more surprising is how often families at home, while genuinely anxious to see sojourners return, urged those in the East to stay there until they had acquired their fortunes. Indeed sojourners faced considerable expectations and a degree of pressure not to return home without the wherewithal to support themselves and their families. When in

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1777 Captain John Wedderburn of Pearise’s mental instability resulted in his impecunious return from India, he and his family suffered considerable social embarrassment. As a result, Kathie Wedderburn wrote to her and John’s brother Charles Wedderburn, also in India, asking him not to return. She argued: I entreat you will never think of following your business as a surgeon in this country, it is impossible. I confess I would wish you first to get such a fortune as would make you live genteely in this country for without that I am certain you never could be happy yourself. There is our cousin David Reid [who] will be unhappy from that circumstance. You know he brought home [from India] only £5,000, which will make him in straits all his life.99 Katherine Wedderburn’s advice reveals the harsh economic logic that underpinned the movement of Scots to the East. The significance of the aspiration to return, however, should not be underestimated. Because most elite sojourners planned to reintegrate into their community or some other part of Scotland, they did not have purely sentimental reasons for maintaining their Scottishness. This was true even for those who died in the East. Death is not normally associated with the question of networks and still less with the issue of identity. In the East, however, the constant threat of mortality meant that Scottish sojourning networks often revolved around the need to administer the practical and legal aftermath of death. Scots with property in India found that fellow countrymen could more easily convey the estate back to Scotland in the event of death. Nor was kinship or local association the only basis for such legalistic solidarity. The executors of James Pyper from Banff included William Hamilton in Fife, while Lieutenant Colonel John Campbell from Stonefield in Argyll entrusted his property to Lord Macleod from Ross-shire and David Scott from Montrose. A sample of 38 wills at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta registered on behalf of Scots between 1780 and 1790 show that of the 86 executors, 64 were Scotsmen.100 Scottishness was more, therefore, than just a vague sense of cultural affinity; it remained a meaningful identity that served a practical, even crucial, role in the sojourning process. But the prospect of return also explains vividly why the British, European, and Scottish strands of a sojourner’s identity and networks varied in relation and in importance to each other over time. Indeed, emigrant networks established in the East were in a sense paradoxical. Affiliating with Indians, Europeans, and even other Britons was intended

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to expedite the removal of individuals from the geographic location that had necessitated such networking in the first place. Both mortality and the final phase of the sojourning cycle induced among Scots a new emphasis on the Scottish dimension to their multiple identities. Scottish networks and identities in the East can be interpreted therefore as cyclical as well as multi-layered in character. In death, certainly, Scots often re-expressed a powerful sense of their own local Scottishness. In 1780 James Pyper, originally from Turiff, died at Madras. His will was a complex expression of local, religious, and Scottish identity. He left money to relatives in Kelso, Edinburgh, and Old Aberdeen. His Episcopalianism was reflected in his insistence that a £20 donation for Turiff’s poor be administered by a NonJuring clergymen rather than the local Presbytery. His desire to be symbolically and publicly re-connected to his family and locality was clear by the ordering of a headstone for his father and mother, with an inscription stating that he had commissioned the stone although still at Madras.101 Other forms of correspondence reveal a highly personalized psychological process whereby the emotional bond with Scotland and with family was re-imagined and reaffirmed by sojourners while still in India. Archibald Seton retained such a close mental link with his Stirling-shire locality that his sentiments mirror the rhetoric of exile usually associated with the Clearances and emigre Gaels in North America. Writing home in 1808 he asked that: The greatest care may be taken of all the old trees. I cannot express to you, indeed, I cannot, how disappointed I should be at my return if I missed any of them. They are all well known to me, the image of every one of them, the effect would be most melancholy. I should feel as if I had lost so many old friends. 102 Archibald Seton also revealed that the prospect of homecoming was an aspiration of his day-to-day life in India. He noted with a degree of agitation: My anxiety to return is eager and feverish and that some part of every day is passed in fond anticipation of the happy time when I will be restored to my family and home. This restless sort of longing to return grows stronger and stronger every season and if my stay in India be much prolonged will make me miserable.103

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Here, then, was a powerful sense of local Scottishness evolving and responding on a daily basis to the pressures of sojourning in Britain’s Eastern Empire. Conclusion Scottish emigrant networks and identities in India offer an important geographic, social, and analytical corrective to the Atlantic focus that presently characterizes eighteenth-century studies of Scottish migration. Unlike the unregulated Atlantic, where sojourners could follow kin or local networks relatively easily, the Eastern Empire forced Scots to engage with a markedly Anglo-centric corporation. That Scottish networks were nonetheless the norm in Asia underlines the adaptability of the associative methods used by Scots overseas. The utility of Scottish social practices for the purposes of sojourning, however, does not mean that Scots were exceptional. Indeed, other ethnic groups tended to network in ways similar to the Scots. Kinship and the use of household networks, for instance, played an important part in Irish sojourning to India, not least amongst Huguenot and Ulster families like the Boileaus of Dublin and the Agnews from Antrim.104 Moreover, the assumption that emigrant networks were first and foremost about preserving Scottish ethnicity and community has not been without its critics.105 The evidence relating to Scots sojourning in the East supports such criticism. In South Asia, networks and identities were inherently flexible and multifaceted in character. Albeit racial, religious, economic, professional, and national prejudices produced varying degrees of interaction, Scots freely associated with Indian merchants and concubines, European nationals, and fellow Britons. Although the Scots were not exceptional in how they organized their sojourning to Asia, aspects of their networking and identity were nonetheless distinctive. The key lies in analyzing this distinctiveness without excessively prioritizing its existence. The lack of ethnic exclusivity displayed by Scots in India might suggest that Scottish identities and networks in the East were concentric in character. But such an analysis fails to capture the fluid and cyclical nature of sojourning. It is only by using a wide range of personal accounts such as private letters, business and financial correspondence, and wills, that the complexity of sojourning networks and identities can be recovered. It is when all these sources are used together that they reveal the experiences of individuals like George Bogle, Alexander Elliot, Alexander Pringle, and Archibald Seton. These men show that Scottish networks and identities in the East were never static and revolved in response to the process of sojourning. The cultural disorientation that newly arrived sojourners

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experienced when they first encountered Indian society could be reduced through contact with home and by joining the cocoon of Scottish households already established in India. As the years passed, this early reliance on Scottishness was complemented by new white, European, professional, and British identities. As the process of sojourning came full circle, however, Scottishness was reasserted through legal networks designed to secure property in the event of death, or a renewed emphasis on returning home. Finally, the status of Scots in the East India Company’s civil and military service forces a reconsideration of which social groups in Scotland were predisposed towards high-risk forms of mobility. A substantial minority of Scots in Britain’s Eastern Empire came from the social classes normally assumed to have caused emigration rather than emigrating themselves. Moreover, the vitality and flexibility of Scottish networks and identities in the East stand in marked contrast to the romanticized and ossified emigre Scottishness that had begun to emerge in North America by the later 1810s.106 Eighteenth-century Scottishness in India was far less demonstrative or reliant on outward symbols, ethnic badges, or societies.107 This was not because Scottishness was absent but rather that most sojourners still felt connected to Scotland and so retained a confident, unassuming sense of themselves as Scots. The irony in this contrast with North American Scottishness is that sojourners in India often hailed from the very social classes usually portrayed as eagerly adopting an anglicized North British identity.108 Yet the Scottishness of sojourners in India was as vigorous as the identities maintained by the permanent transatlantic emigrants who are assumed to exemplify eighteenth-century Scotland’s tradition of mobility. Notes I would like to thank Angela McCarthy, Douglas Hamilton, and Tom Devine for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 Marjory Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003), p. 282. Among the few systematic studies of Scottish sojourning networks published to date are Alan L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (New York, 1992), pp. 4-5, 212; David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 20-1, 41. 2 Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001); T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600-1815 (London, 2003). For similarities across the Empire see D. J. Hamilton, ‘Patronage and profits: Scottish networks in the British West Indies, c.1763-1807’, PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1999, p. 328; Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 206, 252.

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4

5

6 7

8

9

10

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J. G. Parker, ‘Scottish enterprise in India, 1750-1914’, in R. A. Cage (ed.), The Scots Abroad: Labour, Capital, Enterprise, 1750-1914 (London, 1985), pp. 191219; G. J. Bryant, ‘Scots in India in the eighteenth century’, Scottish Historical Review, 64 (1985), pp. 22-41; J. Riddy, ‘Warren Hastings: Scotland’s benefactor?’, in Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicolson (eds), The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 30-57; Anne Buddle with Pauline Rohatgi and Iain G. Brown, The Tiger and the Thistle: Tipu Sultan and the Scots in India, 1760-1800 (Edinburgh, 1999); Martha McLaren, British India and British Scotland, 1780-1830: Career Building, Empire Building, and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, Ohio, 2001), pp. 15-28; B. R. Tomlinson, ‘From Campsie to Kedgeree: Scottish enterprise, Asian trade, and the Company Raj’, Modern Asian Studies, 36 (2002), pp. 769-91; A. Mackillop, ‘Fashioning a “British” empire: Sir Archibald Campbell of Inverneil and Madras’, in A. Mackillop and Steve Murdoch (eds), Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers, c.1600-1800 (Leiden, 2003), pp. 205-32. Marjory Harper, Emigration from North East Scotland, Vol. 1: Willing Exiles (Aberdeen, 1988), p. 319; Allan I. Macinnes, Marjory-Ann D. Harper, and Linda G. Fryer (eds), Scotland and the Americas, c.1650-c.1939: A Documentary Source Book (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 19-20, 132-68; Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 232-3. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 4-17, 19-27; Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, p. 5. Charles Tilly, ‘Transplanted networks’, in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (Oxford, 1990), pp. 86-90. Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, 1993), p. 133; D. J. Hamilton, ‘Robert Melville and the frontiers of empire in the British West Indies, 17631771’, in Mackillop and Murdoch (eds), Military Governors, p. 191. Jennifer S. H. Brown, ‘A parcel of upstart Scotchmen’, The Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History, 61:1 (1988), pp. 6-7; Hancock, Citizens of the World, pp. 52-8; D. J. Hamilton, ‘Scottish trading in the Caribbean: the rise and fall of Houston and Co.’, in Ned C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600-1800 (London, 2001), pp. 95-7, 100, 107; Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 234-9; G. K. McGilvray, ‘East India patronage and the political management of Scotland, 1720-1774’, PhD thesis, Open University, 1989, p. 168. P. J. Marshall, ‘The eighteenth-century Empire’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt, 1742-1789 (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 181-2. For the social background of Scots in both companies see P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976), pp. 11-12; Edith I. Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770-1870 (Oxford, 1997), p. 71. European sojourners were invariably struck by the scale and populous-ness of Indian cities. See National Archive of Scotland [NAS], Leslie of Warthill RH4/136/1/84-V2; T. Burnard, ‘European migration to Jamaica, 1655-1780’, The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 53 (1996), pp. 775-8; P. J. Marshall, ‘British immigration into India in the nineteenth century’, Itinerario, 14:1

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12

13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20

21

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(1990), p. 32, 40; P. D. Curtin, Death by Emigration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 4, 23. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (London, 2002), p. 245. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 50-9, 61-4; F. Hasan, ‘Indigenous cooperation and the birth of a colonial city: Calcutta, c.1698-1750’, Modern Asian Studies, 26 (1992), pp. 65-75; J. R. Ward, ‘The British West Indies in the age of abolition, 1748-1815’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), p. 433. For Scottish employment via networks and the crucial fact that the Hudson’s Bay Company faced competition from a non-corporate source, see Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, pp. 144-5; Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trading Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver, 1985), p. 36. British Library, India Office Records [IOR], B/59, p. 161; IOR, O/5/30, fos 210-13; Melville Castle Muniments, NAS, GD 51/4/1. B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan, ‘Introduction’, in B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan (eds), Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (London, 1991), pp. 7-9; N. C. Landsman, ‘The provinces and the Empire: Scotland, the American colonies, and the development of British provincial identity’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), p. 260; John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities: the case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 8 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 229-30. For an emphasis on Scottish ethnicity see Brown, Strangers in Blood, pp. 36-9; Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, pp. 119-20. A. J. Murdoch, ‘The rise and fall of the Scottish Empire’, Scotlands, 2 (1995), pp. 124-6; Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 193-4. For a West Indian context see Hamilton, ‘Patronage and profits’, pp. 10-12, 288-9. P. J. Marshall, ‘Introduction’, in Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, pp. 13-14. Letter to Archibald Seton (Stirlingshire), 1808, National Library of Scotland [NLS], Seton of Touch, Ms 19208, fos 85-94. Hugh Blair (Edinburgh) to John Macpherson (Bengal), 1781, British Library [BL], Papers of Sir John Macpherson, Mss Eur F291/119/12. Jacob Price, The Saddle Put on the Right Horse: or, an Enquiry into the Reason why Certain Persons have been Denominated Nabobs, with Arrangement of those Gentlemen into their Proper Classes or Real, Spurious, Reputed, or Mushroom Nabobs (London, 1783), p. 19. For the West Indies see Hamilton, ‘Patronage and profits’, pp. 46. Claud Alexander, December 1872, NAS, Boyd Alexander Papers, GD 393/6/1, fos 99-102; V.C.P. Hodson, List of the Officers of the Bengal Army, 17581834, Vol. 2 (London, 1927), p. 290. NAS, Fraser-Macintosh Collection, GD 128/36/4/15 and 24. John Prebble, Mutiny: Highland Regiments in Revolt, 1743-1804 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1975), p. 174. K. Teltscher, ‘Writing home and crossing cultures: George Bogle in Bengal and Tibet, 1770-1775’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History:

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23

24

25 26 27 28

29

30

31

32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

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Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 281-97. Thomas Graham to George Graham, 21 August 1776, National Register of Archives (Scotland) [NRA(S)] 1115, Graham of Kinross Papers, Box 17/Bundle 58: Calcutta. Alexander Pringle (Madras) to his sister, 1778, NAS, Messrs Hope, Todd and Kirk, WS, GD246/46/2: European Letter Book, 26 January 1778-12 October 1780, Masliputnam, 7 March 1778. Inverneil Accounts, NAS, Campbell of Inverneil Muniments, RH 4/121/6, pp. 48-9. P. Aiès, ‘The reversal of death: changes in attitudes towards death in Western societies’, American Quarterly, 26 (1974), p. 541. NLS, Minto Papers, Ms 11020, fos 2-5, 6-9, 10, 17, 28-41, 107-11. Alexander Pringle to his mother, 1776, NAS, Messrs Hope, Todd and Kirk, WS, GD 246/46/1, European Letter Book, 1776-1778, Masulipatam, 26 August 1776; Archibald Fergusson, 1780, NAS, Fergusson of Dunfallundie Papers, GD 1/398/55. John Burns to John Renfrew (Paisley), 8 January 1772, NAS, Miscellaneous papers, GD1/768, Dimpore. For a detailed letter to a Macpherson in India relating deaths, careers, and even tenurial change on farms in Badenoch, see Donald Macintyre to Captain John Macpherson, 14 February 1788, NAS, Macpherson of Cluny Papers, GD80/90: Edendonich. P. J. Marshall and G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982), pp. 135-6; R. Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1991), p. 116; R.J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London, 1995), pp. 32-5. C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833 (London, 1996), p. 12; William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London, 2002), p. 34. Journal of Lt. John Grant from 25 August 1748 during the East India Expedition under the Command of Rear Admiral Edward Boscawn, NAS, Seafield Muniments, GD 248/413/1, pp. 35, 37, 41. IOR, LAG/34/29/187, pp. 21-2. See also, LAG/34/29/187, pp. 128-30. IOR, LAG/34/29/187, pp. 90-2. NAS, Edinburgh Commissary Court, CC8/8/132, pp. 423-43. ‘Bramin’ is the anglicized word for the Brahmin caste, the highest caste among Hindus. Europeans often used the term as an abbreviation to refer to a Hindu rather than a Muslim. See C. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1990), p. 207. This information is drawn from IOR, LAG/34/29/185, 187, 191, 341. NAS, Kinross House Papers, GD 29/1865. L. Poliakov, ‘Racism from the Enlightenment to the age of imperialism’, in R. Ross (ed.), Racism and Colonialism (Leiden, 1982), pp. 55-9. George Wedderburn to his sister, 1771, NAS, Rosslyn Muniments, GD164/1698/5(1-4). IOR, LAG/34/29/185, pp. 102-4, 174-6 (1781).

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41 42 43 44

45

46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60

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Robert Spottiswoode to Thomas Spottiswoode (Calcutta), 24 November 1801, NAS, GD 1/529, Dunipace Writs, GD 1/529/289, London. IOR, J/1/6, pp. 430-3; NAS, Boyd Alexander Papers, GD 393/6/1, fo. 109. Hawes, Poor Relations, p. 8. For North America see James Hunter, Glencoe and the Indians (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 34; T. Bryan, Twa Tribes: Scots Among the Native Americans (Edinburgh, 2003), p. 13; Fry, The Scottish Empire, pp. 65-6. For India see Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain made the Modern World (London, 2004), pp. 40-1. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1992); P. J. Marshall, ‘A nation defined by Empire, 1755-1776’, in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), pp. 209, 221. ‘Journal of Lt. John Grant from 25 August 1748 during the East India Expedition under the Command of Rear Admiral Edward Boscawn’, NAS, Seafield Muniments, GD 248/413/1, pp. 38-42; Camp at Commemet, Kingdom of Golconda, 26 March 1768, NAS, GD1/768, Miscellaneous papers, GD 1/768/10; Folder 2: Letter Book of George Bogle of Calcutta, 1770-1771, GCA, Bogle Papers, p. 103. A. G. Hargreaves, ‘European identity and the colonial frontier’, Journal of European Studies, 12 (1976), pp. 166-8. George Bogle to Mrs Brown, 25 December 1770, GCA, Bogle Papers, Box 25: Calcutta. Journal of Lieutenant Gordon, 1761, NAS, Leslie of Warthill, RH4/136/1/84V2. Journal of Sir Eyre Coote (vol. 1), 17 October 1756-13 September 1757, p. 92, IOR, Eur Mss. F.190. NLS, Stuart-Stevenson Papers, Ms 8252, fo. 19; S. Das, Myths and Realities of French Imperialism in India, 1763-1783 (New York, 1992), p. 72, fn. 4. IOR, LAG/34/29/187: 1785, pp. 133-4. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, pp. 219-27. IOR, B/62, p. 478; B/64, p. 555. Edinburgh University Library [EUL], Campbell of Inverneil, Madras Papers, Mic. M. 920, pp. 14-16; Ole Feldæk, India Trade Under the Danish Flag, 17721808: European Enterprise and Anglo-Indian Remittance and Trade (Odense, 1969), pp. 11-12, 26-7. John Johnstone Letter Book, pp. 1-6, 24, 44, IOR, Mss Eur/Photo Eur 109. Parker, ‘Scottish Enterprise in India, 1750-1914’, p. 193. Alexander Pringle to Thomas Todd, 23 August 1782, NAS, Messrs Hope, Todd and Kirk, WS, GD246/46/3: European Letter Book, 1780-1783, Maslipatnum; NAS, Edinburgh Commissary Court, CC8/8/133, pp. 479-80. NAS, Messrs Hope, Todd and Kirk, WS, GD246/30/2/4. Feldæk, India Trade under the Danish Flag, pp. 20-4, 29-37, 44; K. Glamann, ‘The Danish Asiatic Company, 1732-1772’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 8:2 (1960), pp. 112, fn. 6, p. 135. H. V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise, and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 16881775 (London, 1996), pp. 164-5.

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62 63

64

65

66

67

68 69

70 71 72 73

74

75

76 77 78 79

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P. J. Marshall, ‘British society in India under the East India Company’, Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), p. 101. A. T. Bolton, ‘Wormley Bury, Hertfordshire’, Country Life, 37 (1915), pp. 1446; NAS, Grant of Monymusk, GD 345/1170/ Bundle 1765: Cluny, 29 March 1765. Sir Achibald Campbell (Madras) to David Scott (London), 1787, NAS, Campbell of Inverneil Muniments, RH 4/121/7: Letter Book of LieutenantColonel Archibald Campbell, 9 February 1771-22 March 1776, p. 70; EUL, Campbell of Inverneil, Madras Papers, Mic. M. 920, p. 44. For ‘Englishness’ as a cultural badge that transcended the English themselves see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), pp. 4-5, 17. P. J. Marshall, ‘The whites of British India, 1780-1830: a failed colonial society?’, International History Review, 12 (1990), pp. 26-7, 44; J. M. Holzman, The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760-1785 (New York, 1926), p. 18. For British political rights, IOR, H/121, pp. 205-10. M. Sinha, ‘Britishness, clubbability, and the colonial public sphere: the genealogy of an imperial institution in colonial India’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), p. 499; J. M. Steadman, ‘The Asiatic Society of Bengal’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 10 (1977), pp. 464-5. NAS, Leslie of Warthill, RH4/136/1/84-V2; NAS, Cunninghame-Graham Muniments, GD 22/2/145/7: Allahabad, 3 July 1768. K. Ingham, Reformers in India, 1793-1833: An Account of the Work of Christian Missionaries on Behalf of Social Reform (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 3-4; S. Piggin, ‘Sectarianism versus ecumenism: the impact on British churches of the missionary movement to India, c.1800-1860’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), p. 394; D. S. Forsyth, ‘Empire and Union: imperial and national identity in nineteenth century Scotland’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 113 (1997), pp. 7-8; NLS, Melville Papers, Ms 52, p. 77. NLS, Airth Papers, Ms 10919, fos 76-7; NLS. Melville Papers, Ms 57, p. 9. Alexander Mackenzie to his patron, 1761, NLS, Mackenzie of Delvine Papers, Ms 1337, fo. 33. NAS, Abercairney Muniments, GD 24/464/(n)/13, 27-8. IOR, B/53, p. 126; O/1/1, Bonds and Agreements, 1741-91. The Company’s military officers were ‘indentured’, a process synonymous with servant status. See NAS, Cunninghame-Graham Muniments, GD23/1/312/13. Thomas Graham to William Mayne, 29 July 1773, NAS, Kinross House Papers, GD 29/2070/4; GD 29/2136: Houghly; NLS, Minto Papers, Ms 11020, fos 2-5. Colley, Britons, pp. 184-92; C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989), pp. 107-10, 137, 140-3. Compare with G. J. Bryant, ‘Officers of the East India Company’s army in the days of Clive and Hastings’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 6 (1978), pp. 208-19. See, for example, The Madras Register (London, 1799). IOR, LAG/34/29/185, 1780, p. 31. IOR, LAG/34/29/185, 1781, pp. 114-17. NAS, CC8/8/136, pp. 437-43; CC70/1/14, pp. 191-3; CC20/7/4, pp. 312-17.

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85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95

96 97 98

99

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J. G. Parker, ‘The directors of the East India Company, 1754-1790’, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1977, pp. 175-6; IOR, J/1/8, pp. 346-50. Jonathan Duncan (Calcutta) to his uncle John Michie, 1784, Guildhall Library, London [GLL], John Michie Papers, Ms 5881/5, fos 62-6, 99-103. BL, Mudie Collection, Ms Eur F164/55/60; McLaren, British India, pp. 24-6, 69. Alexander Park to G. Graham, 22 February 1776, NAS, Kinross House Papers, GD 29/2063/4: Chunargar. L. Namier and J. Brooke (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754-1790, Vol. 2 (London, 1964), pp. 380-1; GCA, Campbell of Succoth Papers, TD219/8/1/22, 23, 27, 39, 49; TD 219/8/4, ‘Memorial of Captain William Campbell to the Hon. Court of Directors of the United East India Company, 13 November 1769’; TD 219/8/4, ‘Reasons to be assigned for employing Captain William Campbell in the same rank in the artillery service of India that he holds in Portugal, 1769’. John Maxwell to William Pulteney, 2 September 1780, Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA [HL], Pulteney Papers, Box 19, Broomholm; IOR, L/MIL/9/90, p. 36. Captain John Baillie, 1788, NAS, Fraser-Macintosh Collection, GD 128/1/4/3. Lt Malcolm Macpherson to Adjutant General John Macpherson, 5 December 1782, NAS, Macpherson of Cluny Papers, GD80/910, Madras. James Campbell to his father, 26 September 1772, GCA, Campbell of Succoth Papers, TD 219/10/28(1): Trichinapoly. NAS, Boyd Alexander Papers, GD 393/6/1, fos 113-14. NLS, Mackenzie of Delvine Papers, Ms 1256, fo. 196. Baillie of Dundain, 1790, NAS, Fraser-Macintosh Collection, GD128/1/4/3. T. C. Smout, ‘Problems of nationalism, identity, and improvement in later eighteenth century Scotland’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Improvement and Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 2-3. IOR, J/1/8, pp. 142-6. Alexander Elliot to his father, NLS, Minto Papers, Ms 11020, fos 2-5. Thomas Graham to John Graham, 27 August 1775, NAS, Kinross House Papers, GD 29/2136: Europe Letter Book of Thomas Graham, 25 November 1774 to 18 December 1776, Patna; NLS, Minto Papers, Ms 11020, fos 2-5, 1017, 27. Hodson, List of the Officers of the Bengal Army, Vol. 1, p. 297; NLS, Minto Papers, Ms 11020, fos 213-14. John Baillie (Madras) to William Cumming, 7 June 1783, NAS, FraserMacintosh Collection, GD128/1/4/1: Madras. George Bogle to Mrs Brown, 10 April 1771, GCA, Bogle Papers, Box 25: Calcutta. See also John Baillie to William Cumming, 7 June 1783, NAS., Fraser-Macintosh Collection, GD 128/1/4/1: Madras. E. Graham to C. Wedderburn, 27 Feb 1778, DGA, Wedderburn of Pearsie Muniments, GD 131/25, Balmure; Katie Wedderburn to Charles Wedderburn, 12 December 1775, Kinghorn. IOR, LAG/34/29/187, 191. See also LAG/34/29/4, 5, 7, 185, 341.

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101 102 103 104 105

106

107

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IOR, LAG/34/29/187, pp. 164-5 [1780]. Also, LAG/34/29/187, pp. 128-30; LAG/34/29/5 [1786], 1. Archibald Seton, 1808, NLS, Seton of Touch, Ms 19208, fos 99-101. NLS, Seton of Touch, Ms 19208, fos 95-8. Centre for South Asia Studies, Cambridge, Boileau Papers Box 1/1; Hodson, List of the Officers of the Bengal Army, Vol. 1, pp. 12-13. For discussion of this important point, see A. Blaikie, ‘Migration and cultural identity: within and beyond the Nation’, Northern Scotland, 20 (2000), pp. 180-2; A. J. Murdoch, ‘Emigration from the Scottish Highlands to America’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 21 (1998), p. 171. Although most Scottish societies in North America retained practical objectives of charity, as early as 1756 they had begun the process of romanticizing Scotland through St Andrew’s Day celebrations, a process normally assumed to be a nineteenth-century phenomenon. See G. A. Morrison, History of the Saint Andrews Society of the State of New York, 1756-1806 (New York, 1906), pp. 8-9; I. Allen Jack, History of the St Andrews Society of St John, New Brunswick, Canada, 1798-1903 (St John, N.B., 1903), pp. 19-24. For more overt romanticizing of Scotland by eighteenth-early nineteenth century emigres see D. S. Thomson, Gaelic Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen, 1993), p. 197; G. Jarvie, Highland Games: The Making of the Myth (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 49-54. This is in contrast to the more demonstrative expressions of Scottishness during the era of the Raj. See Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj: private and public celebrations of Scottishness in late imperial India’, Scottish Historical Review, 81:2 (2002), pp. 215-36. Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms’, The Historical Journal, 39:2 (1996), p. 363.

3 TRANSATLANTIC TIES: Scottish Migration Networks in the Caribbean, 1750-1800

Douglas Hamilton During the eighteenth century, the British colonies in the Caribbean became increasingly important destinations for enterprising Scots who were drawn by the prospect of what they imagined to be an easily acquired fortune. The first post-Union acquisition of Caribbean territory, in St. Kitts in 1713, marked the beginning of a pattern of disproportionately large-scale Scottish migration to the West Indies that represented a step-change from more piecemeal seventeenth-century involvement. The nature of Caribbean society and the unforgiving tropical climate, however, ensured that few of these Scots planned to settle permanently in the islands. This transience meant that there was a constant movement of people to and fro across the Atlantic. This chapter traces that migrant stream by examining the testimony of emigrants, as expressed through personal correspondence and contemporary accounts. It outlines the form of personal networks that supported Scottish migration to the Caribbean and shows how the extent of Scottish networks in the Caribbean tied the colonies to the metropolitan power. It suggests the networks had three major functions: to provide opportunities for employment, to act as a support mechanism for new arrivals, and to generate sources of finance. The chapter also argues that these personal networks, maintained by a voluminous transatlantic correspondence, sustained identities that were based on kinship and locality alongside other forms of consciousness. Networks: Correspondence and Clanship The association of ‘networks’ with ‘identities’ is both complex and problematic. Family and local connections are often regarded as integral to networking in the pre-industrial world. Important studies of merchants in Spain and Scandinavia suggest that Scots were hardly unique in using these kinds of connections to advance their careers at home and abroad. Indeed, the ‘family matrix was so often central to the operations of business’.1 In this sense, networks appear to grow up out of a series of connections that

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might also be regarded as markers of identity. But concepts like ‘network’ and ‘identity’ are extraordinarily nebulous, and describe groups and perceptions that were extremely fluid and prone to all manner of external influences. In part, this was contingent on the function of the network. Studies of professional networks, from soldiering to fire insurance, show how perceptions of non-kinship identities and more prosaic considerations of utility intersect with, and sometimes interfere with, ‘older’ ties of kinship or local association. As Charles Tilly puts it, the most effective networks were those comprising ‘sets of people linked by acquaintance and work experience’.2 In the context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, these complexities have been compounded for (and by) historians of Britain. In seeking to understand how Britain ‘forged the nation’ or ‘united the Kingdom’, historians and their critics have grappled with how different and competing components of Britain came to be united in their shared ‘Britishness’.3 Moreover, for some scholars of Scotland and Empire, influenced by the work of Linda Colley and others, Empire played a crucial role in the drawing together of Britain in which it was important for Scots to act like Britons. For others, Empire allowed Scotland to maintain a distinctive voice in the world.4 And of course, in the Caribbean, there was an additional thread of identity, as Scots also began to recognize their ‘whiteness’. Discussions of networks and identities have allowed the emergence of an awareness of their complexities; even more than being concentric, identities are now understood as being multi-layered and highly flexible. Yet, if all these different identities of place, kinship, and profession were overlapping and intertwining, how can they be unravelled to explain how the migrant networks in the Caribbean operated in practice? If two doctors or two merchants decided to enter a partnership in the Caribbean, did they do so because they were related, or because they came from the same place? Were their professional connections more important than their Scottishness? Did they need to accentuate their status as North Britons rather than Scots? Was it some combination of different identities, or none of them? Were the combinations constant? Did identity beget the network, or did networks play a role in identity formation? Correspondence between Scottish migrants to the Caribbean and those left behind can offer some answers to these questions. Some letters home were of a purely personal nature, but others reported aspects of Caribbean life and the state of plantations or trade in the manner of an employee reporting to an employer, or an employer seeking information from a subordinate which, of course, is what they were. But, at

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the same time, they were often also private letters that frequently provided much more personal details about the well-being of individuals and acquaintances. After Robert Stirling had informed his brother Archibald that he had bought a plantation, he also mentioned that ‘our Cousin Jamy Stirling & his brother Will. Lindsay are both well as is Jamy Graham & sauntering about as he used to do’.5 The news was not always good: deaths were commonly reported in the correspondence, but even so, the letters formed a key link between home and abroad. The sense of needing to remain in contact was very strong, and it was an absence of correspondence that often upset those in the West Indies and at home. James Barclay, in 1729, wondered what he had done to offend his friends and family at home because none of them seemed to be writing to him. This concern cut both ways: people at home were anxious to know what was going on in the Tropics. To be sure, part of this was a concern about their affairs as George Inglis told his cousin in Demerara, who was something of a reluctant correspondent: ‘For God’s sake write me frequently & fully and do all you can for me, which I depend you will do’. It is equally clear that George was concerned about Hugh, and relied on letters to learn of his well being: ‘For Godsake take great care of your health, and do not go often to Town nor stay an hour longer than is indispensably necessary’.6 As well as being tangible links with ‘home’, letters also told would-be migrants something about Caribbean conditions. Health, as Inglis’s comments suggest, was a major preoccupation. It is clear from some of the correspondence that there was a widespread awareness of the health problems emigrants encountered in the Caribbean, and so new arrivals knew what to expect. The ‘sickliness of the climate … is no better than it is said to be’, wrote James Barclay in 1727.7 In some cases, however, the letters dissuaded Scots from travelling. In 1759, a young Scot arrived in London en route for Barbados. While he was there he read a letter from Jamaica that complained about the climate and the death of two recent arrivals. Despite efforts to persuade him that Barbados was different, the young man remained unconvinced and returned to Scotland.8 In other ways, the letters did not prepare new arrivals. There were often significant silences, particularly regarding life in a slave society. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, relatively few letters home have much to say about drinking or miscegenation. But neither do many have much to say about the system of enslavement, or the enslaved themselves. Some letters between absentees and their managers discuss the health and size of the slave community, or their perceived diligence or (more usually) ‘idleness’, but on the senseless violence or the immorality of the system there is almost nothing. As a

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result, surprise, perhaps even shock, characterized initial reactions to the Caribbean. Furthermore, these silences suggest that the image of Scots as moral guardians of Empire looks terribly unfocused in the Caribbean.9 The letters, and their writers, reveal something about identities as well as networks. Of course, the simple practice of writing a letter to distant friends and family does not in itself show the operation of a network. The webs of correspondents and the contents of the letters, on the other hand, do imply just that. When Caribbean observers like Edward Long wrote about the ‘clannishness’ of Scots, it was certainly not in a pejorative way. Long, never one to flatter unnecessarily, believed that ‘Jamaica … is greatly indebted to North-Britain’.10 What he was really describing, however, was not clannishness but clanship that was recast as a means of providing a coherent organizational structure in a transoceanic Empire. Dramatic transformation was wrought in Scottish society by agricultural change during the eighteenth century. Even before the ’45 there was an acceleration of the shift from customary to commercial practices in the Highlands as more and more clan chiefs recast themselves as entrepreneurial landowners. In many ways, this transformation of landholding and land use mirrored the changes in the Lowlands, which had begun during the seventeenth century and continued into the eighteenth.11 These transformations created profound dislocations across Scottish society, but even as older patterns of clanship and community were swept away in the rush to money rents and property rights, some vestiges remained. Under clanship, allegiances were not just confined to those with the same names, but through a series of marriage bonds and pragmatic alliances, clan power could be entrenched and expanded. These complex webs were founded on an imagined kinship that linked biological kinship with local association. To clansmen, the clan system afforded protection and, loosely defined, patronage.12 Clanship was always about more than simple allegiance to the clan chief and the perpetuation of long-standing feuds. The notion of protection provided by the clan chief, and assumed by his adherents, along with the idea of mutual responsibility and support, was of profound importance. And while clanship appeared increasingly anachronistic in the new ‘modern’ Scotland of the later eighteenth century, it proved very hard to eradicate. Indeed it was remade in the Empire. These ‘interpersonal webs’, as demonstrated through correspondence, underpinned Scots’ activity and identity in the West Indies.13 The Emigrants The absence of reliable passenger lists or census returns makes estimating the volume of Scottish migration to the Caribbean difficult. The transience

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of the population makes ascertaining the Scottish population in the islands at any one time even more of a challenge. It seems likely, however, that about 17,000 Scots (and perhaps as many as 20,000) went to the Caribbean in the half century between 1750 and 1800.14 Of course, not all these Scots were in the West Indies at the same time, but considering the proportions of Scots in individual islands these figures offer a sense of the sheer scale of the Caledonian presence. The Jamaican planter and historian Edward Long believed that as many as a third of the white population was of Scottish descent by the 1770s. If he was right, and it is unclear what he meant by Scottish descent, then about 6,000 of Jamaica’s white population of 18,000 could trace a Scottish lineage. In the southern Caribbean, the land sales after the acquisition of the Ceded Islands in 1763 show a very strong Scottish presence. In Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago, Scottish landownership amounted to between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of the whole. Political representation was even higher. Scots were the largest national group in the Grenada assembly for much of the final third of the eighteenth century, while Tobago saw quorate meetings of the island assembly attended only by Scots.15 But what did this disproportionately large Scottish population do, and how did they come to be there? In the islands Scots engaged in the full range of careers and activities available to Europeans. Lady Maria Nugent, wife of the LieutenantGovernor of Jamaica, remarked in 1801 on the prevalence of Scots and echoed the approval of their contribution. She had just met a ‘clumsy, ill made and dirty’ Scottish overseer but was forced to concede that she heard from her Scottish guide that he did his job well. But, she reported, ‘there is no one here to contradict him [her guide], as almost all the attornies, merchants and shop-keepers, are of that country, and really do deserve to thrive in this, they are so industrious’.16 The nature of Caribbean society determined, to a large extent, the social groups from which Scots migrants came. The presence of huge numbers of enslaved workers obviated the need for white unskilled workers in the islands, especially as unfavourable racial assumptions became increasingly entrenched. The image of blacks and whites working beside each other in seventeenth-century Barbados was wholly alien to residents of the eighteenth century.17 There were white skilled labourers, but even they increasingly found their work being done by the enslaved. So it was that most Scots in the Caribbean were bookkeepers and clerks, overseers, estate managers, mariners, merchants, doctors, attorneys, and planters. In the vast majority of cases, these occupations and professions required literacy and numeracy. These basic qualifications particularly benefited those who had

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been educated in Scotland, from instruction in the parochial schools to more advanced learning in the Scottish universities. Scots were overwhelming young, single, and male. In part this was to do with contemporary attitudes to gender divisions and in part by the demand from employers for robust employees for the Caribbean. The potentially deadly effects from the tropical climate meant that young men were regarded as the most likely to survive the period of ‘seasoning’, though many did not. The Caribbean was not a place where many poor Scots went in large family groups with the intention of starting a new life. For Caribbean migrants, or perhaps more appropriately, Caribbean adventurers, migration offered the prospects of rapid wealth accumulation and a swift return. As will be shown, the financial support of families and friends could be important factors in their success, and particularly in capital-intensive ventures like planting or trade. Recruitment The first of the three major rationales for the creation, maintenance, and extension of these migration networks was recruitment. They were important not just for the recruit trying to take his first step on the road to fortune, but also for the recruiter. One of the very great problems about recruitment for the Caribbean was the distance between employers and employees, particularly if the former were wealthy absentee planters or merchants. The long delays in communication put a premium on the hiring of reliable employees. The issue of trust was an important one, and using connections in Scotland allowed employers to identify and recruit employees who were either known to them, or came recommended by someone they knew. Even more than this, perhaps, when hiring relatives it was the case that one recruited people with a personal stake, as a family member, in the success of the business: ‘it is a source of comfort to me, my dear Hugh, that I have in you an affectionate relation & friend both capable & willing to do the utmost for my interest, and that of my family’.18 The relative ease of recruitment in Scotland meant that some English firms turned north, using their Scottish contacts. The London merchants Lascelles & Maxwell maintained Scottish connections through George Maxwell, a founding partner in the firm after 1743, and used them to recruit. In 1750, the firm sought to hire a plumber for Florentius Vassall, one of their clients in Jamaica. ‘If we cannot get one from Scotland’, they wrote, ‘we must endeavour to procure a Londoner’. Lascelles & Maxwell also turned to Glasgow for indentured servants ‘not exceeding 15 years’. In the early 1750s Mr Finlay of Glasgow hired a number of boys for Lascelles & Maxwell on behalf of clients in the Caribbean. News of the islands had

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clearly reached Scotland, for Lascelles & Maxwell were at pains to point out that the boys were ‘to be brought up Planters carefully & properly done. It was dreaded by some, that they were to be put to the hard labour of Negroes’.19 The importance of families also emerged. In 1760, another Scot who had been hired refused, at the last minute, to go to Barbados. Lascelles & Maxwell were less than pleased, particularly as a Mr Forbes had informed them that the man was ‘nearly related to some of the best families in Scotland’. The perception of near kinship as a qualification is intriguing and suggests a divergence of Scottish and English traditions. As the London company remarked of Forbes, ‘his head is full of the nonsense of families, which is here quite unknown among people of indigence’.20 For the recruited, the webs of connections had obvious benefits. In Jamaica, the Stirling of Keir family developed extensive interests in trade and planting. Three brothers, Archibald, James, and Robert Stirling were in Jamaica before the 1740s, where they were employed by merchants before trading on their own accounts. In 1748 and 1753, Robert acquired the Frontier and Hampden estates, and quickly became the target of requests for employment. In July 1757 he received a letter from his brother Archibald in Scotland and replied, ‘[It] was delivered to me by Sandy Lenox, who you may be assured I shall do all in power to provide for. I have put him for the present in the Office to try if his hand of write will improve so as to continue him there. If not I shall send him to one of my plantations & breed him as a Planter’.21 It is clear from this that Archibald had solicited his brother’s help in setting up Lenox in employment, and, equally, that Robert was quite willing to help. He was conscious of his obligation to the network that he also had occasion to call upon. Through marriage, the Graham family of Airth in Stirlingshire was connected with the Stirlings of Keir, and they used this connection to gain employment in Jamaica. Indeed marriage was a particularly significant means of developing and strengthening connections between families as well as individuals. In 1783 James Graham of Airth travelled to Jamaica, and his employment pattern over the following two years indicates the kind of advantages that membership of a close kin-based network could provide. He started work at By Brooke estate in St. Thomas in the Vale in central Jamaica. He fell ill after a couple of months and transferred to Ardoch Penn in St. Ann’s, where the climate was believed to be healthier. There he worked for Charles Stirling, a cousin of the Keir family. Some months later, he was on the move again, this time to the Hampden Estate owned by the Stirlings of Keir. Hampden’s attorney was Francis Grant, and it was he who secured a position for James Graham at Content estate in St. James’, for which he was also attorney.22

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As the Lenox case suggests, even for those Scots who were without a direct family link, knowing someone who could provide a way into the charmed circle was significant. James Barclay of Cairness in Aberdeenshire had been in Jamaica for nearly 30 years by 1757 and had become a considerable planter, owning 3,149 acres of land in St. Elizabeth parish. In that time he had his share of support from his extended family, which included the Gordon family of Buthlaw to whom the Barclays were related through marriage: Barclay’s sisters were married to John Gordon, sixth laird of Buthlaw, and to Thomas Gordon. Both families owned estates in Jamaica. It was through this network that another Scot hoped to find a means of advancement. John Gordon wrote to his brother-in-law, ‘This letter … will be delivered to you by Mr Sutherland, a young man of a reputable family in the North who has been bred in the merchant way at Glasgow. I know some of his relations here. I have been easily prevailed upon to recommend him (tho a stranger to myself) to the common offices due to a countryman at his arrival’.23 The importance of the local connection also occurs in these examples, but is even more apparent in other instances. Alexander Rose from Inverness went to Jamaica and he continued a correspondence with John MacIntosh. There was a large enough Inverness community in Jamaica for a Northern Meeting in the town to be reported in the Jamaican newspapers in 1790. Access to this group meant access to opportunity and patronage. Lewis Cuthbert of Inverness replaced his brother William as Provost Marshall General in Jamaica, and Rose was aware that ‘he professes a preference for his own friends and countrymen if of equal merit’. Accordingly, Rose wrote to MacIntosh, who was a friend of Cuthbert, to seek advancement. MacIntosh replied to Rose, ‘I was exceedingly happy to find my letter to Mr Lewis Cuthbert came safe to your hands, and that upon delivering it, he gave you & it a cordial Reception & promised exerting his friendship in your favour, when an opportunity offered – Mr Cuthbert is so good a Man, that I flatter myself you may depend on this’.24 For Alexander Houstoun & Co., the greatest of the Scottish West India merchant houses, their location in Glasgow was of enormous significance. Their interests spread throughout the Caribbean during the final third of the eighteenth century, and to manage their interests they employed client firms in each of the islands. Each of these firms had direct connections to the parent company, either through blood kinship or through an association with Glasgow. In this way, Houstoun & Co. devolved decisionmaking authority to Caribbean-based firms in the belief that they could be trusted to proceed in the best interests of the parent firm. Houstoun & Co.’s translation of the store system from Glasgow’s Chesapeake tobacco

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trade probably conferred too much responsibility on the island agencies, and the company was drawn into enormous credit extensions that became unsustainable in the face of defaulted payments at the end of the century. Ultimately, the company collapsed, but their organizational structure, so successful for at least two generations, owed much to very carefully selected local and related clients.25 Variations on this kind of kinship or local connection applied in more ‘professional’ recruitment. Jonathan Troup graduated from Marischal College, Aberdeen in 1786. He arrived in Dominica in May 1789 to begin work as a doctor in the practice run by Dr Andrew Fillan and Dr James Clark. On his arrival he was met, perhaps unsurprisingly, by another Aberdonian, Andrew Smith, who was one of ‘the principal Gentlemen in the Island’. What is more significant is that Troup was recruited in Aberdeen by Clark, himself an Aberdonian, who had received his doctorate in medicine from King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1773. Clark had provided an excellent reference for Troup to Fillan. But interestingly, in Dominica, Troup was asked whether he was related to Clark, which perhaps suggests an expectation that he would be.26 In Demerara, where there was a strong Scottish presence, the operation of patronage within well-defined local and kinship groups was well established and articulated through correspondence. George Inglis of Inverness owned Bellefield plantation in Demerara, which was managed by his cousin Hugh Inglis. Additionally, George was active in recruiting in the Inverness area, and was particularly keen when he happened upon a candidate he felt had potential. His letter to cousin Hugh Inglis in May 1801 highlights the intersection of locality and kinship in networks that provided overseas opportunities for young men from the Scottish Highlands: There is a Gentleman who is from this place, and was in habit of correspondence with my lamented Brother, who I find by a letter just received from him has lately been appointed Commissary of Stores at Demry – He is Mr. Robert Patterson … I have not a doubt but that you may be mutually useful to each other. I have written this Gentleman to see if he would provide a Birth in his Department for a fine lad a brother of Phineas McIntosh but I think greatly more promising … If I can do anything for him with Mr. Patterson it will make me happy, if not, he must go out as an Overseer, in which case I must get you and Dr. Chisholm to procure a proper Birth for him.27

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Support Mechanisms The second key function of the networks was support. Any young Scots (as any young Europeans) disembarking in the Caribbean found themselves in a very different world. Islands that are now regarded as tropical idylls, appeared to eighteenth-century migrants as distant, hot, and disease-ridden. Janet Schaw’s immediate response to seeing large numbers of black people at once reveals a common reaction among European newcomers and her racial assumptions. She wrote, ‘We proceeded to our lodgings thro’ a narrow lane … Just as we got into the lane a number of pigs run out, and after them a parcel of monkeys. This not a little surprised me, but I found what I took for monkeys were Negro children, naked as they were born’.28 For Europeans, the Caribbean was about difference, and adjusting to it could be traumatic. So when Archibald Cameron of Fassfern wrote to his father in Lochaber, one can almost hear his relief: I happened luckly to se Archy Torcastle & John Cameron, a brother of Stronse upon my Arraivel. John desaired me to make his House my home. I verry thankfully Accept his offer. Mr Gair the Gentleman I was recommended to by Doctor Gair was vastly keind to me Used all his Endeavours to get me provided. There being no prospect of a Birth in Town, I went up the Country with Archy to Mount Cameron steid their for a month he was leik a father to me.29 For Cameron, his network was certainly significant in securing employment and accommodation, but there is also a clear sense that he was delighted not to have to cope on his own. Support was not just emotional, however. Entrepreneurial activity in the British West Indies often required access to considerable capital or credit, or both. Banks were not common sources of finance, and the substantial chains of credit extended by merchants often required either heritable security or a long-standing and trusted business relationship. Lacking these things, would-be planters and merchants often turned to their extended network for financial support. Again there was a quid pro quo: in return for the investment, the job opportunities created and the wealth that accrued would benefit other members of the network. After Robert Stirling branched out from his merchant interests in Jamaica he had ‘occasion for the assistance of all my friends to help me in paying the purchase money’ for his £8,000 sugar plantation, including a loan of £500 from his brother Archibald. This kind of financial arrangement enhanced the ability of Scots to raise capital, and provided the

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kind of moral indebtedness to the family or local group that encouraged recruitment from within it. In Stirling’s case the debt was considerable, in all senses. For all his (misplaced) optimism about the prospects of the estate clearing £2,200 Jamaica currency a year (about £1,571 sterling), it became increasingly heavily encumbered by debt. Stirling, rather than quitting while he was behind, bought another estate in 1753 in partnership with his brother James. Hampden Estate, where James Graham later worked, also proved to be a millstone for Robert Stirling, and he died in 1764 with debts approaching £60,000. Eventually, by 1771, the Stirling family had been forced to buy out the debts, and to take control of the estates themselves and thereafter continued to invest in enslaved labour to drive forward estate production, in which they seem largely to have been successful.30 Burdens and Failures To be sure, the maintenance of these often extensive networks could be hard work, and they relied on a deep well of good will on the part of the patrons. This well occasionally ran dry. Sometimes it was the result of a breakdown in relations. When Dr Alexander Johnston of St. Ann’s in Jamaica responded to his brother’s request to aid a new arrival in 1783, he promised to introduce his ‘near relative’ Dr Anderson ‘into good business, if he behaves well; - I like him very well’. Over the next year things began to unravel. Perhaps Dr Anderson did not ‘behave well’. Whatever happened, by August 1784, Johnston wrote to his brother saying he was ‘not pleased with Mr Anderson’ and ‘I do not think he had any good Education – consequently not much ability’.31 One of the most intractable problems patrons were left to deal with was the execution of estates; it was worse still when there was no will. In 1794, Alexander Tulloch of Elgin died intestate in Tobago. Both men were at the heart of a complex grouping of men, all from an area of Scotland bounded by the towns of Elgin, Huntly, and Banff. Alexander Elder had been called upon to unravel the affairs of other members of this group, but when he was called upon to deal with the claims on Tulloch’s estate, he erupted, ‘Folks north of the Tweed think that every person that dies in the West Indies must be worth a fortune and that those who take the trouble to serve you without any recompense defraud you – I have had so much trouble and so little thanks for doing offices of this kind to my own countrymen that I have determined never to take anything of this sort in hand again’.32 At other times, the sheer scale of requests for assistance bore heavily on the patrons. James Baillie of Dochfour, later an MP, agent for Grenada,

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and prominent anti-abolition campaigner, established himself as a merchant, slave trader, and planter, firstly in St. Kitts and Nevis, and increasingly from the 1760s, in Grenada. The extended Baillie family had considerable overseas interests. James’s brother Evan was on his way to becoming a key Bristol merchant and politician, while cousins from the Dunain branch of the family carved out high profile if not always glorious careers in East India Company service. But James found himself swamped by requests for employment. He wrote in 1770: ‘I wish the family well provided for. I woud willingly have been all the service I coud for any of them, but places are so seldom to be got, & Mr Baillie had filled my hands so full of Relations, that I have found great difficulty to provide for two of them’.33 Baillie, like other Scots who went to the Caribbean to make their fortune, remained attuned to his responsibilities as a provider and patron for his family. This extract suggests that had he been able to offer opportunities to other family members, he would have done so. There seems to be a quite different perception between Scots at home and those in the islands of the availability of jobs. The Caribbean perception of scarce opportunities was apparent in other islands. Indeed, the Chief Justice of Jamaica John Grant wrote, ‘The folly of young men flocking from Scotland to this country is to me unaccountable, very few of the get forward – many of them want bread, and in that number not a few of your clan’.34 The scarcer jobs became, the more important it was for potential bookkeepers, overseers, managers, doctors, or would-be planters to have the security of a network to fall back on. One clear way to illustrate the importance of these groupings is to recount the unhappy stories of those who were left outside them. Lewis Grant of Magoty Estate in Hanover parish, Jamaica, found himself outside the circle of influence that provided support and employment to members of the Grant clan. His unsuccessful attempt to extract £500 from Sir James Grant of Grant was soon followed up with a plea for patronage: ‘I have served a tedious apprenticeship to the planting business wherein I have had such opportunitys of being acquainted with Plantation management as must enable me to do the greatest justice to any property I may be entrusted to’.35 Perhaps Lewis Grant had a higher opinion of his abilities than others did, but this case emphasizes the importance of having access to patronage, and serves as a reminder that not all Scots who went to the Caribbean in search of a fortune were successful. Identities Cases like this are probably the exceptions, despite the fact that making money in the West Indies was certainly risky and difficult. It is particularly

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significant that contemporaries should have seen the arrival of an impecunious Scottish family in the Caribbean as remarkable.36 This type of movement, so much a feature of emigration elsewhere in the Americas, was very much a rarity in the West Indies. As a result, perhaps, the kind of charitable organizations that anchored Scottish groups in other parts of the Americas were conspicuously absent from the West Indies. In the second half of the eighteenth century, towns and cities all along the east coast of North America saw the establishment of Scottish societies. They, like the networks in the West Indies, had a dual purpose. At one level, they provided places where business and political connections could be nurtured. They also performed an important charitable or philanthropic function in assisting members of the Scottish community newly arrived or down on their luck. In Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, these organizations provided an important ‘ethnic anchor’ and formed the central core of Scottish communities. The Church of Scotland was similarly absent from the Caribbean until the nineteenth century. Despite the impressively large Scottish contingents in the Caribbean islands, there was little desire to push for the construction of kirks. Janet Schaw, a Presbyterian, was forced to attend Anglican services during her visits to St. Kitts and Antigua. And while she professed herself to be ‘no bigoted Presbyterian’, her discomfort with the ‘English service’ was clear.37 The reasons for this absence relate to the particular circumstances of the British Caribbean. For most whites in the British West Indies, religious fervour seems only to become animated when Catholicism confronted Protestantism.38 The nature of enslaved society, and white attitudes to the Christianization of the enslaved, was profoundly important in this respect. British planters, until very late on in the slavery period, tried to deny the enslaved access to Christianity and to the literacy required to read the Bible, and were wary of churchmen. To allow the spread of Christianity among the enslaved would be to usher in ‘dangerous’ ideas about equality and humanity, and threaten an entire system predicated on the notion that the enslaved were not equal and human. Jamaica did not have a Church of Scotland kirk until 1819, some twelve years after the abolition of the slave trade. Other islands had to await the abolition of slavery, and in some cases the coming of emancipation, to be similarly bestowed.39 Identities are complex things: they are constructed, imagined, multilayered and, often, refashioned by circumstances. For Scots in the Caribbean, this was certainly true. In the first place, all Europeans were members of a tiny minority of the population as enslavers surrounded by a huge, and potentially hostile, enslaved population. For Scots, as with

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others, ‘whiteness’ was a primary mark of identity and badge of solidarity, as well as one that automatically conferred status and privilege on them.40 That fundamental awareness, however, masked broader identities among Scots in the Caribbean. The study of Scottish groups in the Americas in the early modern period, as indeed for Scots in the Empire more generally, tends to perpetuate the notion that an ‘ethnic’ identity was forged among Scots abroad.41 It is clear, however, that Scots in the Caribbean did not recreate institutional bases for Scottishness in the way the colonists in North America did. That said, there are some signs that Scots in the islands did see themselves as Scottish. Janet Schaw, the ‘lady of quality’ who recorded her visit to the Caribbean in 1774 and 1775, noted of Antigua that there ‘was a whole company of Scotch people, our language, our manners, our circle of friends and connections, all the same’.42 Although Schaw was an observer rather than an emigrant, her remarks suggest an awareness of a Scottish identity among some residents. In another case, a sense of Scottishness fed into a professional identity. In Dominica in 1789, Jonathan Troup, in one of his frequent rants, noted that the ‘name of a Scots Dr’ protected his employer’s reputation, with the clear implication that the good name was being sullied.43 One of the main studies of Scots in the Caribbean characterizes Scots as not only transients but as outsiders. This transience is regarded as a sign of their exclusion rather than as an ambition common to all British migrants to the islands. The discussion goes further, however, and suggests that not only did Scots feel different, they were also regarded as different, ‘as members of an alien culture’, by their English neighbours and so were ‘provoked’ into ‘maintaining an image of distinctiveness’.44 This seems hard to sustain. At one level, such a formulation imputes too much stability and cohesion to white society in the West Indies, and it ignores a critical aspect of Caribbean society. In colonies driven by enslavement there was a fundamental area of commonality for the ruling elite – whiteness. Beyond that, there is little evidence that Scots were actively excluded. The comments of Long and Nugent seem to suggest that Scots were highly valued in Jamaica, and that is supported by Scots holding positions of authority in officialdom, and in trusted positions on English-owned estates. At another level, while some Scots may have felt like outsiders in the British Empire, they responded, not by heightening their Scottishness, but with a concentrated effort to assimilate. Alexander Johnston in Jamaica was quite clear as to what the problem was. He wrote to his brother in June 1771 telling him to learn ‘to pronounce the English language … to throw off that wicked, barbarous pronunciation which the people in [Aberdeen] have’. ‘Find out some Englishman’, he counselled, ‘that never saw Scotland

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or a Scotch man till he were 20 years old – no matter if he be a soldier – & that will be the most likely way’.45 This seems pretty unambiguous: Johnston believed in assimilation as a means of progressing – at the very least. But, as demonstrated, he also remained tied into a close family and local network. Elsewhere in the islands, the ‘otherness’ of Scots is even more problematic. Few islands were uniquely ‘English’ in composition by the later eighteenth century, while others like Grenada or Dominica had considerable French, Scottish, and Irish populations. Indeed, in Grenada, it was the French who were regarded as outsiders by an establishment dominated by Scots who emphasized the Catholicism of the French ‘others’. In protesting against the French, they asserted their Britishness. Their response to the American Revolution was similarly unequivocal. And in everyday life, few Scots dealt solely with other Scots. When they traded with and worked alongside people from outside their kinship or local group, they were as likely to work with people from Bristol or Liverpool or London as with other Scots with whom they had no prior connection. Because this was a shared British Empire, which seemed to bring material benefits to all Britons involved, it became a central tenet of a British identity. If Scots developed a new consciousness in the islands it was surely a voluntary assimilationist Britishness rather than an exclusive Scottishness foisted on them by aloof and alienating English neighbours. Scots may have had to be British to get forward, but most had no more trouble being imperial, Protestant, commercial, and free than any Englishman. This is not to suggest that Scots simply swapped a local identification for a British one. The layering of identities was much more subtle. While not all Scots who returned from the Caribbean maintained a physical connection with their home localities, most did retain a strong emotional and often financial link to their home areas. This much is clear from extant correspondence that forms the basis of this essay. The letters themselves were hugely important anchors for Scots in the West Indies because the constant, if slow and unreliable, transatlantic correspondence bound them into their worlds at home. The letters suggest a very clear emotional commitment on the part of Scots to their home areas, borne of a close family connection and sentimental association with a specific location. It was very much more focused than a more generalized longing for Scotland and this remembering of particular localities also presented itself in practical ways. James Stirling actively considered making the enslaved on Frontier Estate in Jamaica wear tartan ‘as it will help encourage our Woollen manufactory’.46 Other Scots invested in schools, hospitals, and land, but in

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the vast majority of cases these investments were made in areas to which they already had a local or family connection. Some Scots in the Caribbean, like Justice John Grant in Jamaica, displayed a firm desire to return home to ‘satisfy the hankerings of imagination towards the natal spot’ and it is clear that he defined this very closely even down to a particular plot of land.47 Even among those Scots who returned from the West Indies and settled in major English civic centres, investments in Scotland (whether in academies, finance, or famine relief) were targeted quite specifically.48 Identities among Scots in the Caribbean were extraordinarily malleable. The particular context of Caribbean society doubtless added layers of complexity. But the ways in which Scots perceived themselves varied with circumstances. At different times, and in different places, they imagined themselves as part of more than one community. For them there was no contradiction between being Scottish or British or professional, even simultaneously. But what the letters of migrants reveal most strongly is a sense of kinship and locality, of neo-clanship, underpinning it all. Letters home provided the crucial anchor for Scots, while the connections they represent ensured recruitment, emotional support, and financial opportunities in the islands. Notes I am grateful to Angela McCarthy and Tom Devine for their comments and to Archibald Stirling Esq. for permission to quote from the Stirling of Keir Papers. 1 Peter Mathias, ‘Risk, credit, and kinship in early modern enterprise’, in J. J. McCusker and K. Morgan (eds), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, 2000), p. 16; Ida Bull, ‘Merchant households and their networks in eighteenthcentury Trondheim’, Continuity and Change, 17:2 (2002), pp. 213-31; Juan Carlos Sola-Corbacho, ‘Family, paisanaje, and migration among Madrid’s merchants (1750-1800)’, Journal of Family History, 27:1 (2003), pp. 3-24. 2 Charles Tilly, ‘Transplanted networks’, in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics (New York and Oxford, 1990), pp. 79-95; Robin Pearson and David Richardson, ‘Business networking in the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 54:4 (2001), pp. 657-79; Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Networks, patronage, and information in governance: Britain, New South Wales, and the Cape Colony, 1826-1843’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2001, pp. 48-86; see also Andrew Mackillop’s essay in this volume. 3 See, for example, Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1994); Alexander J. Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995); Alexander Murdoch, British History, 1660-1832: National Identity and Local Culture (Basingstoke, 1998). 4 Among the growing literature of Scots in Empire see T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600-1815 (London 2003); A. Mackillop and Steve Murdoch (eds), Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers, c.1600-1800 (Leiden, 2003); Michael Fry,

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5 6

7 8

9

10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17

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The Scottish Empire (East Linton, 2001); Ned C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire, 1600-1800 (Lewisburg and London, 2001); John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities: the case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 8 (1998), pp. 215-31; and Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, 1750-1820 (Manchester, 2005). Robert Stirling to Archibald Stirling, 11 May 1748, Glasgow City Archives [GCA], Stirling of Keir Papers, T-SK 11/2(41). James Barclay to David Gordon, 9 June 1729, Aberdeen University, Special Collections and Archives [AUSCA], Gordon of Cairness Papers, MS 1160/5/2; George Inglis to Hugh Inglis, 9 March 1801, 1 October 1801, Inverness Museum [IM], Letterbook of George Inglis. James Barclay to David Gordon, 2 December 1727, AUSCA, Gordon of Cairness Papers, MS 1160/5/1. Lascelles & Maxwell to Gedney Clarke, 21 April 1759, Rhodes House Library, Oxford [RHL], Lascelles & Maxwell Letterbooks, Pares Transcripts, H395, fo. 300. Alan L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (Ithaca, 1992), p. 5; Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London, 2004), pp. 40-1. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island, Vol. 2 (London, 1774), p. 286 Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Landownership, land use, and elite enterprise in Scottish Gaeldom: from clanship to clearance in Argyll, 1688-1858’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Elites (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 1-42; T. M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy, 1600-1815 (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 23-4, 45-7; Robert A. Dodgshon, Land and Society in Early Scotland (Oxford, 1981), p. 212. For a discussion of clanship see Robert A. Dodgshon, ‘“The pretense of blude” and “place of thair duelling”: the nature of Scottish clans, 1500-1745’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 169-98. The phrase comes from Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, p. 137. For a fuller explanation of these figures see Douglas J. Hamilton, ‘Patronage and profit: Scottish networks in the British West Indies, c.1763-1807’, PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1999, pp. 36-8. Long, The History of Jamaica, Vol. 2, pp. 287, 316-19; Hamilton, ‘Patronage and profit’, pp. 93-5, 168-9. Frank Cundall (ed.), Lady Nugent’s Journal, from 1801 to 1815 (London, 1939), pp. 39-40. Hilary Beckles, ‘Black men in white skins: the formation of a white proletariat in West Indian slave society’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 15:1 (1986), pp. 5-21. George Inglis to Hugh Inglis, 1 October 1801, IM, Letterbook of George Inglis.

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19

20 21 22

23

24

25

26

27 28

29

30

31

32 33

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Lascelles & Maxwell to Florentius Vassall, 18 January 1752; Lascelles & Maxwell to John Frere, 20 June 1752, RHL, Lascelles & Maxwell Letterbooks, Pares Transcripts, H392, fos 249 and 330. Lascelles & Maxwell to Gedney Clarke, 21 February 1760, RHL, Lascelles & Maxwell Letterbooks, Pares Transcripts, H396, fo. 41. Robert Stirling to Archibald Stirling, 23 July 1757, GCA, Stirling of Keir Papers, T-SK 11/3(95). James Graham to William Graham, 19 June 1783, 2 April 1785, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh [NLS], Graham of Airth, Jamaican Papers, MS 10925/5, 10925/7. For the career of Francis Grant see Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, pp. 66-71. John Gordon to James Barclay, 23 November 1757, UASCA, Gordon of Cairness Papers, MS 1160/5/12, PRO, CO 142/31; List of Land Holders in Jamaica, 1754; H. F. Barclay, A History of the Barclay Family with Pedigrees from 1067 to 1933, Vol. 2 (London, 1933), p. 150. Alexander Rose to John MacIntosh, 10 May 1788, 4 August 1790; MacIntosh to Rose, 18 November 1790, National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh [NAS], Fraser-MacIntosh Collection, GD 128/44/6b. D. Hamilton, ‘Scottish trading in the Caribbean: the rise and fall of Houstoun & Co.’, in Ned C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600-1800 (London, 2001), pp. 94-126. Journal of Jonathan Troup, UASCA, MS 2070, fos 11, 67, 71v; Peter J. Anderson (ed.), Officers and Graduates of University and King’s College, Aberdeen, 1495-1860 (Aberdeen, 1893), p. 134; Peter J. Anderson (ed.), Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis 1593-1860, Vol. 2 (Aberdeen, 1898), p. 359. George Inglis to Hugh Inglis, 22 May 1801, IM, Letterbook of George Inglis. Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal in the Years 1774 to 1776, ed. E. W. Andrews and C. M. Andrews (New Haven, 1923), p. 78. Archibald Cameron to John Cameron, 1 April 1766, in Allan I. Macinnes, Marjory-Ann D. Harper and Linda G. Fryer (eds), Scotland and the Americas, c.1650-c.1939: A Documentary Source Book (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 35. Robert Stirling to Archibald Stirling, March 1748, 30 September 1753, GCA, Stirling of Keir Papers, T-SK 11/2(41, 81); James Stirling to Archibald Stirling, 4 June 1765; James Stirling to Robert Gordon, 1 November 1771, 22/2; lists of the enslaved on Hampden Estate, 1770-1780, 22/5-6; Account Books, 22/5-7. James Johnston to Alexander Johnston, 23 December 1782; Alexander Johnston to James Johnston, 24 June 1783, 21 August 1784, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia [HSP], Alexander Johnston Papers, 1582/29B Box 2, Folder 3. See also Alan L. Karras, ‘The world of Alexander Johnston: the creolization of ambition, 1762-87’, Historical Journal, 30:1 (1987), pp. 53-76. Mr Elder to Mr Logie, 5 April 1794, NAS, Gordon Castle Muniments, GD 44/34/46/1(9). James Baillie to Mrs Ramage, 10 May 1770, NLS, Liston Papers, MS 5513(188).

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34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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J. Grant to Sir James Grant, 11 November 1787, NAS, GD 248/61/2(67) Seafield Muniments. Lewis Grant to Sir James Grant, 15 June 1774, NAS, GD 248/51/2(4) Seafield Muniments. Journal of Jonathan Troup, UASCA, MS 2070, 2 November 1789, fo. 121v. Schaw, Journal of a Lady, p. 93. For a discussion of the dispute in Grenada in the 1760s see Douglas Hamilton, ‘Robert Melville and the frontiers of Empire in the British West Indies, 1763-71’, in Mackillop and Murdoch (eds), Military Governors, pp. 194-9. Hew Scott (ed.), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, Vol. 7 (Edinburgh, 1928), pp. 668-71. See, for example, Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Vol. 2 (London, 1801), pp. 6-7; A. C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Coloured, and Negro Populations of the West Indies (London, 1833), p. 18. Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and its First American Colony (Princeton, 1985), p. 174; Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, pp. 120-1. For an influential perspective on the Empire more broadly see John M. MacKenzie, ‘Essay and reflection: on Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, 15 (1993), pp. 714-39. Schaw, Journal of a Lady, p. 81. Journal of Jonathan Troup, AUSCA, MS 2070, fo. 79. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, p. 120. Alexander Johnston Papers, HSP, 1582/29B Box 2, Folder 4. James Stirling to William Stirling, 5 September 1766, GCA, Stirling of Keir Papers, T-SK 22/2. John Grant to Sir James Grant of Grant, 11 November 1787, NAS, Seafield Muniments, GD 248/61/2(67). Hamilton, ‘Patronage and profit’, pp. 290-328.

4 THE WORLDS OF JOHN ROSE: A Northeastern Scot’s Career in the British Atlantic World, c.1740-1800

Douglas Catterall This chapter follows one Scots migrant, John Rose, as he attempted to mediate an identity caught up in the worlds in which he lived and whence he drew his origins. Rose belonged to a network of some 127 individuals, many of them Scots, who participated in commercial and imperial projects across Eurasia and the Atlantic world.1 Beyond ethnicity, many of the network’s members shared family origins in one of two closely allied families: the Irvines of Drum, Artamford, and Crimond (from Aberdeenshire) and the Roses of Clava (from Nairnshire). I will therefore refer to the network as the Irvine/Rose network. In addition to their complex global involvements, these families also had roots in Scotland’s northeastern Catholic/Episcopalian and Jacobite communities.2 Achieving material wealth, then, could never have been a complete measure of success in John Rose’s career in British North America. More would be necessary. Understanding how Rose balanced the demands of the North American colonial context and those of the Irvine/Rose network is the challenge that lives like his present. To fathom Rose’s life, we must place his career choices into the context of the cultural norms to which he and members of his network subscribed. Only by doing so is it possible to relate Rose’s ethnicity to the many seemingly contradictory actions he took during his life.3 He embarked on his career in 1749 as a typical sojourner. Rose then became a settler by marrying into the landed gentry of the Carolina lowcountry in 1755, which he remained until the early 1780s when his loyalist politics forced him to leave.4 He later tried to return to the Carolina lowcountry, even maintaining ties to the region after he had finally settled in London, which differentiates him from many likeminded Scots, who supposedly did not get on with those who stayed in North America.5 With his many departures from the various patterns that historians have established for transatlantic migrants, it is obvious that we cannot look there for his identity or his ethnic affiliations. In so doing we would merely conclude that, like many Scots of

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middling to elite status with transatlantic mobility, he drew these from experiences in British, Scots, and ‘American’ climes, in other words that he was a polyglot.6 While true, Rose was also more than a ‘citizen of the world’.7 This chapter argues that, as a member of the Irvine/Rose network, John Rose was participating in the eighteenth-century incarnation of a Scots medieval tradition of network-and-enclave based migration. This tradition had first allowed Scots to achieve a presence on the European Continent and subsequently in the Atlantic world, making them the envy of many of their competitors, but always at the forefront of vibrant commercial and imperial projects. Rose’s participation in this venerable practice of Scots mobility expressed itself in three ways: his reliance on patron-client ties; expectations that he would adhere to specific notions of respectability; and his settlement and participation in Charleston, South Carolina’s corporately defined Scots enclave. The interconnection of these elements produced a mentality of migration, a network-specific set of assumptions and expectations that most members of the network understood and accepted. Rose’s identity, then, consisted of his efforts to balance the values of individuals in the Irvine/Rose network, his social ties to the Carolina lowcountry, and his family’s Jacobite heritage, a legacy that operated at the level of social memory within the Irvine/Rose network. Members of the Irvine/Rose network were voluminous in their correspondence and lucky in their descendants as many of their letters have survived.8 The correspondence of Charles Irvine, one of its principal figures and John Rose’s uncle, amounts to some 3,500 extant letters between 1748 and 1771, a crucial period covered in this chapter; including the correspondence of John Rose’s elder brother James Rose, the other major network participant whose letters survive in quantity, would augment this total considerably.9 Among these many letters only a few directly concern or were from John Rose, but the others contribute to an understanding of the impact that the Irvine/Rose network had on Rose. This substantial volume of correspondence underpins an exploration of John Rose’s career as he rose from apprentice shipwright to become one of Charleston’s most influential shipbuilders and plantation owners between 1750 and 1770.10 Unfortunately, James Rose and Charles Irvine died long before John Rose and, as far as is known, John Rose’s own letter books or preserved correspondence do not exist for the period after 1770.11 Therefore, beyond a scattering of mentions in the Henry Laurens correspondence, two sets of legal documents are relied upon to capture Rose’s worlds post-1770. First, there is a memorial as well as several communications that John Rose’s son

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Hugh wrote to justify the actions of himself and his father to the South Carolina legislature, which had confiscated John Rose’s property as retribution for his loyalist politics. Second, we have John Rose’s petition to the parliamentary committee for compensation of loyalists. Couched in a narrative style, these documents reflect the constraining legal circumstances that evoked them. Nevertheless, their concerns match those of the letters examined. Indeed, they offer a broader perspective on Rose’s past that conjoins it with the social memory of the Irvine/Rose network, and in that regard complete the world conjured by the correspondence web from the middle decades of the eighteenth century.12 The Scots Tradition of Enclave-and-Network-Based Migration Before turning to Rose’s past, brief consideration should be given to how an earlier period of Scots migration history took shape. As Ned Landsman and, more recently, T. M. Devine have suggested, the movement of Scots of middling and elite background into the Atlantic world had deep historical roots in Scots migration within Europe. In making a living in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Scots like John Rose and other members of the Irvine/Rose network relied on a tradition of Scots migration with medieval origins that married enclaves to highly structured kin networks. This tradition fostered Scots success abroad by making Scottishness, in the form of norms and institutions, portable and therefore influential within the diaspora.13 Research over the past decade has shown that kinship played an important role in the organization and operation of pre-1700 Scots migration networks in three ways. First, it conjoined individuals of similar social rank. Thus, the ministers Alexander Petrie and John Durie, both influential in mid-seventeenth-century political and religious affairs, were cousins. Both men had prominent roles in Scots enclaves on the European continent, Petrie chiefly in Rotterdam, and Durie in several communities including Rotterdam and Elbing. Kinship allowed the two men to collaborate despite different temperaments and religio-political agendas.14 In addition to connecting individuals of similar rank, kinship also linked whole families in Scots migrant communities on the European continent, thereby providing the bedrock for Scots enclaves. The Belfrage, Maclean, Spalding, Sinclair, and Hamilton families, for example, were linked to one another through the institution of godparentage and had an important part in the early history of Göteborg’s Scots enclave.15 Similarly, the Scots settlement in Elsinore rested on a foundation of network kinship, with a number of Scots families building influential local positions in part on the strength of kin-based ties.16 Perhaps most interestingly, kinship within

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Scots networks also bound together those of unequal status and socioeconomic rank. The minor merchant, factor, and shipbroker Alexander Bisset of Rotterdam had kinship ties both high and low. His son-in-law John Fleming was one of Rotterdam’s more prominent coal merchants in the seventeenth century and a prominent sessioner in the Scots Church of Rotterdam. This tie linked Bisset to the shipmaster Thomas Fleming, John Fleming’s father. Through his wife Agnes Bower, on the other hand, Bisset’s connections included common mariners and lodging house owners.17 Crucial to this side of Scots networks was the role of patronage which, in a mercantile network such as Bisset’s, guided business partnerships and careers unfolding within a family-based network in part to reduce the risks attendant on trading ventures.18 Less prominent in the concerns of networks, however, was a larger sense of Scottishness transcending regionalized interests. Broader perspectives emerged from the interactions between networks and individuals, many of which happened at the level of the Scots enclave. Although often corporate or quasi-corporate (in the medieval sense of this term) entities, most Scots enclaves that I have examined in the North and Baltic Sea zones expanded medieval notions of corporatism by conflating ethnicity (here Scottishness) with enclave membership and thus the right of access to certain privileges. Typically, enclaves coalesced around both religious and charitable institutions and merchants often provided important leadership. Some enclaves also acquired corporate trading privileges. Over time enclaves in the North and Baltic Sea zones also seem to have developed a more flexible attitude towards religious politics, which allowed Scots of differing religio-political persuasions to coexist in an enclave. In addition to providing a modus vivendi for folk of differing views, enclaves managed poor relief in the wider Scots diaspora. In aid of this, they often drew financial resources not only from enclave members but also from transient Scots to whom they, in turn, offered poor relief when need arose.19 Enclaves also provided the context in which mercantile propriety unfolded. This behavioural code, which received substantial support from Scots corporate bodies such as the Convention of Royal Burghs, stipulated that Scots merchants across the North and Baltic Sea zones should come from a middling or respectable background and present themselves as such. They should also behave in a manner that would not injure the reputation of the Scots nation. Consequently, peddlers, bankrupts, and shady dealers were not to be countenanced. The code did not always work, but it did provide a standard for conduct that many acknowledged.20 One indicator of its value is the successful activity of the Scots factor or merchant’s agent in Scots trade to the Continent. The factor’s duty was to

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execute transactions on behalf of his clients to their best advantage and to treat them all equally. In other words, the factor was supposed to act in good faith: if he did not, censure could be his lot.21 During a financial failure that struck North Sea-based Scots merchants in the 1750s, for example, observers had critical remarks for a number of Rotterdam-based Scots merchants whom they described as Scots factors, and one in particular found himself ostracized from the North Sea zone.22 The practices established by Scots enclaves, nourished by kinship-based networks, carried Scots to the Americas and moved with them. From the onset of their serious engagement with the Americas, middling and elite Scots, in particular, relied on ties to enclaves in Europe as funds of experiences, ideas, and savoir faire, and for material support.23 Still more striking is that both the ties to and the practices associated with enclaves survived the transformation of Scots migration to the Americas from a position on the Atlantic imperial periphery, through a period of largely failed colonization, to integration within the British Atlantic in the decades after 1707.24 Professional and, to some extent, poorer Scots alike maintained their use of kin-based networks in the Americas. Even in the era of mass migration poorer Scots moved in large, planned migrations, often in families and from a single region.25 For professional Scots it is well-known that kinship-based patronage networks determined how people operated in the Americas, even contributing to the efficiency of economic organization in the sugar and tobacco trades.26 The Scots enclave itself made the transition too. Charleston, South Carolina, John Rose’s destination, provides an excellent example. By 1750 it possessed a Scots charitable society, the St Andrews Society, a large complement of professional Scots either part of or tied to the colony’s hierarchy, and a substantial Scots ecclesiastical presence.27 As Ned Landsman has astutely observed, there was even a Scots theorist and advocate for the utility of transplanted communities of Scots in the Americas: John Witherspoon, onetime president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton.28 John Rose’s Worlds Before Rose even began his apprenticeship in the early 1740s, much of what he and those in the Irvine/Rose network would do was predetermined by the collective knowledge that Scots had accrued over the centuries in their migrations to Europe and subsequently transferred to the Americas. John Rose would receive patronage to put him on the road to success and would in turn be expected to offer the same to others. Rose would also find that he needed to adhere to strict notions of respectability to remain in good standing with those in the network and would find in

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Charleston the society of Scots who could help him in this. When Rose did not meet network expectations, however, he found that his ties to the world encompassed by the network weakened. Yet he did not relinquish his attachment to the network, even when he had chances and reasons to. His mentality of migration, formed within the Irvine/Rose network, rooted him in a sense of Scottishness that he could not easily relinquish. What emerged was an inflected sense of identity, in which one can discern Rose’s voice and the voices of others in the network, all of them interpreting a common mentality of migration. Network Patronage John Rose began life in precarious circumstances that rendered him dependent on the Irvine/Rose network for assistance that chiefly took the form of unofficial patronage even if kin were often those dispensing it. His eldest brother passed away in 1741.29 Moreover, as his older brother James Rose put it, ‘my [eldest] Broyrs affairs [were] in the greatest disorder’.30 With the passing of the eldest Rose brother and the advancing age of their father, James Rose became the effective head of the Rose family. As part of his duties, James Rose saw to sorting out the career prospects of John Rose, his youngest brother. He wrote to their uncle Charles Irvine from Göteborg in 1743 that he had ‘ordred my youngest Broyr.[John Rose] up to London to be bound Apprentice in the Kings yard [in Deptford]’.31 There, he would be under the watchful eye of Mungo Murray, a shipwright at the Deptford yard, with whom he also lodged for a while. It was Murray who arranged John Rose’s apprenticeship to Master Allan, Master Builder at Deptford and later Sawyer of the Royal Navy.32 During John Rose’s time as an apprentice shipwright in the Deptford yard, George Ouchterlony, Charles Irvine’s principal London correspondent, made regular reports on his progress. Throughout this period Ouchterlony almost without exception stressed that Rose was diligent about his business, prudent, and frugal. In a letter from early winter of 1747 Ouchterlony wrote to Charles Irvine that John Rose turns out well & applys himself close to his Business. I let him know I had your orders & was ready to advance him £10 or £20 if he had occasion for it. At same time I cautioned him to manage his Money & to be no ways extravagant, which I needed not have done, for he is frugal, as most young folks are, who have a right turn & apply themselvs to their Business.33

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Ouchterlony also advocated for John Rose. In a letter from 1748 to James Rose, Ouchterlony wrote that, ‘It is right & kynd in you [James Rose] to supply him [John Rose] with what is necessary & not toe let him want. It encourages him to do well’.34 John Rose was building ties that would see him through his move to South Carolina, although he could not have known this would be his destiny even as late as 1748. Not until the next year was it apparent that Rose would have to seek his fortune beyond Britain. Before turning to the decisions that led to John Rose’s settling in Charleston, however, some comment is necessary about the ties John Rose shared with those in his network at this early stage in his life. Above all, it is apparent that John Rose’s future was not his own. Rather, the Irvine/Rose network and more particularly his family controlled it. John Rose became a shipwright because his brother James Rose willed it so. He received encouragement for good performance in his apprenticeship because, in a sense, he was doing credit to his benefactors. That John Rose’s most ardent supporter would appear to have been George Ouchterlony indicates that John Rose was as much serving a function in the Irvine/Rose network as he was a member of the Rose family. Once John Rose had established himself in Charleston, it would become apparent that far from being his own master, as he hoped, he would be called on to provide support to the schemes of his patrons in the Irvine/Rose network. Before that day, however, Rose would have to surmount a more immediate difficulty.35 The problem that he faced is easily expressed in one word: politics. One determined who obtained advancement or, as George Ouchterlony called it, ‘preferment’, in the King’s Yard at Deptford not by identifying ‘he who is most deserving,’ but by choosing ‘he who has the best intrest [i.e. political influence]’.36 This was no less true in the Carolina lowcountry, where John Rose would be going. But whereas John Rose lacked sufficient ‘intrest’ in Britain, he did not, it would turn out, in the New World.37 George Ouchterlony, with the connections of Mungo Murray and the influence of Charles Irvine, assisted John Rose in moving beyond his status as an apprentice shipwright to make his way in the world. Rose was more than aware of this too. Only months before writing the letter just quoted, Ouchterlony had written to James Rose that although John Rose had completed his time in Deptford he ‘continues to work in the King’s Yard untill you & his other Friends consider what scheme will be best for him to go upon’.38 The hand of patronage was clearly in evidence. The plan on which the network finally settled for Rose was to have him form a partnership with his benefactor Mungo Murray’s nephew James Stewart to build ships in Charleston, South Carolina. Members of the

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Irvine/Rose network carefully supervised the initial stages of the undertaking. As George Ouchterlony faithfully reported to James Rose, ‘He [John Rose] & Mr. Stewart goe Partners together in every thing & Indentures are drawing up to that purpose’.39 Among other assistance, the Irvine/Rose network offered John Rose and his new partner £120, additional funds in a bond payable to James Rose, and twenty letters of introduction to influential merchants in Charleston.40 Patronage versus Personal Advantage So it was that John Rose arrived in South Carolina in 1749 with the sort of strong network-based, kin-influenced support seen as essential to success in the pre-1700 Scots migration tradition.41 Although for the first five years of his time in Charleston John Rose still depended on the Irvine/Rose network, he now began to shape his own place within that social world. This would eventually result in a transformation of Rose’s migration mentality. John Rose understood and accepted the system of network patronage that had procured for him an upbringing and training and had now set him on the pathway of a potentially lucrative career. But if Rose accepted and benefited from the network’s patronage, he would prove unwilling either to conform or confine his interests to its dictates and this would create frictions. His first years in Charleston, however, were peaceful and saw Rose writing regularly to his uncle Charles Irvine and to George Ouchterlony. There was no hint in Rose’s early correspondence with these men of the discord that would follow. His first letters back to his uncle Charles Irvine concerned the establishment of his shipbuilding business in Charleston. In general, he was sanguine about the prospects of his nascent partnership, opining that he and Stewart had no real competitors in Charleston to worry about. The main barriers to success were structural. Chiefly, John Rose and his partner had difficulty paying for labour and materials. They needed to hire (rather than buy) slave labour, which was expensive. In addition, Rose and Stewart were forced to rely on area tradesmen for assistance in working on the naval contracts they were receiving. The main reason for this reliance on other skilled workers had to do with the facilities at their disposal. The partners did not have the space and the capacity for dealing with the ships they had to service. Thus, while John Rose’s ties to Master Allan, his mentor in the Deptford yard, were gaining the partners contracts to work on Royal Navy ships, the costs of completing these contracts were too high to profit from them.42 The partners solved these problems by drawing on capital and credit available from the Irvine/Rose network. John Rose made a journey to

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Göteborg, Sweden, to ask his uncle personally for a loan and a letter of credit in the year 1751, in which endeavour he succeeded. With the money and credit Rose accessed between 1751 and 1754, he and Stewart were able to purchase slaves. They subsequently trained these slaves in the building and repair of ships, eventually eliminating their dependence on artisans and hired slaves. Rose and Stewart also expanded their wharf facilities. Throughout these early trials George Ouchterlony remained steadfast in his insistence on John Rose’s character as ‘sober & dilligent in his Business,’ observing further that ‘if it please God he lives, I hope you [John Rose’s uncle Charles Irvine] will have no Reason to repent your friendly good Offices’.43 Joining this consistent portrayal of Rose as the dutiful nephew were John Rose’s efforts to appeal to his uncle as an individual. Rose adopted a frank and conversational tone in his letters explaining the business climate in Charleston, and was forthright in his thanks for the assistance he received. In thanking his uncle for the loan from 1751 he wrote, ‘for I am shure had it not been for your goodnes I should never have been in a capasity to serve myself or my friends & I hope in god I shall soon be now able to make gratfull returns’.44 If patronage was one dimension of the Irvine/Rose network, John Rose sought to emphasize reciprocity within its usual economy of deference; he tried to indicate his acceptance of the system while also indicating his own role as an individual.45 Unfortunately for John Rose, rhetorical returns were insufficient thanks in the Irvine/Rose network’s patronage economy. Words meant less than deeds, and when John Rose tried to shift his position in the Irvine/Rose network by expanding ties to Charleston without paying due attention to the designs of the network, its members found his behaviour unacceptable. The hurricane that struck Charleston on 15 September 1752 wreaked far less destruction on his fortunes and mental world than the events that unfolded between October 1754 and June 1755.46 In October 1754 John Rose married Hester Bond, one of seven Bond sisters who, between them, came to control Charleston’s entire shipbuilding industry by virtue of their marital alliances.47 On 24 June 1755 James Stewart, John Rose’s partner, ‘was found dead in the woods with his gun by him with a string to the treeger & Round his foot’.48 Writing to his uncle Charles Irvine on this topic, Rose claimed to be at a loss to explain Stewart’s actions. Of his erstwhile partner’s passing he remarked blandly that ‘he shot himself and I belive there is none upon earth cann acot. for it’.49 But if Rose was able to take Stewart’s apparent suicide and his own marriage to Hester Bond in stride, those in the Irvine/Rose network could not. These events would undo John Rose’s ties to some within the Irvine/Rose network and change Rose’s outlook on his migrant status.

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On the surface, Rose’s marriage to Hester Bond should have been cause for celebration. In South Carolinian terms she was gentry. Her father, a successful planter who owned around a hundred slaves on land near to Rose’s on Hobcaw Point, had also been a member of South Carolina’s legislature for some years. Both of these facts bespoke his membership in lowcountry society’s inner circles of power. In the closed world of the lowcountry gentry, then, John Rose had clearly ‘made it’. Although a relative newcomer, he had married into an elite family and one interested in his business to boot.50 Extant letters from John Rose, George Ouchterlony, and Charles Irvine, however, make apparent the network’s dim view on the Rose/Bond match. In letters to Charles Irvine and James Rose on the subject of John Rose’s marriage, George Ouchterlony expressed his own view, and echoed that of his two longtime friends, in judging Hester Bond to be ‘a Wife without a Fortune or a very small one’.51 Elite South Carolinians like the Bonds would have agreed with Irvine, Rose, and Ouchterlony that a marriage to such a woman was to be avoided at all costs. They would have demurred strongly, however, at Ouchterlony’s characterization of Hester Bond.52 Unfortunately for John Rose, those in the Irvine/Rose network did not accept the judgment of most folk living in the Americas as sound. Writing to George Ouchterlony, Charles Irvine noted that ‘it seems John Rose is married, some good for nothing person I suppose, so all your trouble and my money is lost &c’.53 This view fits in with Irvine’s general view of the marriage market in the Americas, which he expressed in stark terms. He observed that ‘the Inhabitants [of the British colonies were] chiefly a vicious and debauch’d sett of people, most of them the offspring of Jail=birds with whom it is dangerous to have communication’.54 From this it followed that the British Atlantic empire was a ‘part of the world where few or none suitable [for marriage] was to be met with’.55 In this opinion, Charles Irvine resembled many in Scotland, who, as Alan Karras has shown, tended to see the Americas as insalubrious.56 The records do not indicate whether Irvine’s view had any connection with Hester Bond’s ethnicity, but it certainly had roots in notions of the Americas as degenerate. Given this, how could Hester Bond be acceptable in the eyes of a man like Charles Irvine? Yet Charles Irvine expressed himself willing to let bygones be bygones if John Rose would explain himself to Irvine’s satisfaction. Indeed, Irvine claimed to be willing to overlook the possibility that Hester Bond did not have much fortune if ‘she were an honest girl of a creditable family without a groat’.57 This statement at least suggests Irvine’s willingness to grant his nephew clemency and it is surely true that if many in Scotland had an

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ambiguous view of the Americas, they did not always disapprove of marital alliances.58 And perhaps Hester Bond might, in the end, have suited. John Rose described his new wife as ‘a planter’s Daughter, my very nixt nighbar who is as good and Creiditable peiple as any in this Cuntray’.59 On the word of his Charleston acquaintances George Ouchterlony seemed to agree with John Rose’s assessment noting that ‘if she is a virtuous frugal Woman & I never heard any thing to the contrary, that which cannot now be remedied should be passed over & forgiven & he for whom you have done so much & put in a way not without just cause for doing so, be all at once abandoned’.60 The always avuncular Ouchterlony also encouraged Charles Irvine to consider the rumours of John Rose’s supposed misconduct, which Ouchterlony did not describe, carefully and critically.61 Had his marital alliance been John Rose’s only miscue, he might have quickly repaired relations with his kinsmen (and others in the Irvine/Rose network). Unfortunately for him, John Rose’s behaviour towards his former partner and his brother Robert, a common sailor, had also deviated from network norms. His conduct towards these men ruptured his ties to the network and actually became linked to his marriage to Hester Bond in the view of the network. Tension had marked John Rose’s relationship with his partner from early on, and much of it turned on the financing of their business. When in 1751 Rose had secured his first major loan from his kin in Europe, for example, Stewart had refused to lend his name to the promissory note until John Rose had applied substantial pressure.62 Later, other matters appear to have been at stake. In late November 1755, George Ouchterlony wrote to Charles Irvine that ‘as to his late unhappy Partner Mr. Stewart, the little I know of him I took him to be of a stiff, dogged Temper, which makes me the less surprised there was between them no right agreement with regard to Mr. Stewarts Estate’.63 Ouchterlony referred here to a disagreement between Rose and Stewart over how to delineate the ownership of the assets in their partnership or co-partnery. In a letter to Charles Irvine, John Rose claimed that after Stewart’s death he discovered that Stewart had placed lands jointly purchased in a ‘joynt Tennancy’ that gave the longest liver absolute rights, even to the point of excluding the deceased partner’s heirs.64 Asserting that Stewart had planned to exclude Rose’s heirs, Rose wrote to his uncle that ‘I cannot think that taking the same advantage that was intended against me cann be Criminal or dishonest in me’.65 Ouchterlony’s letter, quoted above, suggests that Rose may have been disingenuous in claiming to have discovered Stewart’s intentions only after his partner’s death.66 At the very least one can conclude that John Rose had

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become as uncompromising as his former partner when it came to money matters. More damning, though, was Charles Irvine’s perception that his nephew intended to cut off James Stewart’s heirs without a penny. Commenting on John Rose’s mooted plan to take over all of the property purchased with his partner, Charles Irvine wrote ‘he talks wildly concerning the land they purchased as if the longest liver was to inherit the whole witho.t accounting to the heirs of the deceased; for which ther is not the least foundation from his own report of the terms of Copartnership or the purchase of said land’.67 This was an affront to Charles Irvine’s acquaintance Mungo Murray, for whom Irvine had great regard. From a more practical standpoint John Rose’s proposal also created difficulties, as it assumed James Stewart’s kin would not take an interest in his ‘affects’, which was far from true in Irvine’s view.68 John Rose’s proposal must have particularly irked Irvine since his branch of the Irvines had been disadvantaged, as he saw it, by sharp legal practices whose effects he spent much of his life combating.69 It was equally irksome to John’s elder brother James Rose. He wrote to Charles Irvine that on first receiving his brother’s letter concerning the Stewart matter, he ‘was justly I think so angry that had his letter come first to my own hands I would have burnt it without reading [it] but my wife happened to get it and keept it up from me only told me the contents’.70 Indeed it was James Rose’s wife and her siblings who convinced Rose to write to his brother in the end.71 The tone of this letter is civil on the whole, but makes three things abundantly clear: that James Stewart was James Rose’s ‘old very good friend’; that John Rose had by that time forfeited his brother’s good will by not answering his letters ‘for upwards of two years’; and that unless John Rose’s agreement with Stewart concerning their partnership property had been unambiguous, he owed it to Stewart’s kin to treat them fairly.72 As if this were not enough, Charles Irvine explicitly connected the death of John Rose’s partner with his marriage to Hester Bond, presumably due to the financial strains it imposed on the Rose/Stewart partnership.73 Here it seems that Charles Irvine’s suspicions were wrong. Far from draining money from the partnership, John Rose’s marriage to Hester Bond most likely brought him additional financial pull. Irvine’s sense that John Rose had a great need of money, however, seems quite accurate. Perhaps Rose’s business was experiencing growth that required substantial cash outlays and his alliance with Hester Bond served this purpose just as much as his apparent intention to take over his partner’s assets did. In short, John Rose had fundamentally reoriented his business strategy away from the network after profiting from its help.

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This change in course violated the values of network patronage, kinship loyalty, and mercantile propriety and deserved censure in the eyes of those in the network. Charles Irvine never resumed a regular correspondence with John Rose after the events of 1755 and refused to respond to any of Rose’s letters until July 1762.74 His elder brother, James Rose, did, but not for a number of years; even then the two men quarrelled over whether John Rose would be able to purchase the family estate and title of laird of Clava from James Rose. For these two benefactors and likely for George Ouchterlony as well, John Rose’s behaviour in the matter of his partner had been heedless and inappropriate, reminiscent of his conduct in the case of his brother Robert Rose. For just as John Rose had been too busy to answer his brother James’s letters, he had been too busy to assist his brother Robert in finding a situation in Charleston in the early 1750s.75 A Jacobite Past Confronts the American Revolution It would seem that John Rose was leaving the tradition of Scots enclaveand-network based migration behind. The rupture caused by John Rose’s apparent misbehaviour had the effect of pushing him mentally into the world of the lowcountry and away from the Irvine/Rose network. Until his troubles with loyalism in the 1780s, John Rose would work to become one of the lowcountry’s substantial inhabitants. At the same time, he never left the network or his Scots ethnicity behind. In a letter to Charles Irvine in 1762 he wrote ‘it will give me the greatest pleasure to here [hear] from you as often as it is Convenint to you’.76 In this same letter, fully seven years after the death of his partner, he was still defending himself against his uncle’s judgment of his actions towards Stewart and his heirs. Moreover, he maintained contact with his immediate kin such as his brother James Rose and nephew Hector Rose, the latter a shipmaster who called in Charleston at least into the mid-1770s.77 This becomes apparent when one looks at his dual integration into Charleston society. On the basis of evidence in several sources, and especially his testimony to the parliamentary commission for loyalist compensation, it is safe to say that John Rose succeeded handsomely in Charleston and in Charleston society. By one estimate he took 170 slaves with him to Jamaica, his first stop when he left North America in late 1782, and he had owned even more. In 1774 the Laurens brothers, at the time trying to interest Rose in building a ship for them, referred to Rose’s shift in priorities away from shipbuilding to developing his plantations. Between 1770 and 1772, for example, Rose later claimed to have purchased some 9,265 acres for a total of £42,000 with a total of 221 slaves between them. According to his parliamentary testimony, Rose’s estate had a value of £65,974 13s 5d

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sterling when the State of South Carolina auctioned it. Through the marriage of his daughters, Rose was also making contact with others of importance and means. One of his daughters married Philip Tidyman, a Charleston silversmith, and his daughter Margaret would marry the merchant and loyalist John Tunno.78 Rose seemed to have joined lowcountry society for good. Yet Rose did not forsake his Scottishness or the tradition of migration that had brought him to Charleston. He integrated into Charleston’s Scots enclave, which was part of but also distinct within the Charleston urban community. Its more elite members had substantial careers as physicians, apothecaries, colonial officials, clergymen, intellectuals, planters, and especially merchants; the enclave also included craftsmen and educators among its number. According to an estimate based on testimony before the parliamentary commission of enquiry for compensating loyalists, the Scots enclave numbered some 35 families in the period before the American War of Independence, a fairly modest size for a city whose population had reached 11,000 by 1770. This figure is therefore likely a significant underestimate, but by how much is hard to say. More certain is the enclave’s influence, mainly due to the high number of professionals it could claim.79 For his part Rose seemed more than willing to forge ties with the enclave. He became a member of the St Andrew’s Society of Charleston in 1765, and he counted among his acquaintances several of the Scots community’s important members: Colonel Alexander Innes, Alexander Garden, William Ancrum, and John Tunno.80 Despite his success, however, some time between 1775 and 1782 John Rose became known publicly as a loyalist, a political label that again challenged his ties to Charleston and to some members of its Scots enclave. Indeed, if his parliamentary testimony is to be believed, Rose considered himself a loyalist from the onset of hostilities between Britain and her North American colonies.81 Despite these sentiments, through 1776 it would seem Rose retained good relations with Henry Laurens; he is mentioned in Laurens’ correspondence without any hint of his having become a loyalist.82 Perhaps this was because Rose’s policy seemed to be to avoid contact with the discord emerging around him. He claimed to have left Charleston in May 1775 and from then until the British took Charleston spent much of his time in the country on one of his plantations, although he admitted signing the ‘Oath of Abjuration’, by doing which he repudiated his allegiance to Britain and embraced the cause of independence.83 By absenting himself from Charleston as much as possible Rose avoided having to leave the colony as others did.84

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This nominal conformity to the side fighting for independence notwithstanding, by 1782 authorities in South Carolina had adjudged John Rose a loyalist.85 A number of actions led to this charge. First, Rose signed an address of welcome to Sir Henry Clinton and Admiral Marriott Arbuthnot, the British commanders who took over Charleston in May 1780.86 Rose also gave assistance to Colonels Tarleton and Webster, key figures in Cornwallis’s efforts to pacify South Carolina, and Rose’s son Hugh served the British forces as a volunteer in the royal militia, with both father and son having petitioned to serve.87 Finally, Rose noted that he returned to Charleston after British forces had retaken it and claimed that ‘during the Seidge of Charles Town [by American forces] he afforded all the Assistance to the British Army in his power and at the request of Earl Cornwallis supplied it with such Provision and other Necessarys as his Plantation afforded’ and for these actions ‘his Person was proscribed and his Estate [was] confiscated by the Legislature of the Country [South Carolina]’.88 Throughout the Journals of South Carolina’s House of Assembly from 1783-1788 there are entries mentioning first John Rose’s own efforts and later those of his son Hugh Rose to clear their names in South Carolina and obtain relief from the 1782 Confiscation Act passed by the Jacksonborough Assembly. But where did Rose’s loyalism fit into his identity, and is it important enough for us to ignore his identity’s other dimensions?89 Given his actions and the two certificates of loyalty that Rose received from Lord Cornwallis and Colonel Balfour (Cornwallis’s commander in Charleston) there is no reason to doubt his loyalist credentials.90 Rose was not, however, a loyalist without demur. Had he been it is unlikely he would have taken the oath of abjuration, as there were many ways for him to avoid taking it.91 Nor would he or his son have made the efforts to retain a foothold in the Carolina lowcountry that they did. Shortly after the elder Rose’s departure from Charleston in late 1782, a memorial in his name was submitted to the South Carolina House of Assembly in February 1783, by which point Rose had certainly reached Jamaica, where he remained until moving on to London.92 In the memorial Rose asked, ‘to be relieved from the Pains & Penalties of an Act Entitled “an Act for Confiscating the Estates and Banishing the Persons therein mentioned”.’93 Indeed, throughout the 1780s the Roses, along with other loyalists, remained hopeful of returning to South Carolina, and the Roses would appear to have had some success.94 A year after the first memorial, in February 1784, Hugh Rose petitioned the South Carolina legislature to free his father from the penalties of the Confiscation Act.95 In late February 1787 Hugh Rose, denoted as a resident of the parishes of Christ Church and St Thomas and

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thus evidently living in South Carolina, submitted another petition, this time for the return of his portion of his father’s estates. Apparently the purchaser of the estate, one Singleton, had agreed to surrender his interest in the property, a plantation called Richfield. Consequently, Hugh Rose owed only the auction price of the estate, about £3,000, considerably less than its stated value of £33,078 7s sterling and apparently affordable for John Rose.96 A confusing picture to say the least. How, then, to reconcile John Rose’s luke-warm conformity to the fight for independence, his loyalism, and his strong desire to return to South Carolina after the Revolutionary War? Hugh Rose explained his father’s actions in terms of the Rose family’s Jacobite past and the moderate nature of his father’s political behaviour. This, in my view, is what unifies John Rose’s apparently contradictory actions.97 Of his father Hugh Rose noted that, ‘his Behaviour was always peaceable and moderate, and in a variety of Instances, friendly to many Individuals, even after the possession of Charleston by the British Troops.’98 Moreover, there were grounds, Hugh Rose argued, for his father’s political views that went beyond a choice between loyalty to South Carolina or to Britain. John Rose’s family had, ‘lost a very large paternal Inheritance by the Commotions [Jacobite rising], in the Year One thousand seven hundred and fifteen’.99 John Rose wanted to be part of South Carolina, but not if his family had to suffer. Once again John Rose’s loyalties to the network and the migration tradition that had brought him to Charleston had triumphed. For above all, Hugh Rose’s memorial connects his father’s actions to his continued loyalty to the Irvine/Rose network and to his ties to Charleston and its Scots enclave. Even if John Rose made the effort to return to Charleston in part for economic reasons, in trying to continue the ties he had built up there he was also putting his life on hold. Rose’s adapted network mentality, and its strong ties to the Scots enclave-and-network migration tradition, were responsible for this choice. On the one hand, even once the politics of South Carolina had made it impossible for him personally to continue there, he was supportive of his son trying to continue on and his son-in-law John Tunno maintained a presence in Charleston through his brother Adam.100 True, the Scots enclave in Charleston may not have retained its former prominence. Nevertheless, some of its members continued on there and others maintained ties to them, possibly drawing more newcomers as the membership lists of the Charleston St Andrews Society suggest.101 At the same time, Rose was not willing to jeopardize the future of others in the Irvine/Rose network, some of whom had been prosecuted for Jacobitism as a result of the 1745 Jacobite rising, to stay in South

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Carolina.102 He was only willing to continue an association that did not disadvantage them. Thus, if John Rose had not always acted in accord with the designs of the Irvine/Rose network’s members, neither had he forsaken it even as he adapted it to his circumstances. Conclusion John Rose’s case addresses more than the life of one middling Scot and his successes in the enterprises of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. First and foremost, Rose demonstrates the durability of the pre-1700 Scots tradition of migration, thereby adding further clarity to the picture painted by Landsman and Devine.103 Rose behaved in a manner reminiscent of Scots migrants to the Baltic and the North Sea zones, who maintained ties to Scotland and to the enclaves in which they lived even as they also adapted the enclave-and-network migration system to their own circumstances.104 He defied, but ultimately maintained, a fundamental loyalty to the kinship-based network that sent him to the Americas and also remained steadfast in his ties to Charleston, the site of a Scots enclave evincing most of the hallmarks typifying the pre-1700 Scots enclave in the North Sea and Baltic regions. Rose’s complex history also adds nuance to our understanding of the enclave-and-network system’s influence. Clearly, eighteenth-century Scots migrants who availed themselves of pre-1700 Scots migration practices could do more than merely react to the forces around them; drawing on their portable ethnicity, they created opportunities for themselves. Rose’s ties to Charleston endured in part because he had participated in the city’s Scots enclave. Whether or not migrants to the Americas outside of John Rose’s demographic of middling and elite skilled migrants had these opportunities is an important question, though Bernard Bailyn’s work on the migration profile of less elite Scots suggests that they may well have created their own version of the enclave-and-network migration system.105 Of equal moment is to define how ‘Scottish’ the enclave-and-network approach of the Irvine/Rose network was. In this chapter it is suggested that part of the case for its Scottishness must rest on the fact that this is what Scots in the pre-1700 era of migration did. It is worth noting, though, that the Scots approach to enclave-and-network migration seems to be sui generis in the European context, lying between that of traditionally stateless migrant groups such as the Sephardim or the Armenians on the one hand, and that of European groups who formed foreign enclaves. Scots formed enclaves with ethnically as opposed to religiously defined memberships, that existed not as projections of the Scottish state but rather of the royal burghs or of other Scots enclaves.106 This differentiated Scots enclaves from their other

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European counterparts insofar as their emphasis on ethnicity and on ties to the royal burghs as opposed to a centralized state gave Scots enclaves an insider/outsider position in their host societies. Most other European enclaves had to choose between an insider or outsider status.107 The Scots also differed from stateless boundary-crossers in that they could and often did have an active attachment to their homeland.108 Scots networks such as the Irvine/Rose network, working through enclaves, acted as conduits for Scots values and institutions because migrants perceived them as originating from their home communities (not from a central government). These same communities still provided an institutional matrix that reinforced enclaves abroad, as Rose found in Charleston, South Carolina. Rose’s behaviour also suggests that we should see identity as resulting from negotiations with limits.109 Rose’s identity, the core of which has been reconstructed from the correspondence of his brother James Rose and his benefactor and uncle Charles Irvine, ultimately rested in the migration mentality bequeathed him by the Irvine/Rose network, which, in turn, had deep roots in past Scots migration practices; indeed these practices serve as a counterpoint to other motifs shaping eighteenth-century Scots identity, chief among them Britishness.110 This past established clear boundaries within which Rose operated. Yet his efforts to balance the worlds that the Irvine/Rose network’s migration mentality encompassed involved him in stretching it by contributing his own views on the place of loyalty, patronage, and propriety. Among the individual views that Rose adopted, two stand out. First, Rose did not subscribe to absolute patronage loyalty, seeing this as constricting. Second, he chose to remember his family’s Jacobitism and incorporate it into his own actions, which, in the 1780s, he need not have done. Viewing identity as a construct of limited fluidity allows one to build individuals and their agency back into larger historical narratives, as attempted here. Nevertheless, as Willem Frijhoff has noted in his work on the Dutch divine Evert Willemsz, identity remains a concept rooted in claims-making, an activity that is as much about prescription as reality, a fact made even clearer when one considers the sources for this piece: letters and legal narratives.111 It is far too easy to elide differences between individuals, resulting in a monolithic identity that fails to account for individual actions, or to reduce one’s field of vision to the internal dialogues of an individual, yielding a biography so unique that it loses analytical purchase. In this piece the corrective of a network conversation has been introduced on matters of identity tied to an institutional context through the notion of a mentality of migration. While this approach guards against the possibility of an unrepresentative biography, it assumes that the

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network in question, the elite Irvine/Rose network from northeast Scotland, can effectively represent eighteenth-century Scots views on the pre-1700 tradition of Scots migration. This is all the more true in that only a limited set of people in eighteenth-century Scots society could have produced the letters and legal documents forming the backbone of this piece. Yet, as Allan Macinnes has noted, kinship-based regionalism had historically inflected Scottishness, even in Scots enclaves in the early modern period.112 If, then, the mentality of migration necessarily represents a metonymy, it is, it seems, an honest one. Through more detailed work on social formations such as the Irvine/Rose network and their individual members scholars will gain a much better sense of migration from the migrant’s viewpoint, a perspective that is too easily left by the wayside. Notes 1

2

3 4

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6

As I have counted only those who were active participants in the network (by virtue of kinship or their regular business associations), this figure is a conservative estimate and could be increased considerably if all contacts were counted. Moreover, the figure of 127 will increase substantially once I complete my analysis of extant sources. There are no recent monographs on the Irvines of Drum or the Roses of Clava. Recent literature that is informative on the family genealogies and histories, however, does exist. See especially Donald M. Mackintosh, The Irvines of Drum and Their Cadet Branches, 1300-1750 (Greenville, SC, 1998) for the Irvines. Antiquarian works such as George Bain, History of Nairnshire (Nairn, 1893) and Cosmo Innes (ed.), A Genealogical Deduction of the Family of Rose of Kilravock (Edinburgh, 1848) contain information on the Roses. See below for further information and full citations on the details of Rose’s biography in this paragraph. On the sojourner model see Alan L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800 (Ithaca, 1992); Mark Quintanilla, ‘The world of Alexander Campbell: an eighteenth-century Grenadian planter’, Albion, 35:2 (2003), especially pp. 230-5. On the nature of the settler or ‘planter’ motivation see Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, with the assistance of Barbara DeWolfe (New York, 1986), pp. 194-5. See Michael Fry, ‘A commercial empire: Scotland and British expansion in the eighteenth century’, in T. M. Devine and J. R. Young (eds), Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton, Lothian, 1999), pp. 64-6. For some recent discussion of the middling sort and elite in the Atlantic world see the discussion of this topic on H-Atlantic (http://www.hnet.org/~atlantic/) during January and February 2002. It is with reference to this discussion thread that I am describing John Rose as part of these groups.

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12 13

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I borrow here from David Hancock. See David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995). I have made no attempt to impose any dates on the correspondence as it originated in regions with different date conventions and the correspondents did not always pay attention to such details. All dates, therefore, are taken straight from the sources without alteration. I make this calculation based on the inventory of Charles Irvine’s incoming correspondence at the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota for the period from 1748, when John Rose was deciding on a career path, to 1771, the year of Irvine’s death. During this period Irvine received 1,772 letters; his letter books for this same period, all of which I have examined, indicate that he likely answered each one of these letters, yielding an approximate figure of 3,544 for his entire correspondence for this period. There is, unfortunately, no inventory for the letter books or incoming correspondence of James Rose of Clava, but the four sizeable letter books and additional bundles of correspondence left from Rose’s activities c.17401773 would amount to well over a thousand pieces of correspondence. For the basics on Rose’s position in Charleston see Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution (Columbia, SC, 1987), pp. 6, 26. With regard to Rose’s letters and papers I have conducted extensive searches in the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, the Drum Castle muniments, the University of Aberdeen Department of Special Libraries and Archives, and Aberdeen City Archives, as well as preliminary searches of the holdings of the University of South Carolina Libraries, the College of Charleston, and the South Carolina Historical Society. None of these efforts has yielded any of John Rose’s papers. As Rose finally settled in London his papers may turn up in the National Archives, but for now I am assuming that little of his correspondence survives beyond what his brother and uncle preserved in their letter books. In this chapter, therefore, I am concerned chiefly with Rose’s interactions with the Irvine/Rose network and not with his efforts to expand that network in Charleston, a separate issue that I plan to address elsewhere. For full bibliographic details on the sources discussed in the paragraph and the associated history see below. Ned C. Landsman, ‘Nation, migration, and the province in the first British empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600-1800’, American Historical Review, 104:2 (1999), pp. 463-75; Ned Landsman, ‘Introduction: the context and functions of Scottish involvement in the Americas’, in Ned C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600-1800 (Lewisburg, PA, 2001), especially pp. 18-22; T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600-1815 (Washington, DC, 2004), pp. 1-12, 26-36. As both Devine and Landsman aim at a broader synthesis of Scots migration, neither addresses the specific ways in which Scots networks and Scots enclaves intertwined in a European context. It is this nexus that I wish to emphasize below in order to identify concretely

THE WORLDS OF JOHN ROSE

14

15

16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

25 26

87

those aspects of Scottishness that John Rose took with him to the Americas. I would like to credit Ned Landsman, however, for first putting the notion of a portable sense of Scottishness on the map for the Scots Atlantic. Copy letter, John Durie (Rotterdam) to Alexander Henderson (London), 20 December 1644, Hartlib Papers, Electronic Edition. For a brief overview of Petrie’s importance see Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds.), Dictionary of National Biography, s.v.; Douglas Catterall, Community Without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic, c.1600-1700 (Leiden, 2002). On Durie see Steve Murdoch, ‘Kith and kin: John Durie and the Scottish community in Scandinavia and the Baltic, 1624-1634’, in P. Salmon and T. Barrow (eds), Britain and the Baltic: Studies in Commercial, Political, and Cultural Relations, 1500-2000 (Sunderland, 2003), pp. 21-46; Howard Hotson, ‘Cultures of communication in an age of crisis: the multi-layered network of Samuel Hartlib’, in Paul Nelles (ed.), Information Empires: News, Networks, and Learning in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y., forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Hotson for allowing me to see an advance copy of his article. Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch, ‘The Scottish community abroad in seventeenth-century Gothenburg’, in Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch (eds), The Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2005), pp. 191-233, especially 194-5. Thomas Riis, Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot … Scottish-Danish Relations, c.1450-1707, Vol. 1 (Copenhagen, 1988), pp. 162-94. In particular the alliance between the Lyall and Hansen families seems to have been quite important in Elsinore. Catterall, Community Without Borders, pp. 209-12. Catterall, Community Without Borders, pp. 344-5; Devine, Scotland’s Empire, p. 9. Douglas Catterall, ‘At home abroad: ethnicity and enclave in the world of Scots traders in northern Europe, c.1600-1800’, Journal of Early Modern History, 8:4 (2005), pp. 319-57. Ibid. T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 1600-1707 (Edinburgh, 1963), p. 99. Catterall, ‘At home abroad.’ Catterall, Community Without Borders, pp. 344-5; Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 34-5; Landsman, ‘Nation, migration, and province’, pp. 467-74; Landsman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 220-5; Esther Mijers, ‘Scots in the Dutch Americas: networks and politics’, paper given at ‘Williamite Scotland and the United Provinces 1689-1702’, a conference sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, June 2004. For an overview of the phases of Scots migration to the Americas just mentioned see Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 1-48, 62-8, 94-118; Landsman, ‘Nation, migration, and province’, pp. 469-75; George Pratt Insh, The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (London, 1932), pp. 21-35; Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pp. 44-9, 95-8, 102-3, 204-39, 497-536. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pp. 95-8, 102-3, 497-536. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, pp. 118-69; T. M. Devine, Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and their Trading Activities, c.1740-1790

88

27

28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35

36

A GLOBAL CLAN

(Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 56-64; J. H. Soltow, ‘Scottish traders in Virginia, 17501775’, Economic History Review, second series, 13:1 (1959), pp. 86, 88; Douglas Hamilton, ‘Scottish trading in the Caribbean: the rise and fall of Houston and Co.’, in Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province, pp. 100-7. J. H. Easterby, History of the St. Andrew’s Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1729-1929 (Charleston, SC, 1929), pp. 11-46; David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607-1785 (Athens, GA, 1994), pp. 103-9; Ian Charles Cargill Graham, Colonists from Scotland: Emigration to North America, 1707-1783 (Port Washington, NY, 1972), pp. 130-42. Landsman, ‘Nation, migration, and province’, p. 474. While Witherspoon was probably thinking of larger colonial settlements, his emphasis on expatriate communities with distinct profiles also provides some legitimacy for Scots urban enclaves in the Americas. National Archives of Scotland [NAS]/Commissary Court 16 (Moray)/4/3/141. James Rose (Nairn) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 20 May 1743, James Ford Bell Library, Charles Irvine Correspondence [CIC]/1743/7a. I would like to thank Professor Carol Urness, formerly Head Curator of the James Ford Bell Library, and Professor James D. Tracy for recommending I look into the Irvine correspondence and for subsequently supporting my work on the Irvine correspondence. James Rose (Gothenburg) to Charles Irvine (London), 22 September 1743, CIC/1743/14a. James Rose (Gothenburg) to Charles Irvine (London), 22 September 1743, CIC/1743/14a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 22 January 1751, CIC/1751/7a. For Mungo Murray’s biographical details see Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds.), Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. (1885-1901). George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg) 6 November 1747, CIC/1747/17a. George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 10 March 1748, James Rose Correspondence, James Ford Bell Library [JRC]/1748/5b. It is important to point out that the quasi patron/client ties John Rose had to the Irvine/Rose network differed markedly from what Lorri Glover has described as typical of the South Carolina gentry. Among this group of people, close, affectionate, and even indulgent relationships between kin were not uncommon. The Irvine/Rose network also differed from the situation in England as well due to the extensive use it made of extended kin ties. For this see Lorri Glover, All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds Among the Early South Carolina Gentry (Baltimore, MD, 2000), pp. 1-58. How far John Rose’s experiences differed from those of Scots of his background is another matter. Alan Karras’s work on the Scots in Jamaica and the Chesapeake would suggest that Rose was not unique in experiencing the degree of control that he did. For this see Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, especially pp. 71-80. George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 13 December 1748, JRC/1748/22b.

THE WORLDS OF JOHN ROSE

37 38 39 40

41

42

43 44 45

89

On the prevalence of political influence and nepotism in the Carolina lowcountry see Glover, All Our Relations, especially pp. 87-139. George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 26 October 1748, JRC/1748/21b. George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 22 June 1749, JRC/1749/4b. George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 13 December 1748, JRC/1748/22b; John Rose (?London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 17 February 1749, CIC/1749/6a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 21 February 1749, CIC/1749/8a; George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (Aberdeen?), 11 March 1749, JRC/1749/1b; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 28 March 1749, CIC/1749/11a; George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 22 June 1749, JRC/1749/4b; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 23 June 1749, CIC/1749/14a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 7 July 1749, CIC/1749/19a. George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 7 July 1749, CIC/1749/19a; John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 23 November 1749, CIC/1749/64a. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 23 November 1749, CIC/1749/64a; John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 22 January 1750, CIC/1750/6a; John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 24 November 1751, CIC/1751/84a. George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 4 January 1751, CIC/1751/1a. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine, 24 January 1751, CIC/1751/8a. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 22 January 1750, CIC/1750/6a; George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 23 August 1750, JRC/1750/1b; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 22 September 1750, CIC/1750/72a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 10 October 1750, CIC/1750/80a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 4 January 1751, CIC/1751/1a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 22 January 1751, CIC/1751/7a; John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine, 24 January 1751, CIC/1751/8a; John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 30 March 1751, CIC/1751/16a; John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 24 November 1751, CIC/1751/84a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 26 November 1751, CIC/1751/85a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 21 January 1752, CIC/1752/3a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 30 November 1753, CIC/1753/114a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburgh), 25 December 25 1753, CIC/1753/123a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 22 February 1754, CIC/1754/18a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine

90

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65

A GLOBAL CLAN

(Gothenburg), 11 June 1754, CIC/1754/33a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 19 November 1754, CIC/1754/45a. For John Rose’s account of the hurricane see John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 29 October 1752, CIC/1752/73a. For Rose’s mention of the marriage’s timing see CIC/1755/27a (July 3). On the Bond sisters see Glover, All Our Relations, p. 98. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 3 July 1755, CIC/1755/27a. Ibid. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 3 July 1755, CIC/1755/27a, and, for general discussion of the lowcountry gentry and membership within it, see Glover, All Our Relations, pp. 1-58, 87-112. George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 21 November 1755, CIC/1755/53a. On the gentry of the lowcountry see Glover, All Our Relations, pp. 1-58, 87112. Charles Irvine (Gothenburg) to George Ouchterlony (London), 20 August 1755, National Register of Archives (Scotland) 1500 [NRA(S) 1500]/Irvine of Drum/XXIII. I would like to thank Ian Riches of the National Trust for Scotland for granting permission to cite from the Drum Castle muniments as well as the kind and helpful staff at Drum Castle for making possible my use of the documents there, especially John and Jackie Fisher and Alec Gordon, Property Manager at Drum Castle. Charles Irvine (Gothenburg) to Thomas Irvine (Amsterdam), 5 November 1755, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/XXIII. Charles Irvine (Gothenburg) to George Ouchterlony (London), 25 October 1755, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/XXIII. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, pp. 21, 23-9. Charles Irvine (Gothenburg) to George Ouchterlony (London), 6 December 1755, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/XXIII. See, for example, the case of James Parker, a tobacco trader in the Chesapeake. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, pp. 157-66. John Rose (Charleston) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 3 July 1755, CIC/1755/27a. George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 21 November 1755, CIC/1755/53a. George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 7 October 1755, CIC/1755/45a; George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 21 November 1755, CIC/1755/53a. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 24 November 1751, CIC/1751/84a. George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 21 November 1755, CIC/1755/53a. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 3 July 1755, CIC/1755/27a. Ibid.

THE WORLDS OF JOHN ROSE

66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77

78

79

91

George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 21 November 1755, CIC/1755/53a. Charles Irvine (Gothenburg) to George Ouchterlony (London), 25 October 1755, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/XXIII. Charles Irvine (Gothenburg) to George Ouchterlony (London), 24 September 1755, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/XXIII. There is voluminous primary source documentation on the legal troubles of the Irvines. I cite here one of the more extensive legal briefs from the case(s) involved: Memorial for Alexander Irvine of Drum, Pursuer; Against George Earl of Aberdeen, Mrs. Margaret Duff of Culter, and others, Defenders, October 14, 1775 (n.p., 14 October 1775) to be found in the University of Aberdeen: Historic Collections, Department of Special Libraries and Archives. James Rose (Aberdeen) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 6 December 1755, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/Bundle 328/item 4. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. For the resumption of their correspondence, albeit on a very formal footing, see Charles Irvine (Aberdeen) to John Rose (Charleston, SC), 30 July 1762, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/Volume XXV. George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 8 April 1758, JRC/1758/2b; James Rose (Aberdeen) to John Rose (Charleston, SC), 11 May 1768, NRA(S) 1500/Irvine of Drum/Volume XXVIII; John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 30 March 1751, CIC/1751/16a. John Rose (Charleston, SC) to Charles Irvine (Aberdeen), 27 February 1762. For a letter to James Rose from George Ouchterlony concerning John Rose see George Ouchterlony (London) to James Rose (?Aberdeen), 5 February 1761, JRC/1761/1b. On Hector Rose see, for example, George C. Rogers et al. (eds), The Papers of Henry Laurens. Vol. 9: April 19, 1773-Dec. 12, 1774 (Columbia, SC, 1980/1981), pp. 89, 100; James Laurens (Charles Town) to his brother Henry Laurens (?Rotterdam), 8 July 1773 and James Laurens (Charles Town) to his brother Henry Laurens (?London), 24 July 1773, in which James Laurens indicates to his brother Henry Laurens that he is sending letters by captain Hector Rose. See Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 256, 280; Henry Laurens (Bath) to Reynolds, Getly & Co. (Bristol), 1 January 1774, in The Papers of Henry Laurens, Vol. 9, pp. 213, 213, fn 5; American Loyalists: Transcript of the Manuscript Books and Papers of the Commission of Enquiry into the Losses and Services of the American Loyalists held under Acts of Parliament of 23, 25, 26, 28, and 29 of George III. Preserved amongst the Audit Office Records in the Public Record Office of England, 1783-1790, Vol. 53: Examination in London: Memorials, Schedules of Losses and Evidences of South Carolina Claimants in six books (Book ii) (Transcribed for the New York Public Library), p. 289. Dobson, Scottish Emigration, pp. 104-9, 159-61; Graham, Colonists, pp. 131-42; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 6-7, 14-16, 25-7; Peter A. Coclanis, ‘The

92

80

81 82

83 84

85 86

87

88 89

90 91 92

93

A GLOBAL CLAN

sociology of architecture in colonial Charleston: pattern and process in an eighteenth-century southern city’, Journal of Social History, 18:4 (1985), p. 611. Rules of the Saint Andrew’s Society of the City of Charleston, in South-Carolina: Established in this Year of Our Lord, On Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-Nine (Charleston, SC, 1817), p. 22; American Loyalists, pp. 290-305. American Loyalists, p. 278. Henry Laurens (Charles Town) to his brother James Laurens (London), 27 September 1776, in David R. Chesnutt et al. (eds), The Papers of Henry Laurens. Vol. 11 (Columbia, SC, 1988), p. 272. American Loyalists, p. 295. American Loyalists, pp. 278-9, 295; Robert W. Barnwell, ‘The migration of loyalists from South Carolina’, The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1937), pp. 34-42; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 33-51, 5974. Such nominal conformity was a common tactic adopted by many in South Carolina. See Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 65-6. Ella Pettit Levett, ‘Loyalism in Charleston, 1761-1784’, The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1936), pp. 6-14. On the address and its significance see Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 95-6. American Loyalists, p. 279; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 95, 98-100; Wilbur Henry Siebert and George Athan Billias (eds), Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785; the Most Important Documents Pertaining Thereto, Vol. 2: Records of their Claims for Losses of Property in the Province (Boston, 1972), p. 105; Lorenzo Sabine, The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherent to the British Crown in the War of the Revolution; Alphabetically Arranged; with a Preliminary Historical Essay (Boston, 1847), pp. 580-1. American Loyalists, pp. 273, 279. Theodora J. Thompson and Rosa S. Lumpkin (eds), Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783-1784 (Columbia, SC, 1977); Lark Emerson Adams and Rosa Stoney Lumpkin (eds), Journals of the House of Representatives, 1785-1786 (Columbia, SC, 1979); Michael E. Stevens and Christine M. Allen (eds) Journals of the House of Representatives, 1787-1788 (Columbia, SC, 1981). On the passage of the Confiscation Act see Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 237240. On the roles of Balfour and Cornwallis see Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 96-100. For the certificates see American Loyalists, p. 279. American Loyalists, p. 295. I have found nothing on Rose’s time in Jamaica as yet. Given that he was in London by 1784, though, he did not stay there long. In London Rose lived on Norfolk Street, in the Strand. He died at the age of 83 on 16 June 1805. See Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783-1784, p. 99; American Loyalists, pp. 272-97; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 256, 259, 280; J.M.B., ‘The Roses of Clava’, in Scottish Notes and Queries, third series, 12 (1934), p. 40. Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783-1784, p. 99. Unfortunately John Rose’s memorial is lost.

THE WORLDS OF JOHN ROSE

94

95

96

97

98 99 100 101

102 103 104

105 106 107

93

For the general situation as regards loyalists trying to return to Charleston, including John Tunno, John Rose’s son-in-law, see Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 279-81. Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783-1784, pp. 486-7. Rose may have done this in person, but this seems unlikely given the poor reception that he and others received when they attempted to return to South Carolina in June of 1783. Moreover, Rose claimed in his testimony to a parliamentary commission for compensation of East Florida refugees that he was in East Florida from December 1782 to August 1784. Thus, Rose likely presented his case in writing only at first. On the position of loyalists in Charleston after the American Revolution and Rose’s June 1783 attempt to return to South Carolina see Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, pp. 286-90. Journals of the House of Representatives, 1787-1788, pp. 115-17, 299, 407-8, 452, 460-1, 476-7; American Loyalists, pp. 299-300; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, p. 268. Rose may later have settled in the Bahamas, but his intent to try South Carolina again is beyond dispute. I draw the above information concerning Hugh Rose’s memorial from Journals of the House of Representatives, 1787-1788, pp. 115-17. For the information that undermines the memorial see American Loyalists, p. 279; Loyalists in East Florida, pp. 105-8. Journals of the House of Representatives, 1787-1788, p. 116. Ibid. For Tunno see Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, p. 280. Rules of the Saint Andrew’s Society of the City of Charleston, pp. 24-31. After a hiatus between 1781 and 1787, the admissions of new members recommenced and, to judge by their names, these men continued the Charleston St Andrew’s Society’s links to Scottishness. See, for example, George Ouchterlony (London) to Charles Irvine (Gothenburg), 29 September 1748, CIC/1748/57a. See especially Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 1-48, 62-8, 94-118; Landsman, ‘Nation, migration, and province’, pp. 469-75. See, for example, Alexia Grosjean, An Unofficial Alliance: Scotland and Sweden, 1569-1654 (Leiden, 2003), which discusses how Scots in seventeenth-century Sweden maintained their ties to Scotland and to the enclaves they had founded despite their varied fortunes. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pp. 95-8, 102-3, 497-536. See above for the profile of Scot enclaves as well as the associated secondary literature. The seventeenth-century English enclave in Rotterdam, for example, was clearly a creature of the English/British state while, by contrast, the many German communities in seventeenth-century Sweden were, by design, wholly absorbed into Swedish society with only informal links to German territories being maintained. R. Bijlsma, ‘Rotterdams Handelsverkeer met Engeland tijdens het verblijf der Merchant Adventurers, 1635-1652’, Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, fifth series, 4 (1917), pp. 18-107; Christina Dalhede, Augsburg und Schweden in der Frühen Neuzeit: Europäische

94

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109

110 111 112

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Beziehungen und soziale Verflectungen. Studien zu Konfession, Handel und Bergbau, Vol. 2 (St. Katharinen, 1998), pp. 402-93. To take two examples of such groups, neither the Sephardim nor the Armenians of New Julfa possessed a true homeland. On these groups see, inter alia, Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London, 2000), pp. 54-64; Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN, 1999), pp. 1-52; Ina Bahdiantz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India, 1530-1750 (Atlanta, GA, 1999), pp. 35-105. Here my findings support those of Willem Frijhoff in Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607-1647 (Nijmegen: Sun, 1995), pp. 47-52. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 346-60. Frijhoff, Wegen, pp. 47-52. Personal communication to the author, July 2004.

5 A Network of Two: Personal Friendship and Scottish Identification in the Correspondence of Mary Ann Archbald and Margaret Wodrow, 1807-1840

David A. Gerber In the nineteenth century, the Scots were an especially mobile people, whose far-flung international migrations throughout the British Empire and to the United States and elsewhere often landed them in locations distant from other Scots and from Scottish institutions. Yet feelings of Scottishness and identification with their homeland proved especially durable, even in isolated circumstances from the plains of India to the American prairies. Assisting greatly in the maintenance of Scottishness in this extensive diaspora was the construction of transnational social networks held together, as they were for other European emigrant groups in the nineteenth century, through personal correspondence facilitated by the increasing international systematization of postal exchange. This chapter will trace these social and psychological processes and the construction of identities to which they gave rise in the life of one Scottish emigrant, Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1762-1840), who left Scotland in 1807 with her husband and four young children to settle eventually on a farm in the Mohawk Valley of central New York State. During the next three decades, largely through letter-writing, Archbald maintained a network with Scots kinfolk, who were resident both in Scotland and in New York City, approximately 175 miles from her new American home.1 In knitting this network together, Archbald, like other nineteenth-century immigrant letter-writers, had to take considerable responsibility for the conveyance of her letters for while postal exchange was becoming more routinized, especially between Britain and the United States as the two nation’s trade rapidly expanded in the nineteenth century, much indeterminacy continued to govern the process of getting one’s letters to their destination and getting the letter sent one by correspondents. In her years in the United States Archbald saw local mail arrive successively by canoe, mail rider, stage coach, canal boat, and finally railroad train. For

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much of the period of her years in the United States weather continued to disrupt the flow of mail. She used the national postal system, but also depended on private couriers – travellers, friends, and passers by, whom she recruited for the purpose – to bring her letters to her, or to take those she had written to New York to be placed on boats for Scotland or England, where they had to be committed to the British mails, or to take her letters across the ocean to Scotland and personally deliver them to her correspondents. She took great pains to make sure her letters arrived at their destinations.2 For immigrants, maintaining networks through the mails involved a degree of personal responsibility in and anxiety about the process of postal exchange that is quite uncharacteristic of international letter-writers today. The maintenance of networks, even between countries as well connected as Britain and the United States, involved constant and deliberate efforts, but the stakes were deemed high enough to make the efforts not simply worthwhile, but an absolute necessity.3 For Archbald, no one was more important to fulfilling the purposes of this network than her oldest friend, her cousin Margaret Wodrow, who remained in Scotland. Indeed, in terms of the crucial functions their correspondence fulfilled for Archbald, the two women could be said to be a network of two. In their case, these purposes had less to do with the exchanges of material resources and of social capital through which immigrant networks are often thought to be exclusively constituted.4 Though Margaret did send her friend books and from time to time small sums of money, and though their correspondence could certainly be said to have strongly reinforced a sense of practical mutual obligation, the ends of their network did not lie in providing assistance in fulfilling such material goals as facilitating chain migrations or purchasing land. Instead, their exchange of letters served the purpose for Archbald, whose letters are the only ones which we possess from this correspondence, of assisting in fulfilling what we might call the immigrant’s ‘second project’, one widely shared among international migrants, then and now. If the first project is conceived as the achievement of the material security that was at the root of the large majority of decisions to emigrate, the second sought to deal with the maintenance of personal identity under circumstances of unsettling change. Personal identity depends on continuity – knowing we are the same people today and will be tomorrow as we have been in the past. Personal identity is constituted in many sources, but most significant among them are primary relationships and rootedness in a physical location, a place and a landscape, that is known to us as ‘home’.5 Correspondence offered Archbald the opportunity to maintain her closest friendship, which was rendered vulnerable by permanent separation. Such

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psychological functions of immigrant networks are largely ignored in the analysis of the origins and maintenance of networks.6 Though significant in itself, however, her friendship did not exist in a vacuum. Her exchange of letters with Wodrow was the principal site for the ongoing development of her feelings of attachment to Scotland and its people, and in particular to her Scottish home, Little Cumbrae Island, which would eventually become in her letters a metaphor for all in her life that had been familiar, secure, and comfortable. So bound up with her memories of the personal past was her engagement with Scotland and the micro-landscape of Little Cumbrae that she could have only had this conversation with Wodrow, with whom she shared memories of people, places, and experiences that went far back into her childhood. In her quest for psychological continuity, Scotland’s national narrative and her own autobiographical identity narrative would frequently merge, and the former over the course of many years of writing her friend would become the servant of Archbald’s effort to fulfil the immigrant’s second project. This correspondence not only served as a site for the ongoing construction of Archbald’s Scottish identity, for Margaret Wodrow would also ultimately assist her friend in reconciling herself to permanent separation from her homeland. The Archbalds’ Emigration: Exile and Loss The Archbalds’ Scottish home was the windswept isolated island, steeped in ancient legend, of Little Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde. In 1764 some 70 people lived there, raising sheep and tending to the lighthouse. Branches of the Archbald family resided there, at least part of the year, for several generations. In the late eighteenth century, the Eglintons, the island’s proprietors, had attempted to improve the economy of Western Scotland with investments in infrastructural improvements, such as the island’s lighthouse. These infrastructural improvements did not benefit the Eglintons as rapidly as they hoped, and they fell into substantial debt. By the last years of the eighteenth century, Hugh, the twelfth Earl of Eglinton, was in enough debt that he was forced to sell a number of small properties and raise the rents of others throughout his regional holdings.7 Among the tenants who was informed, in 1803, that his rent would be raised was Eglinton’s distant kinsman James Archbald III, 40 years of age, who was living on the island, with his wife Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald, then 41, and their four children, James IV, Margaret Ann, Patrick Peter, and Helen Louisa, each of them under ten years of age. James raised sheep, and Mary Ann made yarn and knit clothing.

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The prospect of much higher rents threw the Archbald family into crisis. James and Mary Ann feared that accepting these high rents would lead them into ruinous debt, and destroy their ability to educate and to provide foundations for the adult respectability for their children. James was not able to find a more suitable tenancy, largely because rents were rising throughout the region, and the other offers he received were just as likely to mortgage the future.8 There seemed no choice but emigration. Already well into mid-life and settled in their ways, the Archbalds were also deeply attached to their homeland and the singular place in which they lived, and faced this prospect, Mary Ann more than James, most reluctantly. She understood the dilemma they faced, but vowed she would do nothing to encourage James in the proposal to emigrate, and nothing to discourage him either. Mary Ann understood that, as wife and mother, she was not an equal partner in making this momentous decision. It was ultimately James’s decision, based on his appraisal of their situation.9 But gender roles do not completely account for her resolve to leave the decision to James. Mary Ann did not appear equal to the task of contesting the material logic on which James had to approach the decision. What she would lose in emigrating was not measurable in material terms. As the decision about their future was being made, Mary Ann lived with an acute awareness that emigration would disrupt the web of human relations that gave her life its most significant meanings. Relatives of Mary Ann’s family and some friends already lived in the United States. Her much older half-brother Andrew had resided in western Virginia since 1768, and wished to unite the two families in the same place, but both the Archbalds rejected Virginia, believing the climate unhealthy and his location difficult to reach.10 Her uncle James Ruthven, an affluent craftsman, and his son John Ruthven, were her close, generous friends. They resided in New York City, and probably encouraged her and James to emigrate with promises of assistance.11 A generous Scottish friend, Mr. Fisher, who resided in Albany, New York, offered to escort them across the ocean and to help them resettle on a farm in central New York State. His offer took on special significance, because he had recently proposed marriage to Mary Ann’s beloved friend, her first cousin Margaret Wodrow, who might then come to America with the Archbalds.12 Alongside the difficulties she faced leaving her nearly 90-year-old mother and the graves of her first four children at the cemetery at Little Cumbrae, Mary Ann despaired at the thought of leaving Margaret. Wodrow had been her closest companion since childhood, and was to remain, through correspondence, her closest companion until Archbald’s death finally separated them. She had named her oldest daughter after Margaret, and

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was proud that her other daughter, Helen Louisa, closely resembled her friend. The two women bonded early in life, and shared many memories. They had grown up near one another, and spent much fondly remembered time, especially around the annual New Year’s celebration, in their paternal grandparents’ houses, one of them at Little Cumbrae. They shared the almost instinctual mutual understanding and hence, near-effortless conversation, whether oral or written, of those who, friends from childhood, do not need to explain themselves to each other in adulthood. They shared both the same adult tastes in literature (especially, affection for Walter Scott) and a dislike of orthodox Calvinism in religion.13 Yet this was insufficient to convince Margaret to accept Fischer’s proposal. She told him she did not know him well enough, and would not abandon her aging father.14 Nonetheless, the Archbalds had run out of options. Late in 1805 James terminated negotiations over his lease, and in April 1807 they left for the United States, with the intention of buying a farm. They were certainly not poor when they emigrated, and possessed the resources to soon buy an excellent homestead near the village of Auriesville on land along the Mohawk River in central New York State. Sales of personal belongings and of their sheep, and perhaps gifts from relatives and kin, yielded, even after they had paid for their passage, £600 on which to start a new life.15 Archbald’s Self-Narrative and Her Resettlement The Archbalds would do well farming and raising sheep in the United States. Within a few years of resettling in North America, they were able to sell the small, poor farm on which they had initially settled at no loss to themselves. They had moved into a comfortable, well-decorated house on a 169-acre farm, which they bought outright in 1811 for the impressive sum of $3,750. Ownership of their own property put them among the socioeconomic elite of their county, for probably fewer than 10 per cent of the white male residents of Montgomery County were freeholders during the decade of their initial settlement. They took on only manageable debt to improve their farm. Though their life was one of unremitting toil, and though frequently cash poor in the way that American farmers often were, they never experienced want.16 They did ensure the foundations of respectability for their children, though on American terms, which were not ones that Mary Ann herself found it possible to value, for she found them materialistic, self-satisfied, shallow, and lacking respect for intellectual and artistic endeavour.17 After nearly a decade in the United States, Mary Ann said by way of summation that her children now ate and drank better than they did in Scotland, and enjoyed as high a rank in society as they

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would ever have been able to in their homeland. But she doubted nonetheless that they would ‘fulfill any better the great end of their existence’ for America bred, in her mind, little more than the aspiration to make money and live comfortably.18 It should come as no surprise that immigrants brought more complex measures than material comfort and security to evaluating their experience. Their decisions were life-transforming ones that prompted thoughtfulness about the terms and ultimately the quality of life. The mood the Archbalds took to their emigration guaranteed this critical perspective. When they finally decided to leave Scotland, the Archbalds regarded their emigration realistically, but bitterly, as a reluctant step, tantamount to exile from their home, which was undertaken for the sake of their children, and which had been forced on them by avaricious kinsmen. At the time of their departure, James felt this acutely enough that he instructed Mary Ann to inform Margaret in her last letter to her friend before they sailed, that if there were a disaster at sea and the Archbalds should perish, none of their £600, then in a Scottish bank, was to go to any of his relatives.19 For her part, Mary Ann was equally bitter. If she were ever to return to Scotland, she wrote Margaret a few months before she departed for America, ‘it will be entirely on your account and from no attachment to any particular spot on earth’.20 This mood would pass, however, and soon she would be writing of Little Cumbrae and of Scotland and its people in intensely nostalgic ways. Over the next sixteen years until his death in 1824, James gave himself over completely to farming. He may well have come to take pride in his success, and to feel confident that he had not only made the convenient decision in emigrating, but a positive choice. Yet, for years and more insistently as he grew older, he voiced the hope that someday he might return to Scotland.21 We cannot precisely know his feelings in the matter. We do not have access to his thoughts, for he left no personal testimony behind when he died of what seems to have been a heart attack while working. He was too busy with farming to write letters or keep a diary, and he was not a confident writer. His thoughts may ultimately have been suggested by words on his tombstone, though we do not know if he or Mary Ann chose them: ‘Far from his native land that he loved so well, here lie the remains of James Archbald’.22 In contrast, we have access to the ample testimony from Mary Ann about emigration, dating from before the couple left Scotland. It remained a significant project for the rest of her life to evaluate that decision and its consequences, and particularly to develop ways of formulating her thoughts about their Scottish home, emigration, and resettlement, and the life they made for themselves in the United States. Her letters to Margaret Wodrow

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between 1807 and 1840 were the principal site for the development of this project. Her views were nuanced – bitter and critical at times, balanced at other times, and ironical at still other points, and frequently all of these at once. She often criticized herself, not only for her conclusions (especially when they were negative), but also for the self-absorption that led her back continually over the same ground, even as she traversed a variety of paths across it. In this activity, Mary Ann Archbald’s evaluative efforts resemble those of many other immigrants, whatever their national origins, who used their letters to family and friends in their homelands to assess over the course of the balance of their lives the positive and negative aspects of the experience of emigration and resettlement. Yet the contrasts in Archbald’s case are more telling than the similarities. It was not only that many emigrants left Europe enthusiastically, while the Archbalds were reluctant migrants. Nor was it that Mary Ann Archbald displayed considerably greater literacy skills and self-awareness than most of her contemporaries among immigrant letter-writers, and so expressed herself often and articulately on complex matters that eluded those with marginal literacy, who were probably the large majority of immigrants. It is also that an evaluative process slowly working its way toward a conclusion is much less the point of her writing. In her understanding of their emigration, her views did not grow. She did not open herself to experience, as did most of the international migrant correspondents whose letters I have read. Archbald’s views became relatively fixed within a few years of resettling. Different letters to Margaret Wodrow reflect different aspects of her evaluation, but her thinking never changed. She experienced her life in terms of loss, and, though eventually she would become reconciled to her American life, loss is more or less the way she expressed her understanding of that life throughout her decades in the United States. What grew over time in Archbald’s case was the practice of stating what she had lost, which became central to her letters to Wodrow. A dramatic example is the manner in which through the performance of writing, Archbald ritualized commemorations of the past, and in so doing sought imaginatively to relive it. This was especially the case for some years in her annual New Year’s letter, ideally begun at 11:00 pm on 31 December, so that she could spend the turn of the year anticipating the stroke of midnight in Margaret’s symbolic presence. Inspired by memories of family New Year’s Eve celebrations in the convivial Scottish style that they had shared when they were children, she aspired to a spiritual communion with her friend that magically seemed for a moment to merge the present and past, and join the scenes of her Scottish childhood with the post-frontier

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North American farm house in which she was to spend the last three decades of her life. She sometimes expressed the same feelings of being impelled toward a different dimension of being when opening a letter from Margaret – it was as if, she wrote Margaret, time was suspended and space conquered, and she was back in Scotland decades ago.23 Why it recommenced when it did in 1816, and ended when it did in is not clear. It may well be that there are missing letters in the archived collection, but there is no internal evidence to support that conclusion. In Archbald’s case, viewing life in terms of loss was greatly overdetermined by personal understandings that long preceded emigration. It was, in fact, a permanent condition of Archbald’s self-understanding. Neither she nor her husband had brought much money into their marriage, and neither had personal resources sufficient to make it possible to remain in Scotland. What property they had, they sold to help finance their emigration. Both were the poor relations of more affluent extended families. When she met James, he and his brothers were renting grazing land on Little Cumbrae. They were hardworking young men, with little, if any, parental support or savings of their own. James’s few and usually relatively minor business reversals before emigrating had already thrown the couple into crisis.24 Mary Ann claimed that she herself had laboured under ‘many privations ... from infancy’.25 Her father Robert had to retire from the ministry at age 46, because of ill-health, and, family oral tradition had it, alcoholism, and spent his last three decades in the isolation of Little Cumbrae. It is not clear how the family supported itself in those years after his retirement. Robert may not have been an emotionally supportive parent either, for Mary Ann, who never discussed her own father in her archived letters, wrote years later of her gratitude to Margaret’s father, for his ‘parental conduct’ toward her.26 Margaret, who never married, inherited enough money when her father, a successful minister with a large church at Stevenston, died in 1810, to live independently for the remainder of her long life. To assist the Archbalds she sent Mary Ann money from time to time (though it is not clear that Archbald asked for it, or needed it). Margaret willed her own assets to Mary Ann’s children.27 The couple’s lack of resources, set against their ties to prominent lineages and affluent kin, underscored their humiliation and powerlessness in confronting the demands of their landlord-kinsmen for higher rents. Their situation reminds us that though many Scots endured the same material pressures that led to emigration, there were many individual routes by which the misery of the situation might be experienced. While the couple seemed equally without wealth at the time they were wed, Mary Ann nonetheless appears to have lost social status through her

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marriage, and with that loss, just as with their lack of resources, she further sacrificed the feeling of continuity with a distinguished family past associated in her mind with her country’s national narrative, with which she intensely identified. Mary Ann was well aware that she had married beneath her. James was not only relatively poorer at the time of their marriage, but, while a literate man who enjoyed reading, had little formal education. His manners were rustic. Handsome, with natural, unaffected good manners, James was one of only several eligible bachelors with whom she had the opportunity to interact. She warned herself in her diary against involvement with him, but lamented the snobbery that prompted the warning. She yielded to her strong attraction, and perhaps to the feeling that it was time for her to marry.28 The contrast between the life she was creating and her own ancestry, as she sought to understand it, probably was a cause for melancholy for Archbald. Descended through the Wodrows from a long line of prominent Church of Scotland intellectuals, her lineage had value for her that could not be measured by wealth, but rather by a connection to Scottish tradition, history, and letters. Her great grandfather Rev. Dr. James Wodrow (16371707) was a prominent Presbyterian scholar and rebel who was once hounded by the authorities for organizing conventicles. He would end his long career in the Church of Scotland triumphantly, however, as a Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University.29 Robert Wodrow (16791734), his son, was born at the time the father was being hunted for upholding the independence of Scottish Presbyterianism, but eventually would study under him at Glasgow. Robert declined the offer of large and prestigious parishes and served for many years at a small parish at Eastwood, where the lighter duties allowed him to pursue his research interests in Scottish church and natural history. Though he took an active part in the governance of the Church of Scotland, and was involved in the central controversies within the church in his day, research and writing were his principal activities. An eminent historian and letter-writer, he authored an important two-volume history of the Church of Scotland between the Restoration and the Revolution. Robert Wodrow’s importance for Scottish letters grew after his death and during Mary Ann’s lifetime. His history went through a second edition (1828). Its republication was the subject of discussion in Margaret and Mary Ann’s correspondence, and Margaret sent all four volumes to the United States to be added to the library Mary Ann brought from Scotland. Rev. James Wodrow, uncle to Mary Ann and father to Margaret, assumed his father’s duties at Eastwood until his death in 1784 at Little Cumbrae, where he was buried in the small cemetery that held the remains of a

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number of Wodrows and Archbalds. In her archived American letters, Mary Ann Archbald never wrote of her own father, and she spoke of her mother only to lament having to leave her. She never recalled scenes from the life of her own family. Instead, Mary Ann’s memories of childhood harkened back to the parsonage at Eastwood, and especially to New Year’s Eve festivities celebrated there with her cousin, aunt, and uncle. It was through that relationship, rather than through her own family, that her claims to respectability were made during her years in Scotland. Though poor as a youth, she wrote Margaret, displaying an acute sensitivity to status, she had been ‘treated often with kindness and attention by those in a rank above me, but this was owing entirely to my connection with your family’.30 The intense identification with family lineage and such places and landscapes associated with it as the old manse at Eastwood and Little Cumbrae provide insight into those aspects of Mary Ann Archbald’s personal identity that followed her throughout her life in Scotland and in America. The sites of her childhood were permeated by romantic legends, stories of heroic national epics, and the comforts and consolation of family, all of which melded together to make them sacred ground for her. When, as she frequently did, Archbald wrote from America to Margaret Wodrow of the ‘little isle’, she wrote of more than a physical location. ‘Little isle’ became a metaphor in her writing for expressing a longing for continuity with the world of her past.31 It was a location of both pleasure and pain, for her memories of life there with her own parents were conflicted, and the graves of four of her children were there. But it was the place where she had felt the most intense sense of belonging she would feel in the course of her life. Certainly nothing about life in Auriesville over three decades gave rise to a similar feeling. Archbald and Conventional Conceptions of Ethnicity If ethnicity is thought of in terms of formal identification with fellow ethnics and formal group affiliations in the land of resettlement, Archbald manifested little ethnicity in the United States. While she did visit her New York City cousins, the Ruthvens, twice, and they visited her at the farm to escape the heat of the summer in the city, her letters from the United States do not suggest that she went to significant lengths to seek out the company of other Scots, nor does she consistently even voice a strong preference for it. She does not make mention of the celebration of St. Andrew’s Day or Robert Burns’s birthday in the company of fellow Scots, as was the practice of many Scots in the United States. (In fact, she makes no mention of any personal recognition of these commemorative days at

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all). One of the most vividly and fondly recalled social encounters in her letters was the first visit she and James made to an elderly Scots-Irish couple, who were old settlers in her area and lived nine miles from her home, and whom she said had reminded her of home. Shortly thereafter, apparently coincidentally, she wrote in passing that she had attended ‘a Scottish wedding’, presumably made so by the identity of the people participating.32 But the visit to the elderly couple came nearly a decade after she had settled near Auriesville, and she did not write of them again. Nor did she speak of any more such weddings. These events, therefore, seem notable for their relative rarity. She spent much more time, especially in her early years in North America when one would most have expected her to seek out Scottish company, with the native-born Americans in her rural neighbourhood. These were people of Anglo-American, Dutch, and German ancestry, whose roots in the area went back to the pioneer settlers of the eighteenth century, when Montgomery County was on the edge of the Western frontier, or, in the case of many of the Anglo-Americans, to migrations to central New York from New England in search of productive farm land after 1800, when many areas of rural New England experienced economic decline and emptied of population. To a large extent perhaps, the character of Archbald’s daily social interactions was a consequence of the ways in which patterns of settlement had shaped the demography of Montgomery County, which was overwhelmingly composed of native-born white Americans. Though the quality of the census data is uneven, it certainly appears as if there were few foreign-born people in the area during Archbald’s decades of residence. In 1820, of the county’s total population of 37,569 persons, there were only 93 individuals of foreign-birth, and in the following quarter-century, the percentage of non-citizens never rose above 2 per cent. In contrast, in the mid-1840s, 90 per cent of the residents of the county had been born in New York State. Among the foreign-born, British origins (which included Ireland, in official statistics) predominated in Montgomery County, so there probably were some Scots resident in the county while Archbald lived there, but the foreign-born population, such as it was, tended to concentrate in the county’s larger towns. Rural townships were even more dominated by Americans than the balance of the county. In a population of between 2,000 and 3,000, Glen Township, in which the Archbalds’ resided, was never recorded to have had more than 28 unnaturalized individuals between 1820 and 1846. Under the circumstances, the Archbalds’ neighbours and those with whom they daily had face-to-face relations were very likely to be Americans of the various varieties, Anglo-American, Dutch, or German, who lived in their rural

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neighbourhood. Interaction with Scots, by contrast, was limited to travellers and the seasonal visits of her New York City cousins.33 In her letters to Margaret, when Mary Ann described visiting with neighbours it was with these Americans, about all of whom she frequently complained. She found the Dutch, who were most prominent in the immediate vicinity of their own farm, coarse, unprogressive, cold, and lacking in interest in anything but farming, family, and church. Always of the belief that men and women had much to learn from each other, and that such mutual learning required a greater degree of public regard for women’s opinions, she disliked the way in which the Dutch American men and women insisted on socializing in separate groups during these visits. ‘Amongst the Dutch’, she wrote in 1817, ‘the men and women frequently are apart from each other and if the men go a visiting with their wives, it is thought most polite to entertain them in separate rooms ... These invidious distinctions you will easily believe are not very favorable to our mutual improvement’.34 The Anglo-Americans around her, by contrast, she credited with being more refined and informed than the Dutch, but criticized them mercilessly over the years for cunning, self-interested behaviour, a tendency toward religious intolerance, and thoughtless selfsatisfaction. As she once wrote, ‘In matters of money and in all their dealings they are shrewd and will overreach you if they can’.35 But there is no indication that her relations with any of these neighbours ever broke down in consequence of tactlessness in dealing with them, or that she was anything but pleasant and polite to her neighbours. For the sake of civility, in interactions with her neighbours she accepted the customs of the country, even if it meant obeying what she regarded as such retrograde notions as her Dutch American neighbours’ expectations for gender separation when socializing. Mary Ann’s standards were such, furthermore, that she probably would have found most relatively uneducated and uncultivated people’s conversation, including that of many Scots, inadequate to sustain her interest in them. She might accept their company, but she did not find them adequate as society. Eventually, as we shall see, in a mood of acute homesickness she would idealize the national character of the Scots. But this was an abstraction, not linked to any individuals in particular. Mary Ann often seems on the edge of haughty disdain for many of the people with whom she interacted, whatever their background. Certainly, Americans of whatever variety, who are rarely addressed as individuals in her letters, ultimately appear a faceless mass, largely treated in terms of more or less negative stereotypes. If informal interactions with Scots were generally lacking during her years in the United States, so too were formal affiliations with ethnic institutions.

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Archbald did not belong to any Scottish churches or organizations. The Archbalds worshipped alongside these same much criticized Dutch and Anglo-Americans at a nearby Reformed Church, which had been founded by Dutch settlers of the Mohawk Valley after the American Revolution. Though probably not dissimilar in doctrine to the Calvinism of her youth, it was not Presbyterian. (The local Presbyterian church, across the river, might have been inconvenient to attend, because of its location). Affiliation with the Reformed Church could hardly be said to have served ethnic purposes for her.36 Archbald’s ethnicity, therefore, did not lie in formal affiliations or in ethnic-oriented behaviour. Nor did it lie in verbal or written expressions of solidarity with the Scottish diaspora around her. She was not inclined in that direction, but the difficulties in doing so were larger than her own inclinations. She lived before a language existed that served to legitimize ethnicity, ethnic feeling, and ethnic organization in the United States. Her death in 1841 occurs at the eve of the age of mass immigration in the midnineteenth century that stimulated that development, which established a legitimate, unthreatening place for diversity in American life. Archbald could not describe herself as a Scottish American or a British American, for such nomenclature expressing identification and groupness did not exist in common parlance during her lifetime.37 Archbald’s Scottishness What then was the character of Archbald’s ethnicity? Archbald’s Scottishness was instead a deeply personal attachment to a past that was as mythic as it was historical, and that most importantly provided the context for her personal identity. It might be expressed in personal and localized terms, as memory, or in more abstract national terms, as, for example, the suggestion of an idealized national character. It was less contemporary Scotland that interested her than historical Scotland. She was, of course, moved emotionally by her own memories of the family scenes and local island society of her youth, which seemed to fold in her imagination into a timeless past, abstracted from their material and societal contexts. But these memories might at particular moments of stress have been painful to recall, because she constructed them in such a way that they were suffused with a sense of loss. She could take less ambiguous pleasure in the intellectual and literary culture of the sort associated with her eminent ancestors, or with the historical fiction of Walter Scott and other contemporary Scottish writers. Hers was a bourgeois, cultural national feeling. She took little interest in the folk traditions of the Scottish peasantry. Nor did she comment on contemporary Scottish society and

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politics. These were not topics that she developed in her letters, and perhaps as much to the point, they were not matters on which she sought information from Margaret. There are more comments about American than British or Scottish affairs, perhaps because such commentary gave her the opportunity to vent her trenchant critical faculties. On only one occasion in the archived letters did she comment, not surprisingly disapprovingly, on the modernization of western Scotland, which after her emigration underwent rapid economic development. Just as often it was not Scotland, but rather Little Cumbrae, that ‘abode of peace, of comfort, and friendly intercourse’, for which she longed. Her referent for her past and for Scottishness varied depending on the grip nostalgia, pride, or, especially, hostility to American habits and values had at the moment.38 At other times, however, especially when she felt the need to consult national rather than individual history, the more abstract Scotland did serve her. Thus, when a return to Scotland was a goal early in her years in the United States, she found a precedent in Scottish history for metaphorizing the prospects of her return that was deeply revealing of her selfunderstanding. Not without a trace of self-mockery, she compared herself to Flora McDonald, the Jacobite patriot and saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who had emigrated to North Carolina in 1774. The comparison is telling. MacDonald, too, had a genealogy that fit her into Scotland’s national narrative. She was a descendant of Somerled, the heroic King of the South Isles who drove the Norse from much of western Argyll, and who was killed in battle in 1164 in a struggle to defend local autonomy against the Scottish king; and her own father, who died when she was a child, was related to clan chiefs. There were other parallels too. MacDonald refused to side with the American Revolutionaries against the British Crown, though it had once put her in prison for a year for assisting Charles Edward Stuart escape the pursuit of British troops after Culloden. Her husband Allan raised a regiment of Loyalist Highlanders in North Carolina to fight the American rebels, and was taken prisoner and imprisoned. Perhaps, in Archbald’s mind, there was a parallel between the way the British crown had once spurned MacDonald and the manner in which James’s wealthy, titled kinsmen had spurned the Archbalds. During Mary Ann’s youth, after Allan MacDonald was freed from prison in 1779, Flora returned to Scotland, by now a legendary popular heroine for multiple acts of resistance. Her funeral in 1790 was the occasion for a massive demonstration of public adulation. Perhaps, too, Archbald nursed the fantasy of a similar triumphant return after an ennobling martyrdom, in her own case, the persecution of exile. Both she and MacDonald would remain loyal, in spite of the way they had been treated, to their homeland. In one

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of her few comments about Scottish social developments in three decades of letter-writing, she recorded that it pained her greatly to hear that the west coast of Scotland was undergoing rapid economic development, because she wished the Scotland to which she hoped to return to live forever in heroic legends, rustic simplicity and purity, and romantic isolation.39 It is in the context of both her nostalgia for her homeland and her intense disenchantment with the United States, that we can best understand Archbald’s great affection for the work of Sir Walter Scott, which the cultural historian Allison Scott, in a detailed study of Archbald’s ‘reading life’, contends reached the summit of its enthusiasm during Archbald’s mature years in the United States.40 Though in terms of his own historical present Scott was a strong supporter of the Union and of the British Empire, his work is nonetheless pervaded by Scottish national feeling. But it is national feeling of a type that, as Neil Davidson maintains, had no political correlative for Scottish sovereignty. It was, in fact, the fitting expression of national self-understanding for a stateless nation impelled toward both submersion in a union with a more powerful neighbour and the transforming forces of modernity that were destroying settled, traditional ways of life. Walter Scott’s work taught Scots to experience national feeling through emotional identification with a distant past that was pervaded by the romanticized melancholy and nobility of lost causes, which had no practical meaning for the nineteenth-century present in which he did his impressive creative work. Lamenting the price paid for the processes of progress – the Highland clearances, industrialization, proletarianization, and anarchic free markets – that he saw around him and believed to be both necessary and irresistible, Scott could offer nothing to combat them but an elegiac nostalgia for bygone days and the invented traditions of tartanry, which thanks to his widespread influence were soon to become national symbols, consumed by tourists, appropriated by the British crown, and honoured by Scots themselves, though hardly representative of Scotland’s complex, multiethnic cultural origins.41 To the extent that Archbald often preferred to understand herself through merging Scotland’s national narrative with her personal narrative, Walter Scott’s work presented an ideal context for developing the emotions relevant to sustain that ongoing project. The pessimism and melancholy for lost causes and a lost past that ultimately emerged from his engagement with Scotland’s history and its present were a perfect complement to Archbald’s understanding of her emigration and more generally the course of her life. She had lost her past in the way that Scott’s work suggested contemporary Scotland had lost its history. Scotland’s past had become

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irrelevant to its future, just as Archbald’s past seemed irrelevant to her life in the United States. Yet the historical dramas of noble deeds, primitive codes of honour, heroic personages, and lost causes, of which the Jacobites, like the young Flora MacDonald, were among the most potent symbols found in Scott’s work, provided Archbald with a rendering of her homeland that suited her desire for a virtuous, primitive, communal world untainted by modernity. But it was not the modernizing nineteenth-century Scotland that was the foil for Scott’s traditional Scotland in Archbald’s mind. It was instead American materialism, individualism, and the selfcongratulatory pretenses of American democracy – all of the weaknesses she saw reflected in her neighbours’ culture and ordinary discourse – that were the source of her intense craving for the idealized premodern Scotland of her imaginings, which were powerfully fuelled by Scott’s work.42 Unfortunately her illustrious family history and its diverse associations with the Scottish nation and landscape brought no money with it, so she was forced to accept emigration as a solution to their difficulties, alongside humbler Scots who were without close connections to great families and great events in the national narrative. Archbald believed herself intended for better things than the life to which her marriage and emigration destined her. This was the life of a farm wife in post-frontier central New York, where, she would complain, she was surrounded by unrefined neighbours and yoked to unending, though loving, servitude to her husband, children, grandchildren, and visitors. Much of her mental life on the New York farm was a struggle to seize from the coercions of daily routines and obligations an identity which was in keeping with this elevated conception of herself, and which provided continuity for her selfunderstanding amidst the discontinuities of what she experienced as multiple losses – of status, places, and relationships. It is a fitting emblem of this quest that, whether by her request or the wishes of her surviving children, the title of one of her grandfather’s history of the Church of Scotland is inscribed on her own tombstone.43 In a variety of ways, as Mary Ann Archbald passed through stages in the life-cycle (farm-wife and mother of young children; widow; grandmother; aged and dependent shut-in) in her post-emigration years, she attempted to free her mind of daily obligations in order to pursue activities that allowed for continuous renewal of this abiding self-conception. Among these activities were keeping a diary, copybooks and a commonplace book, and painting, and playing the guitar. But the most important was letter-writing, especially to Wodrow. For three decades, the reconfiguration and vitalization of this friendship through personal correspondence served a

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source of continuity and renewal for her self-making identity narrative. Ultimately, the correspondence helped to reconcile her to her new life and to break, at least partly, the grip of the past on her imagination. It is evident to the reader of their correspondence that Wodrow and Archbald drew considerable pleasure in the roles they played in relation to one another in their letters, which were doubtless the roles that had long been assumed in their friendship. But the delight and intimacy evident frequently in their verbal play should not be allowed to obscure the seriousness of purpose that frequently characterized their epistolary relationship. Their letters were the place in which Archbald, playing her accustomed egocentric role, developed the theme of loss and was from time to time forced by her friend, playing her part as the less opinionated, more objective, and matter-of-fact party, to evaluate the validity of those claims. We are able only to detect the echo of Margaret’s writing, but the reader may occasionally hear their subtextual dialogue evaluating the ways in which Scotland and the comparisons of Scotland and the Scots and America and the Americans weave their way throughout the three decades of Mary Ann’s correspondence. Mary Ann laboured to fix her homeland in her imagination as an idealized place of warmth, intimacy, and community, and in so doing to take the measure of what she had lost in her American exile. How did these efforts stand up to Margaret’s responses to these claims about their homeland? Mary Ann and James hoped to return to Scotland from the moment they made the decision to emigrate. Their dream was to resettle on Little Cumbrae and inhabit their old house. Within a few years after their resettlement, however, they began very reluctantly to recognize that this was impractical, because the costs of living there were unlikely to become any less prohibitive in the future, and they realized it might be many years until they made enough money in North America to provide them with security at home. They were left hoping simply for a visit to Scotland, though this, too, faded with the passage of the years, for it would have been expensive and taken too much time away from the maintenance of their farm. Yet, even as it became increasingly a fantasy, the hope of return probably never completely died, and helps to account for the fact that neither James nor Mary Ann ever became an American citizen, though naturalization would have assisted them in securing the legal ownership of their property and passing it down to their children.44 In her first years in the United States, Little Cumbrae continued to conjure up powerful emotions, which sometimes caught her unawares, as if reminding her that she would never cease to long for her former home. After a storm, the sound of rushing water in the creek near her farm house one day called to

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mind the sound of the rush of the surf on the beach at Little Cumbrae; and standing on the banks of the Mohawk River evoked memories of standing at the sea on a sand bank on the island, watching the play of water and wind on the firth.45 Such remarks are a measure of Mary Ann’s profound longings and the vulnerable state of mind in which they left her for the two landscapes are quite dissimilar. After almost a decade in the United States, she moved beyond this nostalgia for the landscape of her homeland to a stronger assertion of Scottishness and aversion to her American circumstances. In 1816, she professed suddenly, and without further explanation, that in the United States ‘the general character of the people and other untoward circumstances have worn me out’. She now concluded ‘that my country people [are] a set of superior beings, and the land they inhabit ... the spot most highly favored by providence’.46 She began to comment favourably within a few years on the children’s pride in Scottishness. She gave few details, but did write of the affection of the two oldest, Jaime (James IV) and Margaret, for speaking ‘their mother tongue’.47 Patrick Peter was too young to have any comfort with dialect, but he shared his mother’s feeling ‘that nothing bad can come out of Scotland’.48 For his part, she claimed, her husband spoke a more authentic Scottish dialect around the house than when they had lived on Little Cumbrae.49 Her feelings increasingly raw, Mary Ann grew sensitive to casual comments that appeared insensitive to the suffering prompted by her nostalgic longing. She answered sharply when Margaret referred, casually it would appear, to the United States as ‘your country’, for, Archbald said, Scotland would always be her country.50 When, after a visit, Margaret wrote that the island was as beautiful as ever, Mary Ann begged that this not be spoken of, because she was so discontent with the prospect of remaining in the United States. She recalled her original comments that she had no loyalty to any particular place that would bring her back to Scotland, and that it was their friendship alone that would do so. Correcting these former assertions, she confessed, ‘I did not think it possible that local attachment could be carried to such an irrational length after all my brags about the world being my country and such like nonsense’.51 While it may never be clear what Margaret made of the mood of intense and embittered longing that settled over Archbald’s letters for about five years, was it merely coincidence that in its midst, on two occasions, she introduced, apparently at some length, news of scandals then taking place in Scotland that hardly put the Scots in their best light? It may be that Margaret was just indulging in gossip, or being an honest reporter, but it may also be that she did not feel comfortable with either Mary Ann’s

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emotionalism or her sanctification of Scotland and its people, and chose to play her accustomed role in the relationship by restoring balance. In 1821 she wrote of a local scandal featuring a corrupt attorney. Mary Ann responded that while there were certainly instances of this sort among attorneys in every country, she particularly lamented having to think this could be the case in Scotland.52 The next year brought news, related apparently at some length, from Margaret of another scandal – this one perhaps sexual in nature. The news was sufficiently troubling to prompt a long statement, acknowledging error in vaulting the Scots above the rest of humanity, and restoring balance to Mary Ann’s judgment not only about Scots, but, at least implicitly, about Americans, too: Amidst all my cares and regrets about my native land still I could indulge in the fond dream of its being superior to every other country upon earth and when I meet here with instances of avarice and chicanery I say with James, ‘it is just like the Yankees – how different the people at home.’ I did not think these same people at home perfect whilst I was among them but absence was like death[;] their faults were buried or softened and their good qualities only remembered.53 Another source of disillusionment – the news about the economic transformation of western Scotland that has been previously noted – had recently arrived, and she referred to it in this same letter. One of the Ruthvens had written from Scotland that the advance of shipping and trade on the western coast had turned people toward moneymaking, including some of the more idealized former neighbours.54 Seen in this light, how different were the Scots from those cunning, self-interested Yankees, who were so frequently anathematized in the Archbald household? Though the exact effects of the variety of disillusioning scandal and gossip that now came her way may not be precisely known, this testimony of Archbald’s is nonetheless as close as we come in the entire corpus of her letters to an explicit declaration of the necessity of radically reevaluating her thinking on any subject. Thereafter, throughout the remaining archived correspondence, the reader will not again find Archbald indulging in romanticizing her homeland and its people. Longing for the ‘little island’ remains throughout the correspondence, including one of her last letters to her friend shortly before her death. But it is a longing for one’s original home, not idealization of a people or its culture.55 It is the self’s memory,

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and not ideology or idealized collective memory asserting itself through Archbald. We might attribute this transition to the passing of a mood and to changes in external circumstances that diverted Archbald from thoughts of her imminent return. The death of her husband increased her emotional and practical dependence on her children. Jaime took control of her finances, and Helen Louisa cared for many of her daily needs. The marriages of all four of her children fixed them to American lives and American spouses, and in so doing fixed the now-widowed Mary Ann to those lives. It was around this time that she had two dreams of separation, which apparently helped her to gather up her thoughts about the point she had reached in life.56 Perhaps, too, increasingly the alienation and isolation of advancing age (Mary Ann was 62 when James died) began to replace the alienation and isolation of being an outsider. As she turned inward toward her family and her epistolary relationship with Margaret, she may have moved away from preoccupation with the relative claims of Scots and ‘Others’. Certainly she never stopped being critical of the United States, but after this period in the early 1820s, she never again expressed claims for the superiority of Scotland and its people that had ultimately assisted in making her American life seem unreal. To this extent, like her dreams, her intimate, transnational conversation with her friend may have helped her to accommodate herself to the finality of separation, from Margaret and from her Scottish home. Transnational Networks and Transnational Conversations In assisting with psychological adjustment to separation, Mary Ann Archbald’s correspondence with Margaret Wodrow was hardly unique. Transnational conversations that were sustained by the cycle of such personal letters within the network of correspondents served similar purposes for many international migrants, whatever their origins, throughout the classic era of European international migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By enabling migrants to maintain relationships with especially significant others, the exchange of letters allowed those who had emigrated to resolve the basic problem for personal identity posed by leaving home. Personal identity depends on maintaining a sense of individual continuity and nothing is as important to that feeling of continuity as the maintenance of relationships with especially significant others. Only our sense of the place we have known as home ranks with these primary relationships in the composition of our personal identities. As in Mary Ann Archbald’s case, and indeed as for all of us, our original home, about which we become nostalgic, is intimately associated with the

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people who reside there, for it is relationships that give meaning to the places that are integral to personal identities. Such relationships are constitutive of who we are as individuals – how we know ourselves and who we know ourselves to be. Nothing seemed more likely to render personal identity vulnerable than the circumstances of international migration in the age of sailcraft, for separations created by emigration were likely to last a lifetime. Few could afford the time or had the resources to go back and forth across the ocean for visits, and few found the harrowing, typically 10 to 12 week journey, in which they were often miserably ill, one that they wished to repeat. There are at least two reasons why historians of immigration, at least those in North America, have not put themselves in a good position to understand the implications that such challenges to personal identity posed for international migrants in this era. The first is that social identities, especially ethnicity, have been more important in immigration studies than have been personal identities. Immigrant experience has been studied from the perspective of cohorts and categorical groups, not from that of individual experience. In the recent past, historians in North America have particularly dwelt on ethnicization as the basis for understanding the experience of international migrants. One cannot easily dismiss such connections, for people do not stand alone as individuals, outside of the identities and histories they share with others through gender, social class, religious denomination, and memberships in local and national communities. But such identities are for most refracted through the lenses of daily personal experience and of the struggle to fulfil ordinary, daily needs, both material and psychological. International migrants were no more likely than most people to stand objectively outside their lives and employ abstract concepts and formulate the existence of distant solidarities to understand themselves. Even ethnicity, which seems an excellent referent for personal identity, because it provides us with a parallel genealogy that establishes the individual in time and space, is rarely a matter formulated abstractly as ideology or consciously as identity. In the historical past, the ordinary immigrant’s connection with ethnicity typically proceeds semi-consciously through community, family, and personal relations, not through an abstract and impersonal sense of affiliation. By contrast, those who play leadership roles in ethnic institutions or in political negotiations on behalf of an ethnic group understand ethnicity and their own roles within it consciously and ideologically. Times of crisis or acute stress for the group have episodically brought the two orientations into alignment, and ethnicity has hence become a palpable and widely shared feeling for masses of individuals.57

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Mary Ann Archbald was relatively unique in the context of the immigrant letter-writers I have studied, however, because she was able to analyze the critical turning points of her life in social and national terms, and attained a more or less frequent and conscious awareness of the meanings of Scottishness, as a source of identity, throughout her life in the United States. She was assisted greatly in maintaining such self-awareness by her well-developed literacy skills, her pride in crafting meaningful letters, and her lifetime habit of introspection. These skills and habits of mind were forged in the nexus formed by an intellectual family, a prestigious genealogy from which she gained historical perspective, and the isolation of coming of age on a small island amidst a family demoralized by her father’s drinking problem. The sense of loss and marginalization Mary Ann lived with throughout her life was the engine of her acute self-consciousness and of the creativity of her analytical approach to looking at her own life. Few immigrant letter-writers, even those individuals of comparable personal cultivation, produced letters that are as self-consciously reflective, and on so many different analytical levels, including ethnicity, as are Archbald’s letters. Few had the time or inclination for such reflection, let alone for producing the plausible self-explanatory prose that such a text would have required. Introspective writing creates a sombre mood that was at odds with the desire of many immigrants to project the reassuring message that all is well with the writer. It was not in Archbald’s character, however, to feel a need to project a positive message, especially when conversing with her best friend. Here, too, her discourse departs from what seems to be the purposes of others, who prefer to project positive or at least neutral feelings about the lives they are fashioning for themselves. Indeed her relationship with Margaret Wodrow had long ago established a repertory of roles that both parties were conscious of and seem to have enjoyed playing in opposition to one another. Mary Ann’s part was to be negative, obstinate, and opinionated in the face of the balance and moderation presented by her friend. Their network of two was bound ultimately out of a deep psychological connection of characterological oppositions that had been in the making over the course of a lifetime. Other immigrants, of course, were similarly emotionally connected to those they exchanged letters with in their networks, but few gave as much evidence of understanding the dynamics of their connection as did Archbald and Wodrow. As Archbald remarked revealingly in a letter to her friend in 1811, she had put Margaret’s portrait in her dining room, where it ‘occupies a favorite corner and looks at me as I enter with its smirking smile’.58 Margaret’s gaze seems to have offered Mary Ann this reassuring – because

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unchanging – message: ‘I know who you are, and what you are up to; and you know that I know; and this is the secret we shall always share!’ Such mutual knowledge of both the strengths and frailties of character, based on unguarded self-revelation, binds friends together especially tightly. The second reason for our failure to be prepared to grasp the meanings of Archbald’s letters and the transnational network she maintained over the course of nearly three decades is that in focusing on assimilation for so many years, immigration studies, especially in North America, have effaced this element of the migrant’s history. American immigration studies began in the early twentieth century as a projection of anxieties about national unity and cultural coherence. Social work ethnography and the urban sociology of the Chicago School saw the immigrants’ pasts as a problem to be mastered and meaningful only in so far as it might contribute to or disrupt social order.59 The more we have sought to look forward in time to the individual’s future as an orderly citizen, who shares our values and aspirations, the more that individual has been denied a living past. Hence, as investigators we have been denied the benefit of access to a realistic psychology of international migration. Networks that reached back to Scotland and other homelands have certainly had their place in the conceptualization of assimilation, because these networks were conceived as meaningful to the extent they were seen as lying at the centre of the immigrant’s plans for effecting chain migration and reconstitution of family in the lands of resettlement. Such aspirations have been deemed important to successful adaptation and hence assimilation. But this is to mistake the nature of all that networks have accomplished for those participating in them. Neither Scotland nor any place else in Europe completely emptied of its people, and, like Margaret Wodrow, many of those who stayed behind were of great importance to those who left. Ageing parents, siblings who took over farms or businesses from their parents and stayed on at the homesteads on which they had been born, those friends and relatives too comfortable and secure to risk emigration, these and other individuals did not emigrate, and their absence was always a gnawing gap in the lives of those who did. Even when chain migrations were effected, the process of reuniting family and friends could take years. In the meantime, as they planned and worked towards that end, immigrants might experience loneliness that was all the more acute, because they had never given up the idea of reunification. They had not passed through a period of grieving at the death of that goal into a period of relative peace of mind, as would to some extent Mary Ann Archbald. Letters formed transnational networks that came to constitute relationships that could only be maintained through correspondence. In

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writing letters to their homelands, international migrants were propelled backward in time and continually reacquainted with their pasts, even as they built new lives and made plans for the future. A realistic psychology of immigration must understand the international migrant the way we understand ourselves on a moment’s serious reflection. We live, as we must, in different time dimensions, for past, present, and future are simultaneously our constant companions in our efforts at selfunderstanding. Immigrant letters, such as Archbald’s, are an ideal means for understanding the relative weight of personal and social identities and the psychological functions of networks in the consciousness and experience of international migrants of the historic past. Letters have often been used in the past by scholars for purposes of social documentation – largely to substantiate what we know from other types of evidence about society, politics, and economics – and to add colour to historical interpretations based on those sources. But, if we systematically consider both the analytical limits and opportunities that such letters present, we might easily reach the conclusion that these uses are not the best ones to which we can put such first-person documents. To retrieve data from personal letters that reflects, for example, on demography, job structures, or political allegiances, it is usually necessary to abstract from the entire letter a relatively few sentences. In fact, from a thematic point of view, immigrant letters frequently are not about anything in particular. Topics wax and wane unpredictably within each letter and from letter to letter. A reflective mood might yield an effort at a summation about the writer’s feelings about some matter that historians deem specially significant, such as the wisdom of having emigrated from the standpoint of material improvement, or a judgment about some critical political issue of the moment. These summations are of particular interest to historians, because they assist us in integrating the immigrant into the existing master narratives, which allow us the satisfaction of conceiving of historical processes and events on an epic scale, such as elections, wars, or revolutions. But such efforts at summation on the part of immigrants themselves were generally episodic.60 What abides in the personal letter is the relationship between writer and reader, and the thematic material presented is the servant of that relationship. Whether writers are trying to fill the page, present content that they hope will be of interest to their readers, or write about matters in which they have a consciously understood, significant stake, they may never develop the same content again. Personal letters of the sort that immigrants and their homeland correspondents produced are rarely treatises about events, processes, or people of world historical importance,

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let alone narratives. In fact, what may be narrated about them is not the story the letter tells, but the relationship of writer and reader.61 As a medium for maintaining, developing, and enhancing vulnerable relationships, the personal letter, as international migrants developed it, was ideal. A personal letter could be as private as the correspondents wished it to be. It could withhold information or tell lies to spare feelings, with distance plausibly ensuring that the writer would be unlikely to be revealed. It could entertain a great mix of purposes and subjects simultaneously. Its success did not depend on great literacy skills, but only on the much appreciated effort to try to make it comprehensible and to maintain the cycle of correspondence. Then, too, there was the letter’s emotional impact, which lies not simply in its writing, but in its artifactual nature. Letters most sustain an illusion of intimacy, because they encode the physical presence of the other.62 They are touched by the other. Handwriting is personal, an artifact of the other’s body. Letters are said by some correspondents to be tear-stained, the smudged ink giving testimony to deeply felt emotions. Archbald herself spoke of carrying Margaret Wodrow’s letters in her bosom, so that she could conveniently read them whenever she had the time and inclination.63 Even today, when so many other forms of communication are available to immigrants and their correspondents, from cheap long-distance, international telephoning to e-mail, some express preference for the personal letter, precisely because it is the most intimate form of communication.64 Thus, we return to the necessity for understanding the cultural practices constituted in letter-writing that were developed by international migrants and their correspondents at the juncture of personal identity, primary relationships with significant others, and transnational networks constituted in letter-writing. However singular the qualities of her discourse might have been, Mary Ann Archbald did not differ from other immigrants, who might have been less literate and self-consciously reflective, in the larger purposes to which she shaped her letters to Margaret Wodrow. Notes 1

Sections of this essay have been published as David A. Gerber, ‘Ethnic identification and the project of individual identity: the life of Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1768-1841) of Little Cumbrae Island, Scotland, and Auriesville, New York’, Immigrants and Minorities, 17:2 (1998), pp. 1-22. The research on Mary Ann Archbald is based principally on personal letters found in the Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald Collection, History of Women Collection, Smith College [SC], Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. Transcripts of the

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letters made by Hugh Archbald, a distant, direct descendant of Mary Ann, were used in the research rather than the originals. The integrity of the texts was preserved in Hugh Archbald’s transcriptions, but he changed certain features for the sake of form including the Americanization of some of Mary Ann’s spelling. The location of the writing of Archbald’s letters from the United States, as she provides it at the beginning of her letters, is: Creekvale (18071811); Riverbank (1811-1832/33); and Auriesville, New York (1832/33-1840). The first two locations were the names of Archbald’s first and second farms; the last, the name of the village in which she resided. Why she changed from the second to the third address is unclear, but it did not involve a change of residence. Archbald wrote frequently about letter-writing and the problems of sending and receiving letters. She addressed postal costs, problems of conveyance and speed of transmission, and the frequency of the exchange of letters. See, for example, Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, September 1807, 3 September 1808, 28 April [1820], 29 September 1821, SC. This point has been made convincingly and to the best of the author’s knowledge for the first time in Jane E. Harrison’s excellent book, Until Next Year: Letter-Writing and the Mails in the Canadas, 1640-1830 (Waterloo, Ontario, 1997). Her conclusions are valid for much of the rest of the nineteenth century, especially regarding the use of the international mails. The most recent and comprehensive theorization of the immigrant network is Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Oxford, 2000), which takes this perspective on networks. Sydney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca, New York, 1963); Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, 1992); Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992); Rom Harré and Grant Gillett, The Discursive Mind (Thousand Oaks, California, 1994); Joseph B. Juhasz, ‘Social identity in the context of human and personal identity’, in Theodore R. Sarbin and Karl E. Schieb (eds), Studies in Social Identity (New York, 1983), pp. 289-318; Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson (eds), ‘The topic and the book’, Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in A World of Movement (Oxford, 1998), pp. 6-10. Thomas Faist’s imposing The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces focuses on the material and social aspects of immigrant networks, and theorizes the nature of chain migrations in the context of multidimensional push-pull and social capital forces. On the other hand, works in the psychology of international migration have the opposite difficulty. If the network literature fails to psychologize the social, the psychological literature fails to provide a social context for the psychological, a problem with a collection that nonetheless has greatly influenced my own thinking: Paul H. Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn (eds), Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis (London, 1997). These essays are written by clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, and academic psychologists. The Dictionary of National Biography, s.v., ‘Montgomery, Hugh, twelfth Earl of Eglinton (1739-1819)’; Reid, History of the County of Bute, pp. 224-6. T. M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian

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Economy, 1660-1815 (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 46-7, 50, 125-32, 148-9; Alison M. Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”: the reading life of Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1762-1841)’, PhD thesis, Boston University, 1995, pp. 43-4; Mary Ann Archbald, Diary, 1804, 25 August 1804, 1805, 6 April 1806, SC; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow (Little Cumbrae, Scotland), 7 July 1804, 5 December 1806, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow (Little Cumbrae, Scotland), 7 July 1804, SC. Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”’, pp. 27-8; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 5 December 1806; Mary Ann Archbald to Mr G., March 1810; Mary Ann Archbald to Mr Custis, 1810; Mary Ann Archbald to Mr Dailey, September 1814, SC. Andrew Wodrow died in 1814, before his sister had the opportunity to visit him in Virginia. They had not seen one another since Andrew’s emigration, which had taken place when Mary Ann was a very young child. Mary Ann Archbald (New York) to Margaret Wodrow, 18 April 1807, SC. Mary Ann’s mother was a Ruthven, and was John Ruthven’s aunt; see Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”’, pp. 28, 49, fn. 79, p. 49. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow (Little Cumbrae), 7 July 1804, SC; Mary Ann Archbald, Diary, 1804; 1805, especially 18 April 1804, SC. For example, Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 30 November 1816, 11 October 1817, 12 June 1818, 31 December 1818, 31 December 1819, 28 April 1820, 1 January 1821, 13 January 1822, 31 December 1832, 15 November 1834, SC. Mary Ann Archbald, Diary, 1804; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 28 April 1820, 1 January 1821, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow (Greenock, Scotland), 20 March 1807, SC. They left with £600 in the bank and a local debt of £160. It is not clear how much cash they brought with them to America. Deed, Thomas Lufbray to James Archbald, 20 December 1811, Book 66, p. 436, Office of the County Clerk, Montgomery County, New York. Only 327 of the 3,399 white male citizens in Montgomery County in 1821, at the time of the New York State decennial census, were freeholders: ‘County of Montgomery’, New York State Census, 1821. Archbald complained frequently in her letters to Wodrow and others among her correspondents about Americans and American institutions. Her complaints frequently used the world of her immediate neighbourhood as the basis for more or less comprehensive judgments about the failures of American life, but she was also quite capable of directly taking on American institutions, values, and political and cultural leadership, based on her readings of the newspaper. For example: destruction of the landscape, Mary Ann Archbald to Mr Summervil, 1808, Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 30 November 1816; absence of genius, Mary Ann Archbald to Alexander Ruthven, November 1817; the American ministry, Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 28 April 1820; women’s position in society, Mary Ann Archbald to Editor, Montgomery Republican, 1818 (or 1820?); Mary Ann Archbald to Mrs Hildreth, 1820; political ideology and culture, Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 13 March 1815, 28

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April 1820, 15 November 1834; Mary Ann Archbald to Mr McFarlane, January 1817, Mary Ann Archbald to James Archbald IV, 6 August 1828; her children’s lack of cultural development, Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 13 March 1815, 28 April 1820, 1 January 1826, Mary Ann Archbald to John Ruthven, August 1817; American youth and children’s American spouses, Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 10 October 1807, 30 November 1816, 31 December 1818, 1 January 1826, 7 May 1830, 31 December 1832, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 13 March 1815, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow (Greenock), 20 March 1807, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, (Greenock), February 1807, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 31 December 1818, 28 April 1820, 13 January 1822, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 13 September 1824, SC; [n.a.], Archibald [sic] Graveyard near Auriesville, New York, Record of Cemeteries in Montgomery County (Fonda, N.Y., n.d.), n.p. The extant New Year’s Eve letters are: Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 30 November 1816, 31 December 1818, 31 December 1819, 21 January 1821, 31 December 1822, 31 December 1824, 1 January 1826, January 1827, 31 December 1832, SC. The tradition of the New Year’s Eve letters was present before Archbald’s emigration in years in which the two women could not share each other’s company; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow (Little Cumbrae[?]), 31 December 1806, SC. Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”’, pp. 39-40. Mary Ann Archbald to John Ruthven, April 1826, SC. Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”’, pp. 25-6, and fn. 2, p. 26; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 12 November 1812, SC. Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”’, pp. 31-2, and fn. 18, p. 32; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 12 June 1828, 7 May 1830, SC. Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”’, pp. 32-4. Kathryn Clippinger, who has studied Archbald’s pre-emigration life thoroughly through the reading her diaries, has noted reference to two previous suitors, Mr McKay and Mr Robb; Kathryn Clippinger, ‘Mary Ann Archbald’, personal email (24 November 2002). Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, s.v., “Wodrow, Robert;” Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, s.v., “Wodrow, James;” Louise Yeoman, National Library of Scotland, personal email (3 October 1997). Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 28 April 1820, SC. The traditional celebration of Hogmanay occurs on 31 December 31, but Archbald never referred to the day by that name, and restricted her memories of celebration to the evening hours before the turning of the year. She does not discuss the collective, Scottish cultural practices that form these celebrations, but rather restricts her evocation of the past to memories of the people participating. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 13 August 1813, 13 March 1815, January 1817, 28 April 1820, 10 October 1828, 1 February 1840, SC. It is quite possible that in the area of the Firth of Clyde Little Cumbrae was vernacularly called ‘the little isle’ to distinguish it from its larger, nearby neighbour, Great Cumbrae. My point, however, is not geographic description, but the symbol

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32

33

34

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that emerged in Archbald’s writing. This was also, more importantly, Mary Ann Archbald’s point in developing this usage, which in her writing transformed a place into the personal symbol of a shared past. Mary Ann Archbald to W. C. Wodrow, 1820. Interactions with unrelated Scots, over the course of three decades, appear from the correspondence to have been with occasional house guests and travellers and in the context of a local wedding: Mary Ann Archbald to Mr Summervil, 3 July 1808; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 3 September 1808, 15 June 1819, 21 December 1819, 1 January 1821, 13 January 1822, 7 May 1830, SC. United States census data for Montgomery County, New York, for the 1820, 1830, and 1840 decennial census may be found at http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census. Also, ‘County of Montgomery’, New York State Census, 1821, 1825, 1835, 1846; John W. Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New York (New York, 1841), pp. 272-84; Friedrich Rapp, Geshichte der Deutschen im Staate New York bis zum Anfange des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (New York, 1869), pp. 152-5; E. Wilder Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 1783-1789 (New York, 1932), p. 31; Walter Allen Knittle, Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration: A British Government Redemptioner Project to Manufacture Naval Stores (Philadelphia, 1936) pp. 140-9, 205, 247. Mary Ann Archbald to Mr Summervill, 1808; Mary Ann Archbald to Mr G., 1809, March 1810; Mary Ann Archbald to John Ruthven, 1809; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 12 November 1812, 30 November 1816, 11 October 1817 (quote), 31 December 1818, 13 January 1822; Mary Ann Archbald to Mr McFarlane, January 1817; Mary Ann Archbald to Mrs Hildreth, September 1820, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 13 March 1815, 30 November 1816, 31 December 1818 (quote), 13 January 1822, 10 August 1822; Mary Ann Archbald to Mr McFarlane, January 1817. In the letter in which these views are quoted Archbald does not single out the Anglo-Americans in particular, but speaks generally. However, when she spoke about the Dutch, she always identified them as such. When she spoke about the inadequacies of American culture, politics, and society, and Americans generally, the context usually reveals that she had the Anglo-American majority and its influence in mind. Also see fn. 18 above for critical comments about American institutions and values. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 28 April 1820[?], SC; Washington Frothingham, History of Montgomery County (Syracuse, 1892), p. 287; Rayden Woodward Vosburgh, transcriber, Records of the First Reformed Protestant Dutch Church at Glen in the Town of Glen, Montgomery County, New York (New York, 1918), pp. 2, 64. Dale Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Connecticut, 1986); Kathleen Neils Conzen, et al, ‘The dual construction of ethnicity in nineteenth century America’, in ‘The invention of ethnicity: a perspective from America’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 12:1 (1992), pp. 7-12. Mary Ann Archbald to Mr McFarlane, January 1817 (quote); Mary Ann

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Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 10 August 1822, SC. Ruairidh H. MacLeod, Flora MacDonald: The Jacobite Heroine of Scotland and America (London, 1995); Susan Maclean Kybett, Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography of Charles Edward Stuart (New York, 1988), pp. 227-39, 267; Neil Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationalism (London, 2000), p. 124; Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, February 1807, 10 August 1822; Mary Ann Archbald to Dr Wodrow, 20 June 1809, SC. Scott, ‘“These notions I imbibed from writers”’, p. 121. As Scott makes clear (pp. 116-30, 174-5, 178-9), Walter Scott did not have a monopoly on Archbald’s attention. She read other English and Scottish authors. But she followed all his novels closely, read his newly published works as soon as she could get copies of them, and was always ready to discuss them in her correspondence with Margaret Wodrow. No other writer claimed her attention as fully. Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationalism, pp. 159-63, See also Murray G. H. Pittock, Scottish Nationality (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 132-6, and Murray G. H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London, 1991), pp. 84-91; T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700-2000 (London, 1999). For Archbald’s many and abiding complaints about the quality of American life, see fn. 18 above. Archbald’s tombstone reads, ‘Widow of James, granddaughter of Rev. Robert Wodrow, author, “History of the Church of Scotland”.’ Archibald [sic] Graveyard near Auriesville. New York, n.p. (The book title on the tombstone is, in fact, incorrect.) As a result of their failure to become naturalized, within six months of his father’s death in 1824, with the legal ownership of the farm in jeopardy, Jaime (James IV) petitioned the New State Governor to secure ownership of the farm. Early in 1825, he filed a declaration of intention to become a citizen with the local court in Montgomery County, probably at the suggestion of the Governor. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 31 December 1824; James Archbald, ‘Intention to be naturalized’, 8 February 1825, Court of Common Pleas, Montgomery County, New York. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Ruthven, 1817, SC. Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 30 November 1816, SC. Ibid., 1 January 1821, SC. Ibid., 29 September 1821, SC. Ibid., 1 January 1821, SC. Ibid., 13 January 1822, SC. Ibid., 28 April 1820, SC. Ibid., 29 September 1821, SC. Ibid., 10 August 1822, SC. Ibid., 10 August 1822, SC. Ibid., 10 October 1828, 16 November 1833, 19 April, 13 November 1836, 1 February 1840, SC. In the first of the two dreams, she returned to Margaret and to Little Cumbrae, but found the island so changed and confusing that she left the dream

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remembering the thought that she must be ‘content to end my days on the banks of the Mohawk’: Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 1 January 1821, SC. Far more disturbing was the second dream, recorded a year later. She dreamed that during an illness, in which she was feverish, she was in Scotland, in a house with transparent walls. Alongside others who were looking for people who had once been dear to them in life, she was searching for Margaret Wodrow. In this setting, in which vision was facilitated by transparency, but vulnerability heightened by the inability to hide from disappointment and rejection, everyone shared Mary Ann’s fear they would not be recognized, and indeed in the dream Margaret failed to recognize her. Archbald refused to draw the obvious meaning from the dream: that separation would eventually cause the death of their friendship. She instead offered a mock-apology for writing about this fantastical episode, and excused herself by adding that her life in America ‘seems now more like a dream than anything else’, so there was, in effect, no difference between writing of actual daily events and of her disturbing fantasies while asleep. Her dreams had become as good a guide for evaluating her situation as what passed for her waking life: Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 13 January 1822, SC. In fact, Archbald very much believed that dreams delivered a message to us about our hopes and fears, or she wouldn’t have mentioned them at length in these letters. Her distancing herself from her emotions in this dismissive way seems a devise for selfprotection in a situation in which she felt emotionally vulnerable. Philip Gleason, ‘Identifying identity: a semantic history’, in Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 123-49; Victor R. Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 1800-1910 (Baltimore, 1987); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2nd edn, 1983). Mary Ann Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, October 1811, SC. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 53-97, 143-71, 346-71; Stow Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago (Urbana, 1987), pp. 2897. Historians of literature and students of the epistolary novel have an especially acute understanding of the letter as a form of relationship, and have been influential in my thinking. See Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to A Form (Columbus, 1992); Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth Century Familiar Letter (Chicago, 1986); William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in American Before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill, 1998); Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, Les Correspondence: Les Usages de la Lettre au XIXe Siécle (Paris, 1991). Elizabeth J. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton, 1990), pp. 3-9. Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge, 1993) pp. 38-40. Noting that she had been wearing a dress without pockets, so that she had placed one of Margaret’s letters in her bosom, from which she took it often to reread it, Archbald explained, ‘It has been an inmate since [it arrived], its friendly rustling as I moved was music to me ears’. Mary Ann Archbald to

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Margaret Wodrow, 30 November 1816, SC. The continuing recognition of the singular, intimate qualities of handwritten, personal letters was made clear in the recent past to a Pakistani immigrant cabdriver in New York City, when he took advantage of the availability of a video teleconferencing facility in Brooklyn, at $5 a minute, to call-see his family in his homeland. At the cost of $20, his sister ‘harangued him for not writing. He protested he phoned weekly; his sister told him letters were better; they could be fingered and re-read and kept under pillows’: Deborah Sontag and Celia W. Duggar, ‘The new immigrant tide: a shuttle between worlds’, New York Times, 19 July 1998.

6 ‘IN QUIST OF A BETTER HAME’: A Transatlantic Lowland Scottish Network in Lower Canada, 1800-1850

Sarah Katherine Gibson When, on 29 May 1843, an opportunity arose to send a letter to Montreal, Janet Orr of Kaim ‘embraced it’. She had only an hour to write a hasty missive to Ann Brodie, whom she greeted first as a friend and again, midway through the letter, as a cousin: Dear Cusen it is now a long time since we parted and this is the first time I have spoken to you by writting yet I have often haerd from you and rejoiced in your welfare, and I am sure you have haerd as much of us as you had been amongst us. There is so many from this place croses the Atlantic in quist of a better hame that you will get all our news, and your kindness has made your house as it were a plesant rest to many a wery wanderer from your native Country so that the name of Mr & Mrs Brodie is alluays spoeken of as the frind of the Scotish emegrent.1 Evidently this was the first letter Janet Orr had ever sent her friend and cousin in 40 years. Ann Brodie emigrated to Montreal, Lower Canada, in 1803 with her new husband Hugh Brodie and two of his brothers. While establishing two prosperous farms two miles west of the city, the Brodies opened their home to and shared their resources with Scots who came out after the Napoleonic Wars ‘in quist of a better hame’. In the process of deciding to emigrate, settle, and cultivate a social network, many Scots wrote to the Brodies seeking advice, resources, and friendship. The shadow of this transatlantic network is preserved in upwards of 300 documents relating to the Brodies housed at the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal. Janet’s letter, despite its lonely singularity within the Brodie family papers, bears witness to the density and strength of the relationships the Brodies maintained between Lower Canada and Lowland Scotland.

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This survey draws from 86 of the Brodie correspondents who wrote a total of 122 letters over a 50-year period and who actively participated in the migration. It also draws peripherally upon correspondents such as Janet Orr who remained in Scotland but who made observations upon the fortunes of friends and family abroad. The letters sent to the Brodies from those who remained in Scotland are qualitatively different in tone, intent, and content and are being considered in a separate publication. The remaining, artificially defined, collection represents the physical remains of a network which stretched from Montreal and the settlements in Glengarry County in Upper Canada, in Huntingdon County in Lower Canada, various towns and cities in the Eastern United States, the West of Ireland, and Australia, to the parishes of Lochwinnoch and Kilburnie in Western Scotland. These surviving letters provide a window into the cultural cohesion of a geographically dispersed community of Lowland Scots and point to the durability and flexibility of their Scottish ties and identity. Lowland Scots were constitutionally individualistic in their response to the economic hardships of the modern Atlantic World. The cultural and material conditions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries favoured the atomization of Lowland society; the economic rationalization of Scotland’s agricultural practices in the Lowlands disrupted communal bonds and dismantled a hierarchy of obligation. A new category of deracinated farm servant emerged, vulnerable to the fluxes of the labour market and very mobile.2 Emigration appeared as the natural offshoot of the Lowlander’s internal migration in search of work and increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century. The Highlanders, affected by the same forces as the Lowlanders, migrated in vast numbers and in large, visible groups.3 The Lowlanders, in contrast, tended to emigrate as individuals or small family groups. Malcolm Gray has observed that Lowlanders were a less obvious part of the Scottish emigration surge because of the dispersed fashion in which they left Scotland. He surmised that ‘Relationships within the groups they formed and links between emigrants and the relatives and neighbours they left behind were probably looser’ than those of Scots who migrated in groups.4 Marjory Harper’s recent work, Adventurers and Exiles, drew a similar conclusion. The Lowlanders who did not share the Highlanders ‘vision of a kin-based racial solidarity’ were ‘often integrated more easily and imperceptibly into their new environment’.5 The phenomenon had a contemporary witness. In 1836 the minister of the Presbyterian Church of St Andrews attended by the Montreal Brodies bemoaned this trend. Although he did not distinguish between Lowland and Highland, Rev. Alexander Mathieson decried the ‘reproach [that] has often been cast on

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our country-men, that when they leave their native homes, they forget the noble characteristics of their country, and would fain conceal that they are Scotchmen’.6 Ned Landsman and Bernard Aspinwall, perhaps, provide insight into the Lowland Scots adaptability. Scottish values of temperance, progress, and perseverance became part of mainstream culture in North America, their Protestant ethic entirely compatible with capitalist development and urban culture.7 An ironic counterpoint to the disappearing Lowlander is the Scottish reputation for ethnic exceptionalism. The flamboyant and pugnacious Scots who dominated the fur trade preferred to do business with each other. Commercial development in early nineteenth-century Montreal, for example, was dominated by Scots.8 In Canada, as in other colonial societies, the fierceness of the Scottish drive and their clannishness are credited with their rise through the ranks of the colonial plutocracy.9 However, class interests bifurcated ethnic solidarity and the historiography reflects the colonial experience. Studies of Scottish entrepreneurs do not treat the experiences of Scots in the lower orders; probably, as the Brodie papers seem to indicate, because ethnic solidarity did not reach beyond highly visible institutional support for the less fortunate.10 The Brodies’ emigrant correspondence offers an excellent opportunity to examine how an informal network operated to advance the interests of a group who tended to lack visibility as immigrants, either because of their atomized social configurations or because of their social obscurity. Studies of Irish, Scottish, and English settlement in Canada place a great emphasis upon physical proximity, even isolation, in a settlement or urban neighbourhood as the main means by which groups were able to maintain cultural identity.11 The analysis of private correspondence, however, opens a new vista for understanding cultural persistence by documenting experiences and relationships which the public order did not inscribe.12 Emigration statistics for the first half of the nineteenth century are notoriously sketchy and as Barbara DeWolfe and Charlotte Erickson commented separately regarding the networks of Scots in America, the social welfare networks of kith and kin had no existence in the nascent public domain.13 Erickson’s study of Scottish and British emigrant letters concluded that the agricultural emigrant was often ‘unable to contemplate making any remittance’ to those at home.14 The Brodie papers certainly bear out the last part of her assessment, but also reveal the continuing sense of economic responsibility the Brodies felt for their relatives in Scotland. The Brodies’ Scottish network was designed to preserve intact, as far as possible, the communities they had left.

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The First to Leave: The Emigration of Hugh and Ann Brodie Hugh Brodie’s life path from skilled but self-educated farmer in Lowland Scotland to a position of modest social and economic leadership in Montreal follows the profile of the Lowland Scot’s experiences in the British Atlantic and the Antipodean worlds of the nineteenth century. Hugh and Ann emigrated in 1803 at the respective ages of 23 and 24. Even the era in which the Brodies emigrated highlights their characteristically Lowlander individualism; it was an unusual time for Lowlanders to leave Scotland. The statistics for British emigration from the end of the American Revolutionary War to the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815 are unreliable but suggest that most immigrants were Irish. The English, Welsh, and Scots migrated in lesser numbers. Of the 15,000 Scots headed for North America, 10,000 were Highlanders destined to settle in the Maritimes, the northeast shore of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, and eastern Upper Canada in already established Scottish communities.15 Hornsby’s analysis of Donald Whyte’s Dictionary of Scottish Emigrants to Canada Before Confederation tends to support this view. His work revealed that only seven emigrants from the county from which Ann and Hugh are listed as departing settled in Lower Canada during the period 1755-1814.16 Hugh and Ann counted for two, and of the remaining five, Hugh’s brothers John and William account for another two. The small family group made their decision in face of official hostility towards the outflow of migrants from Scottish society; the discouraging Passenger Act of 1803 was implemented in the July of the year they migrated.17 It seems likely personal and structural factors combined to create the conditions of the Brodies’ emigration. Hugh, his wife, and his brothers appear to have made their decision to emigrate after their eldest halfbrother Andrew lost the Langcraft property to creditors in 1803.18 Perhaps the family then found themselves vulnerable to economic and structural forces refiguring the Lowlands. Lochwinnoch, the parish in which Hugh ‘spent his early years’, underwent modest industrialization and urbanization with the introduction of two cotton mills in 1798 and 1799. The population nearly doubled and ‘[f]rom 1788 to 1795, no fewer than fifty-three new houses were built in Lochwinnoch, and ground was feued for many more’. The greater concentration of people acted as a ‘stimulus … to every other kind of business’. By 1801, the parish had a population of 2,955.19 In 1818 a contemporary observed that the town of Lochwinnoch was ‘supported almost wholly from the cotton manufacture, dependent on Pailey’.20 Hugh considered settling in this changing environment, but apparently decided to emigrate instead.21 The loss of the home disrupted everybody’s lives as Mary, Hugh’s sister, reported:

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With regard to Langcroft I have not had a foot upon it since I left it about five weeks after you went away. Wm Yack used our Mother very ungratfuly and showed [omitted: himself] to be both an unfeeling and decitfull man. He would not so much as set us a seat in the church but set it to another and many other things which I ca not take time to write you. Him and his master dug a great part of the house down above our heads before we got out our furniture. We soon did see what [?missing] we had of you when you were far from us. I shall say no more about it only he makes well out with his rent.22 After their removal, Hugh’s mother reported that there was ‘a new steading of Houses Built upon LongCroft and thatched over with rushes’.23 George Crawford’s History of Renfrewshire, published in 1818, listed ‘Longcraft’ with a ‘valued rent’ of £14 and in the proprietorship of a William Peock.24 The family’s childhood home was swept away by the forces of change reconfiguring the parish. By contrast, the parish Ann grew up in appears to have been more stable during the period of her emigration. Ann’s father was Robert Brodie, the laird of a property called Bankside in the parish of Kilburnie, Ayrshire. In 1801, the parish held just under one thousand people.25 A fellow emigrant from Kilburnie recollected in 1846 to Hugh that ‘Kilburnie is not now the wee Cluchan that your Ann and me left, but a sturdy thriving village and going ahead of some of her neighbours, who in days of yore used to sneer at her, “Oh the bonny wi toun on the banks of the Greenock”.’26 The majority of Hugh and Ann Brodie’s correspondents and of the Scots who later settled near them in Montreal came from these two parishes. It is unclear why Hugh, Ann, William, and John chose to settle near Montreal. Family lore holds that the Brodies sailed from Greenock to Quebec city.27 However, in 1801 Montreal was a prosperous town with a population of 8,800 people. The party’s settlement in the area was eased by contacts made through the city’s Presbyterian church, St Gabriel Street Church. Hugh began his career as a farm manager for John Lilly, ‘one of the oldest British merchants in the city’ and prominent member of the church.28 Letters from Scotland during the early years of their settlement were addressed to the party care of Charles Lambie, a merchant tailor and fellow Presbyterian. It is not possible to assess the ethnic origins of Montreal’s population until the census of 1861. A survey of Reverend Robert Campbell’s History of the St. Gabriel Street Church, however, reveals that of 123 notable individuals surveyed, the vast majority were of Lowland origin.29 These countrymen did not necessarily provide the Brodies with a

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ready-made community. Religious and class issues, more than ethnicity, defined Montreal’s Scottish population. The year the Brodies arrived in Montreal the St Gabriel Street Church congregation splintered over the formulation of the Church’s constitution. At issue was the commitment to patronage. American and seceder elements of the Church favoured the evangelical leanings and secessionist affiliations; they broke away to form a Burger Church, later St Andrew’s Church, and still later the Church of St Andrew and St Paul. Class distinguished the new congregation from the St Gabriel Street Church, and the new Church was known as that of the ‘tradesmen and mechanics’, though the congregation did include merchants and a schoolmaster.30 The Brodies attached themselves to this congregation and Hugh Brodie took several positions of responsibility. Brodie was ordained an Elder of the church in 1824 and served on the management committee between 1822 and 1832. However, in 1832 members of the congregation’s increasingly powerful proprietors enforced the Church’s constitution and prevented Brodie, a pew renter, from serving on the management committee.31 Hugh Brodie made his own connections in Montreal. By 1812 the family had built a stone Georgian-styled homestead on a farm two miles west of Montreal. An impressionistic assessment of the householders listed in his vicinity in the 1825 census suggests the district was overwhelmingly French Canadian. Of the 46 heads of households listed in his neighbourhood, only four were Anglophone. However, an undated plan of the projected Lachine Canal which opened in 1825 indicates that roughly one third of the landowners had Anglophone names.32 Brodie entered into many arrangements and agreements with his French-speaking neighbours suggesting that the Brodies were not exclusively concerned with advancing the interests of their kith and kin. It was in this environment that Brodie rose to modest social prominence and acquired sufficient social and material stability to become a Justice of the Peace. His death notice lauded his activities as an agriculturalist and proponent of good schools. It is, however, the ‘pleasure’ he took ‘in giving information and counsel to his country men newly arrived, for whom his house was ever open’, which concerns this chapter. Hugh and Ann were both responsible for helping establish the ‘Scotch residents in Lower Canada’, of which his death notice proclaimed him ‘one of the oldest most generally know and highly respected’.33 The Brodies’ Scottish Network The Lowlander community evidenced by the Brodie papers was articulated in several senses of the word. Letters and word of mouth accounts of

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individual experiences and intentions helped recreate the neighbourhoods of Lochwinnoch and Kilburnie. Individuals wrote the Brodies requesting advice on whether to emigrate and what to carry with them, or for help in finding positions, or for advice on land purchases. The Brodies responded to the needs of later emigrants with loans, temporary shelter, a safe place to deposit their luggage, and friendly encouragement. Gradually, a transplanted Scottish community – albeit attenuated and fluid in form – arose in their vicinity. William Bowie’s 1820 letter to Brodie points to the strength of affective ties in determining emigration decisions. Rather than lose one member, a family of ten people was willing to relocate. Bowie wrote to Brodie asking for advice on the proposed emigration. His eldest son was ‘urgent to get off to Ammerica’ and he did ‘not wish to parte with [his] famely as they are all willing to go’. The rest of his family included two other sons, five daughters, and his wife.34 Others also enlisted Brodie’s help in maintaining the ties of family and neighbourhood. A Scottish landowner gave explicit instructions to Brodie to draw a lot near the owner’s for he ‘would wish them [two unnamed people] to be nighbours’. In 1816 George Hopper inquired about a farm Brodie was selling because he wanted to live in the same ‘neighbourhood’ as his father-in-law.35 The Brodie home often provided a place for emigrants to regroup. Ann and Hugh’s hospitality was legendary and they sheltered many emigrants on their way west. Rev. Robert Easton had cautioned Brodie not to detain two prospective ministers entrusted to his care: ‘I know well the extent of your hospitality but I hope … you will not detain them an undue time under your kind roaf’.36 Hugh Brodie also hosted the family of Dr Miller, Irish friends of his half-brother Andrew. Brodie lent them a considerable sum of money which they painfully and gratefully paid back over four years.37 William McLachlan was more descriptive in acknowledging Brodie’s help: ‘Whene I Sid you My Health wase poure and and landied in a Fare forigen Land with a Large famely which Aspick wase Dismule to me you indevoured to Incurage Me of the Nature & Circumstancises of the country’.38 The Brodie farms also provided more long-term support for those who needed to earn money as labourers before purchasing their own land. The 1825 census reveals that Hugh Brodie headed a household, the largest in his neighbourhood, of 14 people. Seven were men between the ages of 18 and 60, three of them married, and two were unmarried women under the age of 45. They were all probably farm servants, or less probably, guests. Brodie received many letters from people hoping he could provide employment for farm servants. Notably, the minister of St Andrew’s, Rev.

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Alexander Mathieson who succeeded Rev. Robert Easton, recommended an Irish couple to Hugh’s consideration. Many Scots wrote to Brodie on their own initiative asking for help in finding situations in Canada. Old ties and daily knowledge of the common world they once shared underwrote their requests. Margaret Whylie wrote asking for Hugh’s help in finding a position in Canada as a servant and as she ‘had been perfectly Acquainted with Miss Brodie and her sister Mrs. Conaghey when [she] lived in Kilburny they, [she] hope[d], would Testify of [her]’. She also wondered whether Hugh might know of a situation for Alex Gardiner’s brother, a ploughman.39 Generations could grow up and die, but the ties of kinship and neighbourhood endured. In 1849 William Dunsmore of Lochwinnoch wrote to Hugh on the subject of Mr Thomas Carswell, who was a grandson of ‘old James Carswells that kept the corner house at the crose and his father was fiscall here’. Dunsmore hoped that if Carswell, then in New York, made his way to Montreal, Brodie would ‘perhaps have a little inflewence in geting him a place. He was a neboure of ours all his days’.40 Closer to home, Alex Copland, Fountaingrove, Hinchinbrook, had friends recommend a ‘lad from Aberdeenshire’ to him, but he did not need his services. Copland allowed the lad to work for him long enough to earn a local reputation and to prove his worth. The young man decided to try his fortune in Upper Canada, but Copland wondered if Hugh Brodie had any place for him. Failing that, he asked for ‘any advice or assistance which you may be able to give him as to procuring a situation’.41 Unfortunately, the Brodie documents do not record the fate of these inquirers. While many expected Brodie to be able to exert influence on their behalf, only one example survives of Brodie being able to do so. Brodie maintained a three-year correspondence with William Clegg who worked in the Office of the Royal Engineers in Bytown (later Ottawa) and was also a school teacher. Clegg was on intimate terms with Colonel By (responsible for engineering the Rideau Canal). Perhaps it was on the strength of Clegg’s connection with the Colonel that Brodie sent a Mr Young to Clegg with the expectation that Clegg would procure an unspecified ‘situation’ for him.42 Other Scots asked Brodie for vague, time consuming help. News had reached Newhartford that ‘a Great many Settlers [were] Coming out [that] Season forom Glasgow and the Subarbs’. On behalf of a friend, James Whiteford asked Brodie if he would ‘take the trouble of going Down to the Steam Boat when She Comes up … to Montreal and Inquire if there is aney friends or acquaintances of a William Morrison, Wright for me’.43 In 1833 the widow Jean Neill wrote from Scotland trying to recover ‘twelve

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sovereigns’ she had sent her late son three years previously.44 Others called upon Brodie for loans of small sums of money. Brodie received innumerable requests, large and small, all urgent in their own fashion. The documents do not reveal how many he was able to fulfil. James Craig similarly made great demands of Hugh Brodie, but in this case extant documentation reveals the investment Brodie made in one man’s prosperity. Three letters survive to indicate the calls for aid James Craig, then a farm servant, felt comfortable making of Brodie. In 1819 Craig asked Brodie to make inquiries of the ship ‘cherube or any other vesels from Greenock’ for the stray works of an eight-day clock sent out by his father. Three years later, Craig entrusted Brodie with an even greater responsibility. Craig let Brodie know his ‘mind as a father to [him]’ and shared his plans for securing his own farm. He had heard of ‘Cochran Giving up his Plas upon River Deshin [sic]’ and wanted Brodie to ‘write up every Particular about it as soon as it comes to hand’. Speculatively, he sent along $67 so Brodie could purchase the deeds to the farm.45 The men’s friendship lasted the rest of Brodie’s life. Craig established himself as a prosperous farmer in his own right and after Hugh’s death exerted himself on Ann’s behalf. He tidied up the ends of Brodie’s business and made inquiries about a relative’s piece of land. His last letter to the family ends with a retrospective: ‘I receved the track of the Late Mr. Brodie’s funeral Sermon which is A true statment of his Carecter … no more at present butt remaines Your efectionat friend Till Death, James Craig Sinr’.46 Faith in Brodie’s judgment allowed Scots to conduct business from far away and also had the effect of ensuring continuity in Scottish values. Many Scots put their trust in Brodie, giving him power of attorney and trusting in his judgment. When Thomas Fingland moved away from Cote Saint Pierre to Upper Canada, he left the deeds to his farm with Brodie, asking him to sell it for him. The only instructions he gave were ‘to do as if it were your own’.47 After Fingland’s death, his widow asked him to find out if the troop of Cavalry in which Fingland had served had been granted land.48 When Margaret Glen’s husband died in 1820 Brodie was charged with writing to her mother-in-law in order to find out how the property was to be disposed. Margaret also entrusted him with the papers for a property and asked him ‘to be so good as [to] make the best of it you can for me. We were in a little debt when he died’. She also asked Mrs Brodie to purchase some cloth and sundries for her.49 Two years later the late Mr Glen’s brother came out to Canada and kept Hugh busy looking after his luggage and devolved other business dealing on him authorizing him to take ‘whatever steps’ he thought necessary.50 When in 1826 this Mr Glen also died, Margaret’s relative applied to Brodie for information about the

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man’s affairs stating that ‘if [he] could give any information about his Affairs in Lochwinnoch, it wold be adding another favour to the many [he had] done to his Famely’.51 Brodie was entrusted with the business of many; for those in Scotland and in North America. Family members also benefited from the Brodies’ help and Hugh and Ann were able to recreate their family circle in the vicinity of Montreal. A recent analysis of settlement patterns of townships in the Brodies’ environs revealed that emigrants chose lots not based on a market-oriented assessment of land quality, but upon the friendliness of the neighbourhood.52 Several members of Ann’s family, who settled in the seignories on the south shore of the St Lawrence River in the township of Godmanchester, were among those who chose friendliness over productivity. The Gardiners, relatives of Ann’s from Kilburnie, settled in Dundee in 1821.53 A year later Ann’s brother Robert Brodie, heir to the Bankside property in Ayrshire, also settled in this area, in North Georgetown. Robert had sojourned in Montreal in 1806 and again in 1815 when he worked on the Montreal farm of Sheriff John Boston, a Scottish member of the mercantile elite. Robert returned to Scotland but came out again in 1822. Though his intention had been to settle in Upper Canada, he decided on lot 20, in North Georgetown.54 In 1834 Robert was in Scotland again, advising his kin on land available in his neighbourhood.55 Brodie was also willing to help settle two of his nephews in Canada, Hugh and James Cameron. Hugh Cameron and his uncle had a falling out, but Hugh Cameron remained in Lower Canada. James, on the other hand, returned to Scotland on account of his poor health.56 He wrote his uncle several letters over the years. The Brodie relatives in these southern settlements and their neighbours therefore became part of Hugh and Ann’s everyday world. As Robert Cameron’s restless to-and-fro voyages to Scotland suggest, the Brodies did not cut their ties with the Old Country even when their extended family group had relocated close together in the New World. The 50-year correspondence with the Brodie relatives is peppered with thanks for gifts and remittances sent by the Montreal Brodies. In 1807 Hugh’s brother-in-law Archibald Cameron hinted that he should have Brodie send him a ‘parcel of your Yankie Aples’.57 A gift of meal in 1816 was a welcome surprise to the Camerons because Archibald had been ill and unable to work for several months.58 Financial help for the Cameron family continued to 1829, when Brodie sent two sovereigns for his sister Jean.59 These are but a few of the many examples of sustained interest in the material welfare of those relatives who remained in Scotland. These

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enduring economic ties are signs of the deep emotional and intellectual engagement that made the Atlantic Ocean but a minor impediment to the continuing social engagement of the Brodies. The Scottishness of the Brodie Network The Brodie correspondence followed a pattern of ‘face-to-face’ sociability. The Scottishness of their network was implicit, contained in the very act of correspondence as individuals harmonized their interests which they strove to ground in a sense of shared values and common experiences. Rarely did the writers deploy cultural symbols to cement their interests. Of more importance was the exchange of information, either by cultural, institutional, or informal channels. By these means, the Brodies were able to continue friendships and link their interests in a shared community, despite the divide of the Atlantic Ocean. The letters themselves connected writers in Scotland with readers in the colonies by preserving the Scots language in their idiosyncratic spelling and grammar as seen in Janet Orr’s description of Scots ‘in quist of a better hame’.60 The Scots language was a clear reminder of home for John Allan, a Kilburnie man living in New York. He supplied the description of Kilburnie’s economic progress at the outset of this chapter, which was redolent with broad Scots phrases. His one letter to Hugh is steeped in nostalgia which he evoked by recalling the cadence of his family’s speech. He wrote that his own connections that were left were ‘no gude at writing’.61 In this case, the writer used an artifice to draw a distinction between his life and theirs by highlighting their language. However, earlier in the century, in 1824, Ann Brodie must have been very pleased when Margaret Brodie Sloan’s scribe lapsed into a literal transcription of her dictated letter and copied out these words: give my Complements to him [a friend] and his wife the first time you see them. Tel him to send his Sister awe bit of his ain maken of shugar. The last year when she sawe mine She was vext and said she didna ken what she wud gie for A we bit of Mathews meaken.62 For the most part however, the letter writers expressed themselves shorn of any replication of the Scottish language. They employed other means to retain a sense of connection. William Caldwell’s voluble Lochwinnoch letters to Hugh best articulated how the Scots secured their overseas affairs in common roots and values. The first line of Caldwell’s first (preserved) letter to Hugh shows him

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searching for a new way in which to relate to Brodie. Personal bonds would not work in this situation: ‘Although you & I have not hitherto been Personally aquanted nor Probably never will yet my Deceased Brothers small Subject in your Neighborhood has ocationed a Papper acquaintance on your Part’.63 Caldwell drew an explicit comparison between their correspondence, ‘papper acquaintance,’ with the personal acquaintance they never had in order to set the parameters of their relationship. Brodie’s news that the tenant of Caldwell’s Canada farm, William Brodie (no relation to Hugh), desired to leave, disappointed him bitterly: ‘Although I never expected to have ocation to complain of such a Man I live it to you to Judge who of us apered to have had our Nighbours Intrest most At Heart’.64 Maintaining a common ground of values, a consistent sense of what a ‘nighbour’s’ interest might be, was crucial to the functioning of the complex overseas relationships the Brodies maintained. Newspapers were an important touchstone for relatives who had not seen each other in decades. In 1845 Jean Laird wrote to her ‘Dear Cousin,’ presumably Ann. Her letter was unusually descriptive and provides insight into how she drew links between her experiences in Scotland and those Ann must be experiencing through the medium of newspapers. there is a fine appearance of Good Crops here this Season. There is a little deficency amongst the potatoes but corn, wheat and hay are very Good if we have a Good harvest time and we See By the papers there is Good crops in Canada so there will Be abondence of food for Man & for Beast.65 It is through the medium of a newspaper that Jean is able to correlate her experience to that of her cousin. Other correspondents reveal how the receipt of North American news in their indigenous newspapers prompted them to make contact with the Brodies. In late July of 1834 James Borland penned a concerned letter to Hugh Brodie. He wrote to him about his father-in-law, stating: as I huve received no letters, and of Seing the Death of him in the Glasgow Heurrild Newes Papers tacken from the Mentreul Gassett, by the Deat of the Papper, it seemes he had … died verry Sudden. I sent out letters by John Lang this Spring, and has received no answer to them, nor [of] his death. They seem to be verey Carless about Writting to us about it all 66

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The Glasgow newspapers served him well in this instance. As he knew that Hugh Brodie had been a confidante of the late man he applied to him for information about the deceased’s property. The close of Hugh Brodie’s own life was exchanged in the international circulation of information. In March 1852, two months after his death, Margaret Brodie Sloan wrote a letter of consolation to Ann saying that they had received a Toronto paper and saw his death notice. It was ‘the forth of a coloum was filled with one of the best penned charectors wrote upon man’.67 In a rare reversal of imperial-colonial relations, evidence survives of North American Scots sending books home to Scotland.68 The newspapers and the books allowed the community to stay abreast of developments that affected their lives. The Church of Scotland’s international links also provided means for separated family members to share experiences. Both ministers of St Andrew’s Church who served during Ann and Hugh’s lifetime took leaves of absence to Scotland. While pursuing their own interests at home, they offered the Brodie relatives an opportunity to share the experience of their ministrations. In spring 1820 Hugh’s half-brother Robert reported from Saltcoats that ‘last harvest I had the pleasure of conversing with and hearing your Minister Mr. Easton’.69 Alexander Mathieson, who served as the Church’s next minister, went home on leave and made contact with Hugh and Ann’s Lochwinnoch kin. Margaret reported to Ann in August 1853: ‘Your Minister [erased: Mr.] Dr. Matheson called on us on the 20th of october last he is nice Gintel man. He gave us an address and prayed with us. We thought a great dale of him’.70 It was not uncommon for Church of Scotland ministers to return home for a sojourn.71 The strength of the Church’s international relationships provided a structure in which individuals rooted their identity. The Scots involved in long-distance transactions relied upon parish and church affiliations to authenticate identity. Hugh’s half-brother Andrew left his wife ‘with five children, the oldest of whom was not nine years of age’, to seek the family’s fortune in America. Sadly, Andrew died while abroad but Hugh was able to inform his widow in spring 1829 that her husband had died with a debt of more than £72 owing to him by a John Clark. Jean Katrick, Andrew’s widow, thanked Hugh in the warmest terms for this invaluable information. The problem facing her was how to extract the debt due her family in a foreign country. She could not afford the drawing-up of a formal Power of Attorney; however she sent an affidavit attesting to her identity, signed by the minister of her parish of Kilburnie.72 Elizabeth Burns Miller of Cupar, Fife, also tried to recover debts due to her late husband and sent Hugh a similar affidavit, signed by the Elders of her Church.73 In 1832 Hugh Brodie concerned himself with the affairs of a

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James Caldwell who had worked for him. Mrs Caldwell responded from Shelford Neilston to a letter from Hugh, thanking him for the information about her husband: I am happy to hear he is well and to hear you are taking so much charge of him. I hope you will be rewarded for it. You mention in your letter of some money lying in your hand belonging to him which you wish to send to me should he give his consent by me getting this letter signed by the Minister but I am afraid it would hurt his feelings. I would rather see himself along with the money.74 In all cases, the authority of a parish minister served to bridge the Atlantic and underwrote the economic legitimacy of the wives’ claims upon their husband’s estates. The foregoing examples have emphasized the institutional support for this international network; however, the examples also highlight the concomitant presence of informal channels of information and the power of affective ties to endure long separations. Despite the absence of her husband, Mrs Caldwell continued to make economic decisions in consideration of his feelings and his pride. Jean Katrick might never have known of her family’s bounty had her brother-in-law not been attentive to his half-brother’s affairs. The newspapers, the direct exchange of letters, and the Church of Scotland’s international structure did not substitute for the informal exchange of information in a small community. Reputations had to be won, maintained, and spoken of, and gossip flowed easily within this correspondence network. In large part, the mobility of the Scots accounted for the continuation of these informal channels of exchange. The letters reveal that many Scots returned home for brief visits. Margaret Brodie Sloan reported that a Mr and Mrs McLoud were reported to be visiting Lochwinnoch and to be intending to return ‘home’ to North America ‘by Mountryall’. 75 Ann’s brother, as demonstrated earlier, crossed the Atlantic several times before settling in Lower Canada. A cousin of Hugh’s also returned to Scotland and inserted himself temporarily into the social network he had once shared there with Hugh: in 1820 Andrew Lindsay returned to Scotland and forwarded an Iron plough to himself and put it in Hugh’s care. In return he kept Hugh’s money until Mrs Brodie collected it from him. He delivered books for Mr Fingland, Hugh’s Montreal friend and neighbour, though Lindsay may have had an independent relationship with Fingland. Lindsay also housed Hugh’s half-brother Andrew for a night, and forwarded a

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message from him. Seventeen years later Andrew Lindsay was still in correspondence with Hugh and he wrote from Barnet to ask for news from Lochwinnoch, share market prices, and complain about his farm servant.76 One of Ann’s young kinswomen wrote to her from Woodstock to beg excuses (among a great many other things) for her brother-in-law not stopping long in Montreal. She explained that he did ‘not find goods to his mind and hurried home to let one of the men go to Scotland. He will not go this summer. This is the first time he has sent another in his place,’ thus providing a small glimpse into the regularity of transatlantic travel within this network.77 The geographical dispersion of Hugh Brodie’s network, the product of Scottish mobility, allowed for the international circulation of news. John Cochran, who wrote a series of nine letters to Hugh between 1818 and 1831, was one agent of this dispersion. It is possible that he shared local roots in Scotland; certainly Cochran reported upon the fortunes of other Lochwinnoch people he encountered in New York. It is also clear that Cochran lived for a time in the Brodies’ Montreal community before seeking work in New York State’s carpet-making industries, and he rooted his correspondence in this shared experience. Cochran had trouble settling down in North America and his letters reveal the unfixed nature of his life. In 1826 he contemplated returning home to Scotland for a visit.78 A year later, however, his father came to stay with him. Cochran described the visit to Hugh in rather exasperated terms: I would have wrote you long ago as I have often thought of you but for My Father. Perhaps you are aware that he came out to me last summer. I had wrote to him mentioning my going on land and the old man wrote me of the misery and privation that he was enduring at home and if I would send for him he would soon come. In an ungarded moment I did agree his passage as I have in the course of a week from this date to send him home again as he has gote quite discontented with the Country and determined to lay his bones in Scotland. I had wrote to the Family the year before if they would all come that I would go to Country and purchase a little Farm and that I would alow myself to look after them and study their Comfort with all the means in my power. My step mother thought she was two far advanced in years thus have all my plans & views of making the Family Comfortable proved abortive and I have come to think that I must look a little to myself.79

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While Cochran was unsuccessful in transplanting his immediate family in the United States, he retained strong links with Montreal. He and Hugh exchanged visits. 80 He also maintained other Montreal acquaintances, notably William Wilson.81 The story of William Wilson’s domestic affairs serves as an illustration of the Brodie network’s integration. In 1826 William Wilson hand delivered a letter from Hugh Brodie to John Cochran in New York. Cochran commented to Hugh: ‘I was extremely sorrie too hear of William Wilsons domestic difficulties. I did not know him when he first accosted me. As soon as I recognized him I thought there was something wrong’.82 Cochran is evermore silent on the subject. But Hugh’s correspondent in Cupar, Fife, was able to bare better witness. Elizabeth Burns Miller was the widow of a weaver who lived in the Village of St Henri, where one of the Brodie farms was located. At the death of her husband she returned to Scotland and wrote six letters between 1829 and 1832. In March of 1830, in apparent response to an inquiry from Hugh, she revealed that the Wilsons domestic unhappiness had pursued them back to Scotland: With regard to Willm Wilson I can [?say] nothing of him as his people does not wish to talk freely about him but as to Mrs. Wilson she is doing extraordinary well. She is at a spinning Mill about three Miles from this town & has 6/0 per week & her lodgings & she actually is saving some money of it & and what is better than that is much respected both by her Master & Fellow Servts.83 In return for this information, Elizabeth wanted to know if they had ever caught the murderer of Mr Watson, the flour inspector, who had been shot dead while he sat conversing with the Rev. Alexander Mathieson. His killer never was found.84 Elizabeth’s recollections of the neighbourhood community she shared with Hugh, concerns about her husband’s grave, and other affairs fill her letters, but the Wilson fortunes remained a topic of interest. Mrs Wilson was evidently in contact with her former neighbours in Montreal, and some of Elizabeth’s information derived from her. Elizabeth Burns Miller, however, still made her own reports to Montreal in order to clear Mrs Wilson’s reputation. She revisited the Wilson topic in 1833: With regard to Wm. Wilson I last Summer from a Cousin of his (& that in a very great secret too) that he was in Edinburgh working at his own business at Stocking Maker

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but as for Mrs. Wilson she is doing remarkably well here & keeps herself decent and respectable & is in fact saving money to my knowledge. She has about £30 in the Bank so that she has by her steady conduct confeited all the calumnys that he and his relations so industriously circulated against her & shown the world where the fault lay.85 Reputations had to be maintained on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. This chapter opened with Janet Orr’s description of the Brodies reputation in Scotland and the number of correspondents who made contact with the Brodies on the basis of that reputation bears it out. In 1834 Ross Robertson wrote to Hugh from Fosbar asking for Hugh’s help in supporting two aged Brodie relatives living in the writer’s neighbourhood. Robertson stated that he had been encouraged to write to him ‘from the very favorable accounts I have heard of your character for hospitality & humanity’.86 In 1841 word of mouth suggestion resulted in Hugh being chosen as ‘a fit person to be inserted in’ the power of attorney of yet another Scot seeking to liquidate the Canadian legacy of a dead relative because he was thought to have been ‘somewhat acquainted with the situation and circumstances of the deceased’.87 Gossip could also restore soured family relationships. Jean Cameron’s husband roamed around North America searching for work. While he remained in contact with Brodie, he disappointed his family by not writing and not sending money. Two of his sons had stayed with Brodie. Hugh remained in Lower Canada, while ill health forced James to return to Scotland. On his return journey he met with a man from Montreal who is going home to Scotland and his name is Gemmle. He is the man that was with Clerk at long point. He told me that my Brother told him that you had received a letter from John Cochran enforming you that he saw my Father and he was doing well and earning a doller per day. If this account be true it will give great satisfaction to me and likewise those at home but I cannot rely upon it until I hear minutly From you which I hope you will do with the first opportunity.88 Information flowed more easily by word of mouth than it did by letter, if only because the Scots often declined to write many details, but referred the writer to the bearer for news. The examples of this side step are legion. The Scots also cross-referenced their letters, refraining from writing that

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information which they thought another would describe. Their ability to count on someone else to communicate the essentials for them is a testament to the density and frequency of Scottish travel between the colonies and Scotland. Even those Scots who settled in Australia did not stay put, but came home and went out again. Rarely did these Scots rely upon cultural symbols to create a common ground for each other. In one particular case, however, one of Hugh Brodie’s Montreal neighbours appealed to the ‘Tartan’ in order to heal a long-standing rift between he and Mr Cameron, possibly Hugh, who was very ill. Mr Simpson wrote that ‘to his calamitous condition your mind will soften too and even if he has done wrong “Blood is thicker than water” & as he is both kith & kin your heart must warm to the tartan’. He apologized for the interference writing, ‘I can only add that I shall Derive lasting pleasure from this interference if I am the means of reconciling such near relations’.89 Perhaps Hugh Brodie’s heart did ‘warm to the Tartan’. In general, however, the strength and density of the Brodie network meant that they did not have to appeal to Scottish cultural symbols in order to root their relationships. Hugh and Ann’s network of correspondence had successfully preserved the neighbourhoods and social relationships of Lochwinnoch and Kilburnie; their continuing relationships rooted in the physical reality of the letters themselves. Conclusion This chapter has explored the interlocking forces of this Scottish network in maintaining a Scottish identity. A close reading of the letters Hugh and Ann Brodie received in Montreal reveals a group of Lowland Scots who were geographically dispersed yet who were economically and emotionally invested in each other. The perspective this study offers upon the phenomenon of the Scottish diaspora is necessarily narrow and focuses upon the writings of individuals whose claims to historical significance rest entirely upon the basis of their surviving correspondence. However, these documents offer an important contrast to studies of Scottish institutions as the purveyors of culture. The Brodie letters reveal that individuals rooted their relationships and their identities in common Scottish origins. They also reveal the density and the complexity of relationships between Scots in Montreal and those who stayed in Scotland. Thus, the private, personal nature of the documentation only hints at the Scot’s sense of shared group identity and their attitudes towards other ethnic groups. Nevertheless, evidence does survive indicating that the network did not exclude others of different origins who required help. The experiences of Hugh Brodie also demonstrate that his Scottish origins did not gain him entry into the society

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of the colonies Scottish elites. Rather, the network existed to stabilize the identities of a Scottish community reconfiguring itself. Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

8

9

10

11

Janet Orr (Kaim, Scotland) to her cousin Ann Brodie (Montreal), 29 May 1843, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, Brodie Family Papers, File 4, PO21 A1. Hereafter all references indicated simply by a file number will be understood to come from the foregoing collection of papers. Malcolm Gray, ‘The social impact of agrarian change in the rural lowlands’, in T. M. Devine and Rosaline Mitchison (eds), People and Society in Scotland: Economic and Social History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 54-69; Malcolm Gray, ‘Scottish emigration: the social impact of agrarian change in the rural lowlands, 1775-1875’, Perspectives in American History, 7 (1973), pp. 95-174; Marjory Harper, Adventures and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003), p. 4; Eric Richards, ‘Varieties of Scottish emigration in the nineteenth century’, Historical Studies, 21:85 (1985), p. 476. T. M. Devine, ‘The paradox of Scottish emigration’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 8-9. Malcolm Gray, ‘The course of Scottish emigration, 1750-1914: enduring influences and changing circumstances’, in Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society, p. 19. Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, p. 327. Alexander Mathieson, Sermon Preached in Saint Andrew’s Church Montreal, on the Thirtieth day of November 1836 (St. Andrews Day) (Montreal, 1837), p. 48. Ned Landsman, ‘Introduction’, in Ned Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600-1800 (Lewisburg, 2001), p. 25 and notes. Bernard Aspinwall, Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820-1920 (Aberdeen, 1984), p. xiv, chaps 2 and 5. Gerald Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation, 1837-53 (Toronto, 1977), p. 19; Elaine Allan Mitchell, ‘The Scot in the fur trade’, in W. Stanford Reid (ed.), A History of Canada’s Peoples: The Scottish Tradition in Canada (Toronto, 1976), p. 32. Ian Donnachie, ‘The making of “Scots on the make”: Scottish settlement and enterprise in Australia, 1830-1900’, in Devine (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society, p. 150. Donnachie, ‘The making of “Scots on the make”’, p. 135. Heather McNabb, ‘Montreal’s Scottish community, 1835-65: a preliminary study’, MA thesis, Concordia University, 1999, p. 3. See, for example, Stephen J. Hornsby, Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton (Montreal, 1992), pp. 75-9 and 143-6; Steven Hornsby, ‘Patterns of Scottish emigration to Canada’, Journal of Historical Geography, 18:4 (1992), p. 412; J. Clark and P. K. McLeod, ‘Concentration of Scots in rural southern Ontario, 1851-1901’, Canadian Cartographer, 11:2 (1974), pp. 107-13; John Clarke, ‘Social integration on the Upper Canadian frontier: elements of community in Essex county, 1790-1850, Journal of Historical Geography, 17:4 (1991), pp. 390-412.

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14 15

16

17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 3-36. Barbara DeWolfe, Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America during the Revolutionary Era (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 23-37; Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (Florida, 1972), p. 37. Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, pp. 37-9. James Horn, ‘British diaspora: emigration from Britain, 1680-1815’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), p. 32. Donald Whyte, Dictionary of Scottish Emigrants to Canada Before Confederation (London, Ontario, 1986), pp. 27-8; Steven Hornsby, ‘Patterns of Scottish emigration to Canada’, p. 408. This source misidentifies Hugh Brodie as originating from Kilburnie, Ayrshire, which was Ann’s place of origin. Hornsby, unaware of this inaccuracy, only reveals evidence of departures from Ayrshire and not from Renfrewshire. J. M. Bumstead, The Scots in Canada (Ottawa, 1982), p. 8; Marjory Harper, Emigration from North-East Scotland, Vol. 1: Willing Exiles (Aberdeen, 1988), p. 7; Ian Adams and Meredyth Somerville, Cargoes of Despair and Hope: Scottish Emigration to North America, 1603-1803 (Edinburgh, 1993), p. 196. Andrew Crawfurd, ‘The cairn of Lochwinnoch’, 46 vols, Paisley Central Library, PC 1407-52, 7:472 4/4. An Ecclesiastical Sketch of Lochwinnoch Parish: Embracing a Period of about Three Hundred Years, by a Native (Paisley, 1878), pp. 17-20; The New Statistical Account of Scotland, Vol. 7: Renfrew-Argyle (Edinburgh, 1845), pp. 96-7. George Crawford, A General Description of the Shire of Renfrew (Paisley, 1818), p. 356. Mary Gemmel (Lochwinnoch) to her sons Hugh, William, and John Brodie (Montreal), 3 June 1805, file 2. Mary Brodie (Lochwinnoch) to her brother Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 17 March 1808, file 6. Mary Gemmel (Lochwinnoch) to her sons Hugh, William, and John Brodie (Montreal), 4 March 1805, file 2. Crawford, A General Description of the Shire of Renfrew, p. 355. The New Statistical Account of Scotland, Vol. 5: Ayr-Bute (Edinburgh, 1845), p. 709. John Allan (New York City) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 7 May 1846, File 8b. Jean H. McClellan, ‘Brodie-Holmes-Garth ancestry and some collateral families of Scotland and Lancashire thence to Montreal, Quebec’, unpublished genealogy by a member of the Ontario Genealogical Society (Toronto, 1978), p. 12. Robert Campbell, A History of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, St. Gabriel Street, Montreal (Montreal, 1887), p. 98. McNabb, ‘Montreal’s Scottish community’, p. 11. J. S. S. Armour, Saints, Sinners, and Scots: A History of the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal 1803-2003 (Canada, 2003), chap. 2.

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32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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‘Minutes of the Committee of the Church of St. Peter Street Church’, 18151850, Presbyterian Church Archives, microfilm reel 164, entries: 7 October 1824, 25 December 1821, 25 December 1822, 9 July 1824, 8 January 1825, 25 December 1826, 5 March 1827, 4 January 1828, 18 December 1830, 3 January 1832, 25 December 1832. [n.a], ‘Plan of the Projected Lachine Canal’, [n.d], McCord Museum of Canadian History, M3587, 1-2. Quebec Gazette, 16 January 1852, reprinted from the Witness, p. 2. William Bowie (Quarrelton, Scotland) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 29 June 1820, file 1. William Caldwell (Lochwinnoch) to his former townsman Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 10 February 1817, file 8a; George Hopper (Cornwall, Upper Canada) inquiring about land for sale by Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 19 August 1816, file 1. Robert Easton (Montreal) to his parishioner Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 8 October 1823, file 8a. George Miller (Niagara, Upper Canada) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 27 August 1821, 16 May 1822; Mary Miller (Niagara) to her acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 21 September 1824, file 6b. William McLachlan (Whitehall, U.S.A) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), [n.d.], file 8a. Margaret Whylie (Glasgow) to the husband of her former townswoman Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 29 May 1817, file 8a. William Dunsmore (Lochwinnoch) to his former townsman Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 29 March 1849, file 11. Alexander Copland (Hinchinbrook, Lower Canada) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 20 August 1835, file 8b. William Clegg (Bytown, Upper Canada) to his friend Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 4 July 1827, file 8a; 28 August 1828, file 1; 22 June 1830, file 1 William Morrison and James Whiteford (Newhartford, U.S.) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 17 June 1821, file 8a. Jean Neill (Kilbarchan, Scotland) to Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 8 May 1833, file 8b. James Craig to his friend Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 16 May 1819, 13 March 1821, file 1. James Craig (Charlottenburgh, Upper Canada) to his deceased friend’s widow, Ann Brodie (Montreal), 17 June 1852, file 1. Thomas Fingland (Hamilton, Upper Canada) to his friend Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 21 January 1837, file 8b. Mrs Fingland (Hamilton) to the acquaintance of her deceased husband Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 17 March 1846, file 8a. Margaret Glen (Edwardsburgh, Upper Canada), to the acquaintance of her deceased husband, Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 16 October 1820, file 1. Andrew Glen (Richmond, Upper Canada) to his former Lochwinnoch townsman Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 23 October 1822, 20 February 1823, 6 October 1824; Mr Glen to Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 4 February 1823, file 1.

148

51 52

53

54

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John Ramage (Brockville, Upper Canada) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 1 May 1826, file 1. Louis Roy, Gerald Domon, and Sylvain Paquette, ‘Settlement pattern, environmental factors and ethnic background on a southwestern Quebec frontier (1795-1842)’, Canadian Geographer, 46:2 (2002), pp. 144-56. Robert Sellar, The History of the County of Huntingdon and of the Seignories of Chateauguay and Beauharnois: From their First Settlement to the Year 1838 and Revised to the 1900s (Huntingdon, Quebec, 2nd edn, 1963), p. 202. Jean and Archibald Cameron sent a letter to Hugh Brodie ‘by Robert Brodie [his] brother-in-law’ in April 1806 and the letter’s presence in the collection suggests that it was successfully delivered. In April 1807 Archibald reported, in reference to receiving Hugh’s letter of 23 August, that Robert Brodie ‘thinks he has a letter in his Chest but as he left it in Engleand it is not yet come to hand,’ indicating that Robert had returned from abroad where he had been close enough to Hugh to accept a letter from him. Jean and Archibald Cameron (Lochwinnoch) to their brother and brother-in-law Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 8 April 1806; Archibald Cameron (Lochwinnoch) to his brotherin-law Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 6 April 1807, file 5; ‘The Brodie Family’, in William Henry Wood (ed.), The Storied Province of Quebec: Past and Present, Vol. 5 (Toronto, 1931-2), pp. 641-2; Sellar, The History of the County of Huntingdon, p. 275; Carman Miller, ‘John Boston,’ in Frances Halpenny (ed.), Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. 9 (Toronto, 1976), pp. 61-2. James Cameron (Lochwinnoch) to his uncle Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 22 March 1834, file 5. Ibid., 21 March 1825, 8 August 1829, file 5. Archibald Cameron (Lochwinnoch) to his brother-in-law Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 6 April 1807, file 5. Jean and Elizabeth Brodie (Lochwinnoch) to their brother Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 28 April 1816, file 5. James Cameron (Lochwinnoch) to his uncle Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 8 August 1829, file 5. Fitzpatrick highlighted a similar feature of the Irish letters he studied, in Oceans of Consolation, p. 20. John Allan (New York City) to his friend Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 7 May 1846, file 8b. Margaret Brodie Sloan (Lochwinnoch) to her cousin Ann Brodie (Montreal), 13 August 1824, file 4. William Caldwell (Lochwinnoch) to his former townsman Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 16 July 1814, file 2. Ibid., 10 February 1817, file 8a. Jean Laird (Kilmalcolm, Scotland) to her cousin Ann Brodie (Montreal), 5 August 1845, file 11. James Borland (Kilmarnock, Scotland) to the acquaintance of his deceased father-in-law Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 26 July 1834, file 11. Margaret Brodie Sloan (Lochwinnoch) to her cousin Ann Brodie (Montreal), 20 March 1852, file 11.

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68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

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Andrew Lindsay (Howwood, Scotland) to his cousin Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 15 April 1820, file 1. Robert Brodie (Saltcoats, Scotland) to his half-brother Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 4 April 1820, file 7. Margaret Brodie Sloan (Lochwinnoch) to her cousin Ann Brodie (Montreal), 12 August 1853, file 11. In March 1841, for example, Rev. Thomas Alexander revealed that he was intending to return home to Scotland for a short stay over the summer. Thomas Alexander (Coburg, Upper Canada) to his acquaintance Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 16 March 1841, file 8b. Jean Katrick (Kilbarchan, Scotland) to her brother-in-law Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 16 March 1829, file 6a. Elizabeth Burns Miller (Cupar, Fife, Scotland) to her friend Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 27 March 1833, file 10. Mrs. Caldwell (Neilston, Scotland) to her husband’s former employer, Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 18 August 1832, file 1. Margaret Brodie Sloan (Lochwinnich) to her cousin Ann Brodie (Montreal), 12 August 1853, file 11. Andrew Lindsay (Howwood, Scotland) to his cousin Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 15 April 1820, file 1; Andrew Lindsay (Barnet, U.S.A) to Hugh Brodie, 13 February 1837, file 8b. Eliza (Woodstock) to her aunt’s cousin, Ann Brodie (Montreal) 22 June [mid1850s], file 8b. John Cochran (New York) to his friend Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 17 July 1826, New York, file 1. Ibid., 14 April 1828, file 1. Ibid., 24 March 1829, 4 November 1829, 5 October 1831, file 1. Ibid., 4 November 1829, 13 September 1825, 14 April 1828, file 1. Ibid., 17 July 1826, file 1. Elizabeth Burns Miller (Cupar, Scotland) to her friend and former Montreal neighbour Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 21 March 1830, file 10. James Croil, The Life of Alexander Mathieson, D.D: Minister of St. Andrew’s Church, Montreal (Montreal, 1870), pp. 59-60. Elizabeth Burns Miller (Cupar, Scotland) to her friend Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 27 March 1833, file 10. Ross Robertson (Fosbar, Scotland) to the relative of his neighbours Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 31 March 1834, file 11. J. C. Rinsdale (Stonehaven, Scotland) writing on behalf of Mrs Law whose brother was known to Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 6 May 1841, file 11. James Cameron (Quebec City, Lower Canada) to his uncle, Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 15 July 1823, file 5. J. Simpson (Coteau du Lac, Lower Canada) to his neighbour Hugh Brodie (Montreal), 25 February 1834, file 8b.

7 SCOTTISH VOICES AND NETWORKS IN COLONIAL AUSTRALIA Eric Richards Scots were ubiquitous in the invasion and Europeanization of the Australian continent. They came among the motley imperial people who appropriated the lands, first in the convict colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, and subsequently in the interiors of the spreading colonies.1 There might be no particular reason to differentiate the Scots from the other settlers were it not for the claim that they exerted a special influence in the story of colonial Australia. Typically, as one Englishman in early Port Phillip remarked enviously, to be ‘a Scotchman’ seemed to be ‘in itself a sort of passport to fortune’.2 With the worldly success of Australian Scots came other claims: that Scottish institutions, values, and affiliations gave them a head start in the colonies. In Melbourne, Scots banded together to help fellow Scots who were distressed at home, and also to help new colonists arriving from Scotland ‘to provide a congenial circle for all Scots in Melbourne. Only among their own kind could the Scots feel at home’.3 Though mainly Lowlanders, their reputation for ‘clannishness’ was broadly understood: ‘the tie of nationhood was almost equivalent to that of kinship’.4 They were noted for their enthusiasm for ‘genealogies, origins, and connexions and an elaborate sense of kin’.5 Contemporaries testified to the skill, determination, and cohesiveness of Scots colonists. Implicitly, Scots were not only distinctive but were also able to construct better immigrant networks. Every sort of functional network was at a high premium in colonization.6 The dispersed nature of colonial settlement created centrifugal forces, most obviously in the headlong expansion of pastoralism from the late 1820s and in the anarchic goldrushes of the early 1850s.7 Networks among Scots and their fellow colonists counteracted the effects of dispersion. Convergences of colonists gave a spontaneous sense of affinity, while networks of sentiment held families and neighbours together for mutual

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support and spiritual comfort in an alien world. When Hugh Watson, an assisted immigrant, arrived in Adelaide in 1839 he wrote home to say that ‘There are a great many Scotsmen here which are all so kind one with another and … fond of talk of home and their father’s house’. He reassured his parents back in Scotland that they were emphatically not ‘poor creatures, strangers in a strange country – friendless and penniless’. Indeed they had God and their friends for their support.8 More directly, functional networks were those that comprised working arrangements in the practical business of colonization: mobilizing enterprise, capital, and labour for dynamic Scottish families and their associates. The connecting tissue of kinship and homeland among expatriate Scots created effective frameworks attuned to the colonial environment, and appear to have been male-dominated.9 This chapter explores several models of immigrant networks in operation in Scottish Australia: it examines their functions and effectiveness in colonial society; it also listens to the voices of Scottish immigrants for evidence of their sense of national affinity in the work of colonization. Networks, formal and informal, were vital tools in the practical business of long-distance emigration and the Scots were ideal exemplars of the broader story and of the typology of migrant networks at large. Some networks were more instrumental than others; some operated in narrow localities, but others stretched far beyond, even back to Scotland itself. Colonial Isolates Many Scots, however, coped with the rigours of colonial pioneering without any apparent supporting network. Twenty-five year old Farquhar McKenzie, from Kerrisdale near Gairloch, landed in Sydney in 1836 carrying family capital worth £2,000 to locate and manage ‘unappropriated land’ in the distant interior sheep country near Goulburn. Though he found a partner for his remote enterprise he was severely plagued with loneliness. His letters home complained of the long evenings alone, ‘there being nearly 14 hours of darkness and I am badly off for Books and still worse for companions, not having one’. His only comfort, he said, was the prospect of his brother Hector ‘coming down to this country and our one day, revisiting our native land’. His melancholy was re-doubled by financial decline in the early 1840s though he later recovered and eventually became reconciled to his exile.10 Un-networked Scots survived as colonial isolates. Nevertheless, their sentimental regard for Scotland worked as a model for fellow countrymen. One such Highland emigrant, ‘An Old Invernessian in Queensland’, voiced his feelings in a letter home in 1874 when, after many years in the sub-

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tropical reaches of the northern colony, he approached the age of seventy. His letter was crammed with good cheer, prosperity, and nostalgia, exhorting his fellow countrymen to emigrate to Queensland. He wallowed in vivid recollections of his schoolmasters in the old Academy Park, remembering nicknames (‘the soft-hearted, yet tawse-wielding, Campbell of Dores and Croy, and “Black Clark” and his thumbnail hacked through by mending pens’). The ‘Invernessian’ had tried to ‘transplant the North to this tropical land’. His colonial address was ‘Gairloch’ (named after the seat of the Ross-shire clan of the Mackenzies); his house was called ‘Applecross’, and his store was at ‘Seaforth’; his other property was called ‘Ord’, named after the man who had built the dykes on the River Ness at home in Inverness. This Queensland settler became a successful sugar producer and his entries at the recent Vienna Exhibition showed the best yields. He explained that ‘The vegetable growth here is amazing. All the grass is burned down in August and September, yet the growth [by January] is from six to eight feet’. He employed Kanaka labour, that is Pacific Islanders who spoke little English but were christianized. They and the local Aborigines were a challenge. As he put it: ‘When you have solved the problem of how to cleanse and christianize the Black Vennel and the Maggot, and other similar portions of the Highlands, we may be able to solve the problem of the Blacks in Australia!’. But most of all he urged Scottish emigration: ‘if Inverness cannot support and find room for her native citizens, there is here ample room for her native citizens enough for generations yet unborn. We have twelve thousand acres of our own – quite a territory’.11 There were other Scots equally isolated along the frontier with little connection with any support system, Scottish or otherwise.12 The McKinlay case was an example. The son of a Clydeside ferryman, John McKinlay (1819-1872) was inspired by a successful uncle in New South Wales who indeed sponsored McKinley and his brother to the colony, but had returned home before their arrival at the end of the 1830s. John’s brother Alexander McKinlay wrote home in 1840 from Tuggeranong in the Monaro: I feel anything but comfortable here not knowing a single soul except those met in business. You cannot form the slightest idea of the hardship a person without capital must endure in this country. In fact I would never advise a respectable person whose views carry him higher than shepherding or stockkeeping to come out here without some of the needful.13

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Alexander McKinlay moved to Hobart where he knew a friend from Scotland, but mysteriously died by drowning in 1841. John McKinlay eventually became a remarkable explorer of northern Australia.14 The man who could face extreme isolation and survive alone was evidently bestequipped for the work of primary exploration. The ‘Old Invernesssian’ and John McKinlay were solitary voices outside the mainstreams of Scottish emigration, men not normally caught in the webs of interacting migrants’ circles. Networks generate documentation because migrants used their correspondence to oil the wheels of settlement, adaptation, and colonial advancement. Beyond such networks the singular migrant was mostly silent and therefore lost to posterity. Moreover, immigrants rarely articulated their direct expectation of, or reliance on, networks: they assumed friendship and mutual assistance without converting the process into a clear calculation. The nearest to selfconscious network-making were those immigrants, usually of commercial or gentlemanly society, who arrived in the colonies equipped with ‘introductions’ to people of their own class who possessed influence in the colony. This was a well-acknowledged mode, often effective, and demonstrated considerable class-solidarity, yet it was by no means peculiar to the Scots. Long-Distance Family Enterprise Within its first fifty years the convict colony of New South Wales eventually developed a vigorous private sector, and the system of free land grants (which prevailed until 1831) attracted a disproportionate number of Scots from the start.15 Many of them reached the colony after military service and especially by way of India which thereby linked Scottish enterprise to the remotest corner of British trade. The international mercantile network had been pioneered by Scots in the Atlantic trade and, by the late eighteenth century, it was stretched to the east. Connecting to Australia was a difficult and tenuous extension and required special commercial acumen and the most elastic of network connections. Robert Campbell (1769-1846), regarded as Australia’s first merchant, arrived in New South Wales in 1798 to investigate commercial opportunities for the Clydeside firm of Campbell and Co. of Calcutta. He was the perfect exemplar of the Scottish trading network, mobilizing colonial resources for international trade, and building up a network of capital sufficient eventually to challenge the local monopoly of the East India Company. His biographer remarks that the strength and loyalty of the Campbell family was channelled into the commercial house which always recruited its personnel from among its relations at home. The

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Campbell traders displayed cohesion and ‘a distinct preference for their own race … Their partners, if not actually members of their family, were Scots, and so were the captains of the ships they employed or hired, their up country and overseas agents were of the same race, and inevitably, so were their creditors’.16 Thus the family enterprise extended outwards from Calcutta to Sydney and beyond – connecting back to Greenock and Glasgow. India became a stepping-stone from Scotland to Australia and later to New Zealand and into the Pacific. These networks were perfectly explicit in the business and personal correspondence which flowed between the interacting parts of the transoceanic trading mechanism. Mercantile networks were not confined to the Lowlands. A West Highland connection persisted for over half a century from the 1770s to the 1850s, linking the Western Isles through India, Ceylon, and Batavia, eventually to South Australia, and was richly documented in the letters of MacLaine of Lochbuie.17 Similarly, Andrew Hay of Lerwick was engaged in the late 1830s in an ambitious enterprise to create business links between Singapore and Port Adelaide and experienced some of the frustrations intrinsic in very long distance networks. With widening connections with China, India, Padang, and Manila, Hay was interested in various commodities (including cheroots, opium, and tin) but his initiatives depended on intelligence and capital from his uncle in London and his father in Shetland. His family sponsors were tardy and he pleaded with them to send some ‘friends’ to bolster his business, noting that his current associates were always talking of ‘going home’.18 Family was the most reliable network for most colonists in Australia and as early as the 1820s the colonies began to draw men of capital and ambition, often born of reduced prospects at home in Scotland. At the start of this phase were several regimental personnel who saw the new colonies as an escape from impending bankruptcy and decline in Scotland, especially in the Highlands. One was Donald Macleod, a middle-ranking tacksman from Talisker in Skye, who had served in the 56th regiment but ran into the direst financial straits after the French War. He was forced to sell the family estate and by 1819 was living with his wife’s family in Coll. His brother Alexander, in service in India, already owned 7,000 acres at Claggan in Van Diemen’s Land. In February 1820 Macleod’s father-in-law told the Colonial Office that he would pay whatever was required to set his son-in-law up in the colonies, including his passage, and promising to dispatch a number of Highlanders with him. The party departed for Van Diemen’s Land on the Skelton in mid 1820: Macleod surrounded by his family, five children (the two eldest children followed separately), two servants and their ten children, a personal piper, and two maids.19 This

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was, in effect, a fully imported self-contained network. Macleod looked back on his emigration as a decision ‘To leave that land of my Fathers, kindred, and friends, in short to leave all that is dear to a man in this world’.20 He set up the Talisker station in the County of Cornwall in Van Diemen’s Land where the majority of the emigrants were drawn from Edinburgh, the Lothians, and Fife. All were men with capital able to qualify thereby for substantial free land grants. Macleod inherited his brother’s estate when he died in India in the mid-1820s and Talisker thereby became the second biggest property in Van Diemen’s Land. Talisker was not a tranquil estate. It employed 21 convicts in 1830 and the Macleods were harsh masters – they were floggers who generated mutinies among their assigned servants, and many absconded. Alexander Macleod was involved in allegations of assault against his servants. In 1829 there was a concerted convict-led attack on the property and the Macleods faced serious dangers. In the outcome, four of the mutineers and bushrangers were hanged, and one was reprieved.21 The Antipodean dream was close to collapse and these circumstances may have prompted the eventual dispersal of the Macleod family to Sydney and Port Phillip. In 1837 Macleod’s third son Norman, aged 21, crossed to Port Phillip with sheep and ‘was one of the first white men to walk around Lake Corangamite’. These secondary movements among colonists with capital were widespread in the 1830s, often lubricated by the inter-generational flows of capital and landholdings within extended families as the Macleods demonstrate. These family networks provided the experience and propulsive power for second-phase colonization and the rise of colonial dynasties.22 A similar pattern was followed by other Highland elements in Australia. The parish of Aird of Strath in Skye had links with New South Wales from as early as 1817 when Captain Lachlan MacAlister, an ensign in the 48th Regiment, began his service in the colony. He stayed on as a settler with a land grant of 810 hectares near Goulburn which he quickly expanded into a massive territory and was soon employing immigrant Highlanders. He experienced trouble with Aborigines and bushrangers and inflicted savage retaliation against the former. Meanwhile, from the same parish in Skye arrived four sons of Rev. John MacKinnon, ahead of another 25 families (148 people) who reached New South Wales from Aird of Strath in the summer of 1852, under the auspices of the Highland and Island Emigration Society.23 Though not necessarily networks, a growing familiarity linked Skye and New South Wales and these intercontinental connections were contingent on the simultaneous impact of sheep in both places.24

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Family networks, Highland or Lowland, provided models for each generation.25 John McConnell Black was born in Wigtown in 1855, son of a bank manager and procurator fiscal, and was partly educated in Germany before becoming a bank clerk in Scotland and England.26 His emigration to South Australia in 1877 was financed by his mother and probably prompted by the example of his uncle who had emigrated in the 1830s and ran a sheep station on Phillip Island, Victoria. The uncle was so successful that, in 1839, he returned to Scotland, bought a small estate at Torhousemuir, and ‘settled down to the life of a Scottish country gentleman, with good shooting and fishing on his land’.27 Similarly, a brother, an army surgeon, had returned from India to take up a practice in Skye. Young Black emigrated in style, his outfit including ‘a dozen new shirts, alpaca coats, white trousers, a single barreled muzzle loader, water proof leggings, etc’, and a letter of introduction to the Governor of South Australia. He followed the familiar rural ideal and set up as a pioneer farmer in Baroota in the extremely dry north of the colony and, poorly prepared, he failed. He paid too much for the land, yields were poor, and prices low. He sold out in 1883 at a loss and changed his career again, eventually becoming a journalist and a notable amateur botanist.28 The opening of the colonies to new pastoral enterprise drew young plutocratic immigrants from all over the British Isles by the 1830s, with a clear disproportion from Scotland.29 In August 1836, Lord Glenelg in the Colonial Office predicted that ‘the settlement at Port Phillip will probably be reinforced by a large number of Emigrants, and a considerable introduction of Capital from Scotland’, and by 1837 he regarded the colony as ‘a Scotch colony. Two thirds of the inhabitants are Scotch’.30 William Gairdner of French Island, a successful migrant from Glasgow, was involved in sheep farming and wool shipping in Port Phillip district. Like so many others, Gairdner was the bridgehead from Scotland, and his correspondence was a catalogue of subsequent migrations to Australia of his younger brothers and nephews.31 The incoming Scots possessed a sense of association though they were not necessarily coordinated into formal networks.32 Thus an immigrant arriving at that time remarked: As we neared Williamstown in our boat, we found a group of gentlemen, mostly Scotch, who were standing on the shore: and who, impatient to find old acquaintances among the new arrivals, did not wait even till the boat was moored, but loudly called for the names of passengers, and for a description of their persons … They gathered round us as we sprang on

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shore, most of them finding among us some one they knew at least by name. And all eagerly asking us questions about home.33 A few years later a visitor remarked, ‘the Philippians [are] … chiefly Scotch, [and] possessed all the ambition of that wonderful race’.34 The Western District squatters possessed a certain solidarity: in 1845 they raised a League and Resistance Fund against the imposition of taxes; of 53 subscribers at least 33 were Scots.35 Many of them had come to the colony to make quick money and return home with their winnings. Niel Black, the Highland pastoralist, testified to this sojourner mentality when he remarked that ‘although called Settlers we are never permanently settled anywhere; we have always an eye to returning home someday or other’.36 These were homeward-looking networks, their letters full of assumptions about returning to Scotland. The sojourner mentality was fully consistent with the encouragement of further emigration from Scotland, and the successful returnee offered a potent model to other aspiring Scots as several of the cases already cited demonstrate. But Niel Black, like many of them in the outcome, stayed on. He described his fellow squatters as ‘a set of money-making bachelors, half savages and half mad’.37 The same calculating psychology was replicated in a hundred cases, Scottish and otherwise. Abraham Nivison was born third son of a family of eleven children to a middling farming family in Burnmouth, six miles from Sanquhar in Nithsdale. He had poor prospects of improvement in Scotland and most of his family was dispersing. His brother-in-law had already successfully migrated to New South Wales in 1832. On the death of his father in 1837, Nivison was able to sell his farm and property, converting his inheritance into a capital sum of more than £3000, helped also by his wife’s money. They then emigrated to Australia. The local paper reported that the Nivisons took out with them ‘considerable property, which will be turned to good account when laid out in flocks and herds, with the management of which [he] is well acquainted’.38 They sailed out through Greenock on the Superb in 1839, by cabin class, costing about £50 each. On arrival they re-connected with his wife’s family in Sydney and leased a small farm in the Hunter Valley, rode out the crash of 1841, and then picked up the Ohio run in remote New England for £500. It was 200 miles from the nearest Presbyterian Church but by 1860 the Nivisons were running 30,000 sheep and fast acquiring land, raising a family, and developing their local church. In the surrounding population about 18 per cent were Scots.39 In this model it is clear that the original Nivison connection in the colony provided a demonstration effect to the

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prospective migrants as well as some modest practical support on their arrival. Thereafter the Nivisons made their own way, and converged in a remote place with other Scots to form new communities centred around their church. The network functioned by way of psychological and social support rather than as a direct commercial interaction. It was nevertheless instrumental in the making of solidarity in the pioneer settlements. Outback Networks The ‘centrifugal movement of pastoralists’ was most dynamic in the western plains of New South Wales and in the appropriation of the Darling Downs, a secondary movement out of the Moreton Bay District, often ahead of government sanction. This was raw pioneering characterized by extraordinary mobility and the rapid turnover of occupancy and ownership in which men from Aberdeen were conspicuous.40 Among them the most thrusting were the Leslies who came from a group of well-educated Lowland gentry farmers arriving in 1840.41 Family strategies and networks were crucial: the Leslies were responding to fears of decline at home, of ‘degentrification’, especially among second and later sons who saw little future in Aberdeen. The family withheld inheritance until a son, especially a second or later son, had proved himself, particularly if he engaged in overseas enterprise. There was a river of advice flowing from Leslie family contacts in Scotland, India, and New South Wales. This was the origin of the Leslie brothers’ venture to Australia in the late 1830s when some of the sons obtained assisted passages (despite their capital backing).42 The Leslie brothers pooled their patrimonies (of £1,000 each) in a joint venture in Australia to provide them with independence. They were already part of an informal network which connected them by marriage through a sister-in-law who was sister of Davidson, a partner of John Macarthur, one of the greatest of Australian pastoralists. Within six years of basic pioneering, the Leslies were operating five runs on the Downs, a territorial accumulation based on long lines of credit and intelligence. They recruited Aberdonians in their workforce and were linked with others in the colony. They weathered the twin problems of debt and depression in the early 1840s.43 At the centre of the Leslie story was the functional use of the family contacts and capital. Their movement into the Darling Downs was backed by their father and eldest brother drawing on the resources of a Canton business house. It was a closely articulated family network operating on a transoceanic scale made possible by the Pax Britannica and, of course, by the copious flow of family/business correspondence which documents the functioning elements of the network. It was essentially venture emigration:

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George Leslie remarked in July 1839 that his intention was to make ‘a little money’ to enable him ‘to spend it in old Scotland’. In 1847 he assured his parents again that ‘my intention is as it always was, if our prospects are realized, eventually to return home’. In 1853 he said he would prefer to be a ‘Laird on a moderate competency than with a large income in the Colony where we must always be liable to ups and downs’. He had forgotten the ups and downs of a lairdship in Scotland. In 1854 he sold out Canning Downs to his cousin for £50,000. It was not enough to buy a Scottish estate but he retired instead to London to cultivate chrysanthemums, and died there in 1860. Another brother returned home in poor health in 1846 and ‘spent several years enjoying the resorts of Europe’ and lived on until 1891.44 The astonishingly mobile Patrick Leslie returned to Scotland on leave and was thinking of joining the enterprise in Ceylon but decided on the Darling Downs instead, and was pleased with his decision. He wrote home (in about 1844): ‘This colony has now got over the crisis – we have a magnificent climate and our occupations much more suited to the generality of young men born and bred in the country parts of England and Scotland than growing coffee and spices and standing over nigger servants’.45 Patrick Leslie stayed on in Australia even though he once told an uncle that ‘I should not like to end my days in this felonious land and be laid below a gum tree’. He later declared that ‘I like the country better the longer I am in it and never would wish to live in England’.46 Lower down the social scale of expatriates from Aberdeen were the Stewarts, originally of Ballater, a family involved in marketing cattle and sheep to Edinburgh, Lanark, and Fife. Four sons (all born between 1800 and 1818), together with four sisters, set up in Brechin where all four brothers married. In 1839 the first of them, Alexander, emigrated to South Australia as an assisted migrant with his wife who already had a large family from a previous marriage. Stewart was classified a ‘shepherd’ but, like the Leslies, he evidently obscured his true occupational and economic status in order to secure a passage specifically reserved for labouring men. He possessed capital and soon acquired land in his own name and a large stock: within ten years he was established as a large sheep farmer on 63 square miles in the south east of the new colony at ‘Moy Hall’. He prospered and later retired to Adelaide where he died in 1883 worth £38,000. Alexander Stewart was the central column of the wider network of the family which joined him in sequence to Australia. This indeed was the most practical and the most common model of immigrant networks, operating through the assurance afforded within a close and trusting

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family. Its tentacles could reach thousands of miles from the original source. The Stewarts possessed crucial managerial expertise, experience of stock management, and estate functioning. 47 John, 15 years younger, followed in 1851 by way of Plymouth and soon proceeded to the goldfields and achieved enough success to go back to Scotland in 1854 ‘to get married’.48 He soon returned to Australia where he joined his brother at Naracoorte before taking up his own pastoral property at Messamurray, valued at more than £2,000; twenty years later he was still questing for advantage, building up reserves, and moving on to the Western District of Victoria. The third brother left Brechin with his wife and six sons in 1858 from Liverpool, writing a diary of the voyage, and immediately headed for Morphett Vale to join his uncle before moving to the south east to take up a sheep run 40 miles inland – a tract of 48 miles square named ‘Aroon’; in 1866 he sold the property to his brother John and also moved to the Western District of Victoria. The last of the four Stewart brothers arrived with seven of his children in South Australia in 1860. He was a widower who took up a sheep run in the southeast, adjacent to his brother William, 42 square miles in extent. He remarried in 1864 (to the daughter of a Soho bootmaker) and set up in fine style in Adelaide, where he died in 1885 worth £17,000. It was a further sign of the ‘cooperative effort,’ says the family biographer.49 Each phase in the story was set up by the predecessor, and the fraternal network extended into Victoria with each move. This was sophisticated agrarian venture capitalism in its most practical and long-distance form. Each move was a maximizing step in the ascent of the Stewarts, mainly without fanfare, the final account of their successes registered in the colonial probate records.50 The family network had secured the channels of emigration (itself a substantial test) and then ensured the security of rapid resettlement and advance, greatly lubricating the upward progression of the immigrants individually and collectively with pooled capital. Their internal family network was recorded in their letters which were, naturally, the tools of their migration and their mutual success. The acquisitive driving force of these pastoralists was equally captured in the story of the Stuart Brothers, Archibald and John, originally from Campbeltown in Kintyre, who first settled in Victoria, at Skipton, west of Ballarat, where they had ‘a beautiful farm’ in the great centre of the colonial wool industry. They were relatively untutored aspiring brothers. One of them wrote home in March 1862 that ‘you must fo[r]give us Victorians for we think nothing but making money’. Rather than returning to Scotland in 1862 (‘there is a great maney went home from hear to the exhibition this year’, he said), they decided instead to embark on a new

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pioneering venture in sheep farming in far distant Queensland. John had ‘Started of for a new Country called Queensland … it is long way from Victoria’. One of the brothers predicted, ‘that is where I expect to mak may pile’. The other brother reconnoitered in advance: ‘Queensland is a new country only fore or five years inhabited. John think to do fare better there than in Victoria but it is a great speculation we have done well in Victoria but the more we have the more we want’. They covered thousands of miles, travelling with a few dozen cattle and 1,000 sheep: ‘if we be as lukey in squatting as we were in farming there is no telling what we will rise to’. It took nine months to reach their northern destination, worn down by the heat but spurred on by the thought that they would make their fortune in Queensland. Not the least of their deprivations was the absence of women. As John reported: There is no of us mared yet. I do not know what is ther reason for it … I think we are al going to be old batchelors … But I am as far from getting married as ever … this country has noked all thought of marying out of my head and if you don’t send more out I am sure I cant get home for this [for] 7-8 years. Ideas of marriage led to thoughts of returning home or even the possibility of marrying an Irish woman, since single Irish women had emigrated to Australia in much larger proportions than English or Scottish women. More chilling were their encounters with the indigenous people en route: ‘John says the Natives wers no clothes ther. They are rather wild yet they shoot them lik Craws for they will do a way with them’.51 The best network for the intending squatter, in the raw business of pioneering in the remote and unofficial outback, comprised close and insular relatives especially if they possessed capital. It was family enterprise, usually advancing by stages in which capital, experience, intelligence, and ambition were pooled prior to the next venture. For their part, the Stuarts had come to regard themselves as assimilated colonials, able to distinguish themselves from their countrymen at home, and able to indulge in the prevailing disdain for the indigenous populations whom they decisively displaced. Recruiting Labour by Networks Scottish families in Australia clearly created informal networks. More formally articulated networks, notably Scottish-Australian companies from Edinburgh and Aberdeen, grasped commercial opportunities in Australia

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from the earliest moments.52 These companies linked remote investors in Scotland with much more remote locations in the outback, and recruited capital, managerial talent, and even labour, often deficient in rural Australia. A Scottish employer in New South Wales wrote back to the Highlands in 1838 saying that he could ‘find employment for as many shepherds and farm labourers as can be provided, at better wages than they can possibly procure at home and with infinitely better prospects’.53 This was always the greatest spur to emigration behind which were many webs of investment. George Russell of Golfhill was at the centre of such a Scottish web, the workings of which are richly documented in his correspondence which includes accounts of his subsequent return journey to Scotland.54 Born in 1812, Russell left school at 16 years of age after a good education and gained a practical knowledge of farming on his father’s farm four miles from Kirkcaldy. In 1830 he went to Edinburgh where he attended chemistry lectures. His father was a medium-sized farmer with 13 children, facing post-war difficulties and rising rents: he adjusted by reducing his lease but lost £3,000 in the process. One of the sons had already gone to Van Diemen’s Land in 1821 to manage the affairs of Captain Patrick Wood, a retired East India Company man, and he became the younger Russell’s conduit to Australia in July 1830. Russell soon joined the expansion of settlement in Port Phillip as a pioneering pastoralist. He was recruited by the Clyde Company and entrusted with their local management which he led to great success until its dissolution in 1856. Russell was a loyal member of the Presbyterian church and, like so many successful Scots in the colonies, connected to fellow Scots by commerce, marriage, religion, and education. He later returned home and died at Elie in Fife in 1891.55 Russell recruited Scots directly from home for his pastoral operations in Victoria, employing methods similar to those of another dominant Scottish figure in the Western District, Niel Black, a self-made Highlander who, in padrone style, imported Highland labour under the Bounty immigrant scheme. Black engaged his partner Gladstone in Scotland to make a careful selection of labour for his colonial properties, but he paid the lowest wages. In 1841 seven Highlanders were sent out (Black had wanted 12 of them) and they successfully demanded wages of £30 a year and £3 for their passage. To start with they worked well. Black reported from his Glenormiston property that the Highlanders had ‘commenced to save money at a noticeable rate’. In late 1842 he noted that ‘all the men I brought out [on the ship with him] have stock of their own now, and will be masters in less than three years’.56 The Highlanders took advantage of local

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opportunities and rose to be employers very quickly. But a few months after their arrival Black complained that Four of the Hired Servants sent from home have already bolted … I fear the Moral Character of most of them is of a very low order … They left me in the busiest Season of the year. Not together, but one after other while I am here 140 Miles from where I could get their places supplied.57 Then two more bolted and Black was left with only one of the original group. Moreover, he thought many of the immigrants in general were ‘very stupid and ignorant respecting the business at which they are employed’. Without improvement, he complained, ‘they will be no very great acquisition’.58 The squatters generally believed that too many Bounty immigrants were bolters and drunkards and had been corrupted by colonial conditions. But many of the immigrants bettered themselves very effectively, even without initial capital. Colonial settlement, as the cases of Black and Russell demonstrate, depended on personal contacts at home to prime the supply of labour to the colonies: these were functional networks. Angus McMillan, from Skye, became a phenomenally ruthless and successful pastoralist in Gippsland, setting up in several places including Bushy Park where he maintained large herds of cattle and sheep runs. He deliberately surrounded himself almost exclusively with fellow Highlanders who worked in every capacity. McMillan even hired the Port Phillip Club Hotel to ensure their accommodation until they were able to find employment. Similarly Lachlan Macalister made special efforts to recruit recent immigrants from Skye on his property on the Monaro. The bonds of kith and kin were strong but it is also clear that men like Macalister and McMillan regarded their fellow Highlanders as more tractable than other sources of labour. 59 Scottish labour possessed its own networks,60 even among young domestic servants. The Australian nomination systems – in effect a form of institutionalized chain migration whereby an immigrant sponsored a prospective emigrant and the colony paid most of the passage – depended on firm connections between home and away. Scottish domestic servants were in high demand in the nineteenth century. In South Australia in the 1870s the local Minister for Immigration urged an increase in the level of recruitment; the Agent-General in London was told by the Minister that ‘in my opinion more desirable immigrants than Scots cannot be found, and I would gladly encourage and facilitate their coming to this Colony, consequently I shall be glad if you will not overlook Scotch emigration’.61

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The colony appointed a Travelling Inspector of Emigrants in Scotland in 1877 and he made ‘special efforts’ to recruit domestic servants. He was able to raise the proportions of Scots among the immigrants above their national proportion for the only time in the entire century. A chief of the South Australia Caledonian Society, Hugh Fraser (Inverness-shire born), visited the Highlands for four months in 1882/3 and recruited more than 100 emigrants. He was a great believer in local agents to recruit in Scotland and the Society distributed handbooks to rural libraries in Scotland and to the Free and United Presbyterian Assemblies.62 Selected single women were up to 70 per cent of many of the intakes of Scottish assisted immigration to South Australia in the late nineteenth century.63 Here as elsewhere Scottish networks overlapped and interconnected with each other. Solidarity Among Highlanders Highlanders, on average, had more reason to depart the home country and fewer resources by which to emigrate than other Scots. Hector MacDonald emigrated from Gairloch to the Goulburn Plains in New South Wales in 1848. His letters home were read out to the community in Charleston and those he received from Gairloch painted a vivid picture of conditions in the Highlands at the time of the Famine. MacDonald was evidently at the centre of a network of Gairloch connections and he arranged passages to Australia for many of his brothers and cousins. One of them, Murdo Murdoch, left Gairloch in 1852 and, after a safe passage from Liverpool to Sydney, found employment as a shepherd. In his case the network proved unsatisfactory and he reported home that he had been let down by the people who had promised him assistance. Duncan MacDonald in October 1853 said that conditions in Gairloch were very poor and ‘that some people would do better in Australia if they would muster the courage to go’.64 Despite poverty and inertia, there were about 20,000 Highlanders in Australia in 1857.65 Most of them had benefited from special assistance through the Bounty Schemes of the late 1830s, by the Highland and Island Emigration Society in the early 1850s, and also by the energetic efforts of Rev. John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878). Lang casts a long shadow in Australian history, mainly as the vociferous Presbyterian scourge of Catholicism, which inevitably pitted him against the large Irish component in colonial society towards whom he was outspokenly aggressive. But he was also the conduit for bringing Scots to Australia in several formations during his long and controversial life. Lang was the determined and selfconscious centre of several networks from Scotland and also within the

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colonies. He was one of the earliest advocates of selective immigration: in 1830 he declared that ‘a moral reformation’ of the colony of New South Wales could be achieved only by educational measures and the introduction of ‘well-chosen’ migrants.66 The latter would also secure the Protestant character of the continent. Lang secured loans to bring out 140 Scottish families on condition that they repay their fares from their wages. Bounty ships conveyed 4,000 Scots between 1837 and 1840, many of them recruited in the Highlands (especially from Mull and Skye) during and after a widespread subsistence crisis. Lang used his own contacts to recruit some of these Highlanders and they believed that they would be able to settle as a contiguous community in the colony even though the assistance schemes were specifically designed to supply labour without restraint on movement between employers. The first Gaelic church service in Australia was performed at the Scots Church in Sydney in December 1837, and reported by the Sydney Gazette as ‘indescribably affecting’. One large party of Highlanders refused to be split up and demanded to be settled as a single community, with their clergyman, William McIntyre. They presented a petition representing that they had been induced to emigrate by the hope held out to them of being enabled to settle in one neighbourhood, so as to be within reach of religious ordinances administered in their Native Language – the only one understood by four fifths of their number, and praying the facilities to enable them to do so might be granted by the Government.67 In the event, 108 of them went to the estate of Lang’s brother Andrew Lang at Dunmore where they arrived in February 1838, after his offer to ‘receive them as tenants on terms acceptable to the emigrants themselves’.68 This arrangement was anathema to the colonial immigration policy and caused great umbrage among other employers who lost access to the new labour supply. Nor was Governor Gipps happy about the outcome and he told Glenelg in July 1838 that ‘considerable dissatisfaction has been expressed in this Colony at the manner in which a number of Emigrants [from] the ship “Midlothian” were disposed of, they having been settled as a Body ... and thus become occupiers of land on their own account, instead of being forced to work for wages as farm labourers’.69 It was nevertheless a manifestation of the strength of Highland communality pitted against the centrifugal forces of colonization. Lang’s immigrants displayed further cohesion in a secondary migration after their phase at

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Dunmore when they trekked to the Northern Rivers where they re-settled, especially at Wingham where they bought land. They carried with them strong Free Church principles and their solidarity survived recurrent sectarian fissures which afflicted many Highland immigrant groups.70 Lang’s network worked efficiently despite his rancorous and divisive personality. His intermediary role in many emigrant passages was highly practical in terms of the organization, funding, and the confidence he imparted to prospective Scottish immigrants. It was not confined to labouring people. The Chaseley was one of three ships chartered by Lang in 1849 to convey parties of well-chosen, superior emigrants, intended to people the towns being formed in the newly opened district of Moreton Bay, 500 miles north of Sydney. One of the passengers was Mary McConnel of Edinburgh, recently married. The McConnels occupied two cabins aboard the Chaseley: ‘we found a good number of nice people among the emigrants, who had availed themselves of Dr Lang’s arrangements with the British Government that on payment of £200 they should have landprivileges in Brisbane’. Lang attended the embarkation of the Chaseley and reassured the migrants, emphasizing that ‘They were all of one faith, and he trusted that brotherly-kindness would bind them together as fellow passengers’. David McConnel himself employed Scottish labourers and sold land cheaply to deserving immigrants from the later Lang ships.71 In this case family, church, and employment sustained a continuing nexus with Scotland and facilitated further flows of migrants and assisted their adaptation to the colony. Gaelic Voices Scottish networks in colonial Australia were distinctive and persistent when they were associated with the Presbyterian Church and with the Gaelic language, especially where these connections were reinforced by commercial and educational functions. Presbyterian values gave good support to colonial endeavour and blessed its material success. Presbyterians were strong in the Riverina, in New England, along the north Coast, and in Macquarie County, and on the Clarence River where they were at least 20 per cent of the colonial population.72 The Scottish churches at home also promoted the Australian connections and helped to ensure ‘a continuity of the distinctive national identity’ and ‘a Presbyterian vision of this new settlement’ which was the proclaimed policy of the Church of Scotland Colonial Committee. The Church provided comforting propaganda to temper the shock of exile which was further cushioned with the institutions of home, so that ‘there will be no violent change in their habits of life’.73

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The Presbyterian networks were sustained by church ministers who were relatively numerous in comparison with Scotland. Scottish migrants recruited ministers who then recruited further migrants. Lang alone, in 1849, brought out 22 ministers and theological students aboard the Clifton. But in the 1850s the Free Church recruited much more effectively than the Church of Scotland.74 The conspicuous philanthropy of successful Scottish colonists was influential in funding the churches, which sometimes became a parade of wealth and piety. Landowners were involved in self-conscious charity networks – thus George Russell of Golfhill sent circulars to fellow Scottish squatters of the Western District of Victoria to raise funds for a Theological Hall, and they responded with princely sums.75 It was an early expression of the expansive tradition of Scottish philanthropy in the colonies. Maintaining Scottish solidarity was nevertheless an uphill task in a community much dispersed over very large distances and racked by doctrinal conflict. Scottish colonists faced the great schism in the Scottish Church, which coincided with the formation of several Australian colonies. There was clearly a widespread feeling among many Scottish immigrants that they need not replicate the dire division of ‘The Disruption’ and that they could transcend those divisions and maintain their immigrant solidarity. It was a false hope. Scottish networks tended to bifurcate and differentiate, and the colonies indeed witnessed a replication of the divisions of the homeland. In South Australia a meeting of the Church of Scotland in January 1844 passed a motion ‘expressing the fact that causes of the Disruption had no place in South Australia’.76 But division soon broke out and became a continuing issue in the colonial newspapers. Thus Scottish patronage scandals were repeatedly ventilated in the press. The foundation stone of a Chalmers Church was laid in 1850 and there were many rural churches established in distinctly Scottish settlements such as Ardtornish, Inverbrackie, Strathalbyn, and Mount Crawford. South Australia was a small colony with about 10 per cent Scots in the population. But between 1839 and 1900 at least 80 Presbyterian ministers were at work, of whom more than 50 were born in Scotland. They divided into three branches – the Presbyterian Church of South Australia, the United Secession Church of Scotland, and the Free Church of Scotland, and each was linked with counterparts in eastern Australia. They repeatedly sought recruits from Scotland, appealing to Scottish synods for new clergy. The realities of colonial life worked against total Presbyterian conformity. In the 1830s some Scottish immigrants forsook the Scottish Church for Catholicism, much to the fury of J. D. Lang. Wealthy Scots such as Robert

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Campbell and Alexander Brodie Spark defected to Anglicanism and others joined the Methodists.77 Some, like Jane Ryrie in 1838, regarded the splitting tendencies in the Scots Church as distasteful. She wrote, ‘It is disgraceful how the Presbyterian ministers are quarrelling … Really, you have no pleasure in going to hear them and their preaching is so bad it does not make up for it’.78 Facing a shortage of Scottish women many Scotsmen were attracted to Irish women who were there in larger numbers. But mostly the Presbyterians prevailed, despite disunion and distance. Presbyterianism was a trace element for Scots in Australia; as W. W. Phillips says, ‘Presbyterians were as Scottish as Catholics were Irish’.79 Nevertheless Scottish Presbyterian networks were inevitably fragmented in the vital decades of colonization. Gaelic-speaking Scots had most reason to cling together. The 5,000 recruited by the Highland and Island Emigration Society in the early 1850s were expected to relieve the severe labour shortages created by the goldrushes. It was assumed that the Highlanders possessed strong family bonds and were less likely to abscond to the gold fields; they would instead work reliably for the farmers. In the outcome many of these immigrants arrived as the labour shortages ended and their communality made them less mobile for the purposes of resettling. One group, who had experienced a hellish outward passage aboard the Hercules, faced language and unemployment problems on arrival in Adelaide. They were dispatched several hundred miles to the southeast of the colony in 1855. This cluster of 28 families – 147 people – settled at Robe and created the Gaelicspeaking Free Church and built a chapel by 1858. A typical and vivid expression of the tight network of the immigrant community, the chapel represented not only practical co-operation but also a substantial sacrifice of resources and personal income. It was an investment of the first fruits of emigration at a time when the people were least able to afford the sacrifice.80 At Inverbrackie, the Caledonian Church was established for the ‘meeting of the Scotch Settlers’ and its leaders successfully applied to the government for a grant of 20 acres of Crown land for ‘kirk, manse and cemetery’.81 At Yankalilla Charles Robertson gave land to the Free Church. At Naracoorte in 1856 the congregation sent home the request for a minister with the condition that he could preach in Gaelic as well as English. Another group of Highlanders arrived in Adelaide on the Royal Albert in 1854 and settled four miles north of Clare at White Hut. They too built a church and classroom themselves at that place, and one of their number gave land for a cemetery. Eventually they gained the services of Rev. John McDougall, an Edinburgh-educated minister who preached in Gaelic at

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White Hut and at Clare in the 1870s. He was, however, subsequently ‘disowned by some of the Gaelic folk because of his Universalist views’, and he left for Tasmania.82 In the face of doctrinal conflict some of the Scottish networks ossified, especially where there was no fresh replenishment of Highlanders from home. Dispersion was the enemy of continuing communality. One of the 1850s immigrants, John Mackinnon, wrote home not long after his arrival: Now my dear brother, although you had come along with me there was no chance of our keeping together the first year, for all the people that came with me from Raasay and Skye [are] scattered throughout the country, here and there, none of them nearer to me that 20 miles, and every one a shepherd.83 There were, nevertheless, pockets of Highlanders in several places – notably at Maclean on the Lower Clarence River in New South Wales, and at Portland and Hamilton in Victoria.84 Some of the Highlanders who had arrived in the late 1830s in New South Wales, after a dozen years, moved north to create a secondary concentration of Gaelic speakers. One was Donald McLeod who had written in 1838 to the Inverness Courier: Now I think this [Australia] is the best place in the world, and I think it is another world; for when you have the night, we have the day. The man you see in the moon, we see him here his two feet abut and his head down … Send Angus and John … My master will hire Angus for the garden, and will give him good wages, the gardeners here have from £35 to £40 with very good board.85 McLeod was a pioneer on the Manning River and had cut his way into the area with bullock and dray in 1851 to take up land in the Crown Lands Sales. It was part of the Scottish invasion and most of the land, 11 out of 15 blocks, was taken up by Presbyterians. The Maclean district was opened up in 1851 by a mixed group of land seekers including the Liddells, McDermids, MacDonalds, Stuarts, and Stewarts. The first of them were the Lobban family in 1851.86 Alexander Lobban was the first English-speaking elder in the new community and a zealous Free Presbyterian whose favourite reading was reported to be ‘The Ten Years Conflict’ of the Church of Scotland’. Lobban had been sentenced in Aberdeen in April 1829 to seven years transportation for forgery. He arrived in Sydney as a convict and, according to his convict indent, was

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aged 29, literate, Protestant, a native of Banff and a ploughman, 5’10” in height, and of sallow complexion. He served his sentence and was given his ticket of leave in 1834; his wife and son then arrived and they became part of the Presbyterian congregation, and in 1837 Lobban was working at Comer Allyn. The family moved to Manning River in 1846 where, after two weeks trekking, Lobban bought land. He was now aged 46 with six children and his property became the focal point of community’s spiritual and educational life. He died in 1876, highly respected, eulogized as an upright and pious man amongst a community which was apparently unaware of his criminal past.87 The Church was the linchpin of the local network. The Gaelic language survived into the twentieth century among the Free Presbyterians who were noted for the rigour of their principles and their moral seriousness: ‘the old Scotch people in the Manning then could hardly speak any English’, it was recollected. Strict observance was demanded, and the congregation venerated the minister with gifts and salutations.88 The fierce maintenance of standards of behaviour excluded all innovation.89 Some of the local Aborigines knew Gaelic, including two who had lost their mothers ‘and had been brought up by a worthy Scotch couple in a home where Gaelic was spoken’.90 In the 1860s Colin Stewart was recorded as lost in the bush and was rescued by ‘friendly local Aborigines who spoke to him in Gaelic’ and led him to the Mackenzie homestead.91 The Presbyterian Church and education created the tightest form of network, sometimes associated with an insistence on Gaelic services.92 But many of the Australian Gaelic communities witnessed a continuous decline of the language in the later nineteenth century. Even the Maclean district suffered decline despite a ‘vain effort to preserve the language of their fore-fathers’.93 The lack of new blood from home brought linguistic desuetude and there was an ‘irreversible slide to English usage even in services’.94 This, of course, was not unique to the Highlanders, and the same fate awaited the Welsh language in Australia.95 Amalgamation was a temporary defence against language loss. Thus, in South Australia, some of the White Hut people moved on to Spalding, and in 1877 a memorial signed by 90 people asked for affiliation with the Morphett Vale Free Church, but there was a clear decline as the decades passed and the language faded.96 The Spalding community ceased to meet after 1894. Networks could only be prolonged if warranted by need and numbers. Gaelic faced a serious struggle for survival at the best of times and, as in Scotland itself, it was often equated with economic and social backwardness. There were hints of a mutual contempt and hostility between Highlanders and Lowlanders in the colonies.97 In July 1857

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Alexander McIntyre in New South Wales noted the provision of bi-lingual services, observing: the English portion cannot and will not be satisfied with half service, and there are many Highlanders who would be ashamed to be seen going to hear a Gaelic sermon. Dr Mackay does not at any time attempt to preach in Gaelic in Sydney because he is afraid his doing so will operate injuriously.98 By about 1870 Gaelic had ‘virtually disappeared as a publicly spoken language in Australia’.99 In mid-century there had been fire in the bellies of the Gaelic preachers in Victoria but, by 1878 in Geelong, there was no one at McIntyre’s funeral ‘able to pray in Gaelic’.100 As Rowland Ward says, ‘Gaelic communities were even less able to isolate themselves from Anglicising influences in Australia than they were in the Scottish Highlands. Gaelic services after 1890 were rare indeed’.101 The authority of the ministers was never absolute. The attempt to induce the Highland immigrants of the early 1850s to repay the costs of their passages (in order to assist new intakes of poor Highlanders as a sort of ‘perpetual emigration fund’) was a total failure. ‘Most of the Highlanders who had accepted aid to bring them to the colonies repudiated their obligation’ and they were roundly denounced from the pulpit and the newspapers, but to no effect.102 The authority of the networked Church was evidently far from comprehensive. A Localized Network: The Kirkcaldy Connection Immigrants from the British Isles often gravitated to certain locations in Australia though this did not necessarily imply a formal articulated network or a specific coalescence. Kirkcaldy, and the county of Fife, were not commonly regarded as a centrifugal force in the progress of capitalist enterprise, but they sustained influential if little remarked upon links with Australia.103 James Graham (1819-1898) was a young bachelor clerk, the welleducated son of a family of bankers and solicitors in Cupar. He was a bourgeois on the make, and considered himself a gentleman. In 1838 he resigned his clerkship to emigrate to Sydney. His family was known to Lt Governor La Trobe and they entrusted sums of money to the son to be invested in the colony. Graham travelled in style aboard the Alfred with its 50 crew, 23 cabin passengers, and 280 emigrants. To Graham, class loomed larger than nationality.104 He reported his fellow passengers thus:

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They were so very unlike ‘a very nice party of cabin passengers on board, sitting down 23 in number every day to dinner’.106 When he reached Sydney, Graham made good use of his introductions and capital: he set up agencies to buy and sell land, demonstrated a willingness to pioneer in the outback, and cultivated amiable connections with fellow Scots.107 But he was unimpressed with the colonial population and reported home that ‘It must be remembered what the generality of the white population of the Colony consists of, which is of the most debased and vilest dregs of Great Britain and Ireland’. The indigenous people were, he said, ‘a miserable, degraded race of beings’.108 Graham consciously sought Scottish workers in his operations, even ex-convicts. He was delighted to find three Scots among his men, two of them Fifemen: ‘They are worth their weight in gold, they are so decent respectable and hardworking fellows. Of course the two from Fife are my right-hand men – I could entrust them with anything’.109 When the Midlothian arrived he was desperate for labour and he met the ship at the quayside in the hope of obtaining Scotsmen: he was, however, ‘very much disappointed at meeting with no Fife folks’. Nevertheless there were so many Scots in the port that ‘I fancied myself in Scotland again from hearing so many Scotch songs, and toasts and sayings. We sat 30 to dinner and every one was Scotch’.110 In Melbourne he was also glad to meet more Scots – from the cabin class – ‘a remarkable gentlemanly set of young men. I now know them all as well as if we had been all our days together. Nearly two thirds of them remain here, quite charmed with the place’.111 He evidently cultivated his Scottish connections to relieve his loneliness and develop his commercial networks. Graham eventually became extremely successful, remained nostalgic about Cupar, and maintained a correspondence with home over sixty years. In South Australia the connection with Fife and Kirkcaldy was much denser though not co-ordinated by any clear network. David Murray

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(1829-1907), born in Anstruther, arrived in 1853 with his brother and established a retail drapery in Adelaide. Succeeding, they expanded into the wholesale business in 1855, and in 1867 set up a clothing manufactory. They also developed an import-export business with their father acting as general-agent in England: by 1897 they had branches all over Australia from Perth to Brisbane. Murray became a benefactor and politician, greatly helping the Presbyterian Church, public libraries, and the University of Adelaide. He made eleven round trips to England where he died in his Bayswater home, in 1907, leaving £203,669.112 A parallel career was followed by David and James Fowler, also natives of Anstruther who had attended Pathhead Free Church and Kirkcaldy Burgh School. A wholesale grocer from Fife, David Fowler arrived in Adelaide in 1854 with wife, children and servants, and goods worth £2,300 for his new retail business. The family pooled its resources of £20,000, entered the wholesale business, and established its own import trade with a family base office in London. They too were extremely successful, bought pastoral properties, and distributed largesse in Adelaide and at home. Fowler gave £5,000 for a new town hall in Cellardyke before he died in London in 1881. Fowler and Murray were, in the end, eclipsed in the colony by another Fifeman. Sir Thomas Elder of Kirkcaldy, pastoralist, accumulated enormous wealth in the colony. He became a leviathan of philanthropy. Much of his money went into Adelaide University but he also lived in great style in his baronial mansion in the Adelaide Hills. Elder left £815,000 and, in his bequests, was an Australian version of Andrew Carnegie. The success of these men was monitored in a remarkable series of letters written from Adelaide to Kirkcaldy over a period of more than fifty years under the title of ‘Letter from Australia’. Starting in 1854 and published in the Fifeshire Advertiser these letters were written first by Andrew Carmichael (1829-1916) of Pathhead in Kirkcaldy and later by J. S. Knox of Link Town, Kirkcaldy, often under the signature ‘An Auld Freend’. Carmichael, on his outward journey, reported that ‘We have a goodly number of Fife folk [going] to the Golden Land’.113 In Melbourne he soon found ‘our old friends, Mr Thomas Brown of the Kirkcaldy Young Man’s Association and Mr Paterson, who are doing honorably, the former in an extensive grocery establishment, and the latter a clerk’. He was also able to report that ‘the Free Church under the able ministry of the Rev Dr Cairns have just laid the foundation stone of a splendid stone church, named Chalmers’ Church, their large wooden one being well filled, often crowded. A general desire for unity prevails among all the different bodies, which we trust to see carried out’.114 In 1855 he began farming at Stockport in South Australia where he built a schoolroom and regularly conducted services.

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His wife was from Perth and had arrived in South Australia as a small child in 1840: they married in Morphett Vale in 1856.115 Carmichael eventually had eleven children and died aged 87 in 1916. Carmichael’s was the voice of Kirkcaldy in Australia and his letters provided realistic and trustworthy intelligence for intending emigrants. He told them that ‘From the intense heat of the sun, many, among whom are a few of our townsmen, are now in the Lunatic Asylum, where, by kind and mild treatment, they yet recover’.116 His stock anti-Irish observations highlighted the advantage of Scots who were preferred by colonial employers.117 He pointed out that in the Easter holidays, when public works were generally suspended, ‘Scotsman are to be noticed as lustily at their labour as ever’.118 His successor, Knox, in 1867, observed of a local agricultural show that it was gratifying ‘to see so many faces who formerly resided in the Long Town’.119 He sustained his bantering jocose communications with his fellow ‘Kirkcaldyites’, painting a picture of colonial life, partly for entertainment, partly for nostalgia, partly for information. He was proud of the colonial success of people from Pathhead (like the local businessmen, David Tweedie, John Wyles, and Mr Speedie, all of Linktown).120 The use of Scottish machinery was also ‘helping to build up Australia,’ as he put it in 1890.121 Knox recorded the bickering in the Scottish churches and especially among the Free Church.122 He circulated news from among Kirkcaldy people, notably accounts of a murder in 1870 at the Harbour Head in the Long Town which ‘passed from mouth to mouth by many a former Longtownian here as if it could not be credited’.123 The Kirkcaldy connection in Australia was an intensely localized network, unassuming and sentimental in character, barely visible to outsiders, and important primarily in sustaining a familiarity and confidence between the two ends of the world. Affinity and Function Networks among Scots in colonial Australia evidently performed many functions, some instrumental in the success of the many migrations from all parts of Scotland. Leslie Page Moch, argues that migrant networks typically consist of ‘the human contacts that cushion such a move’. They take two forms: the first entails a ‘personal information field’ in which individual trajectories are linked with family, information, and connections. The second consists of the ‘strength of weak ties’ which depend on acquaintance, or mild affinity, and prove useful in adjusting to a new place.124 Both associations facilitate migration and provide support at a destination, and both are well exemplified in the Scottish experience in Australia. The voices and networks typical of Scottish immigrants in

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Australia were not unusual among immigrant groups at large in the British world of the nineteenth century. Virtually every form of Scottish network documented in this chapter possessed a parallel English, Welsh, and Irish counterpart or variant, and this must diminish the claim of any of them to exceptionality. But some of the features were distinctive to the Scots: their business links, their churches, schools, and their literacy125 stand out in this matrix. They formed durable webs of contact by which newcomers came to the colony, found work, changed jobs, and created a new social existence. Networks among migrants are often a ‘cornerstone of migration history’.126 Yet many migrants prospered without such networks, and there is a danger of endowing the idea of ethnicity with automatic network status.127 As we have seen, many colonists in Australia (including Scots) survived without visible support systems. Where networks existed they performed different functions in colonial life. Moreover, and in a wider sense, there were larger networks relevant to the migrants of all sorts. Indeed, to adjust the metaphor, the Pax Britannica operated as a protective canopy for British emigrants in general.128 Localized networks, among which those of Scots were conspicuous, worked beneath this canopy and equally facilitated the grand enterprise of emigration. Notes I am grateful to Dr Robert Fitzsimons for his assistance in the preparation of this paper. 1 The rigorous impact of Scots in Victoria is best described by Don Watson, Caledonia Australis (Sydney, 1984). 2 Charles Burchett writing to his parents, quoted in Paul de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen (Melbourne, 1980), p. 145. The image of the colonial Scot was consolidated by Anthony Trollope who toured Australia in 1873 to visit his own colonial son and famously observed that ‘In the colonies those who make money are generally Scotchmen, and those who do not are mostly Irishmen’. Quoted by Eric Richards, ‘Australia and the Scottish connection, 1788-1914’, in R. Cage (ed.), The Scots Abroad (London, 1984), p. 136. 3 de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen, p. 147. 4 J. H. Kerr, quoted in ibid., p. 146; see also p. 167. 5 de Serville, Port Phillip Gentlemen, p. 49. 6 For a useful introduction to the idea of social networks see Alison Park and Ceridwen Roberts, ‘The ties that bind’, in Alison Park et al (eds), British Social Attitudes: The 19th Report (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 185-207. They note the overwhelming importance of family in modern social networks and also consider the methods for measuring groups which are ‘network rich’ and those which are ‘network poor’. See also Charles Tilly, ‘Transplanted

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8 9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17

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networks’, in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (Oxford, 1990), pp. 79-95. The problems of colonial dispersion were captured in an advertisement in the Hobart Gaelic newspaper An Teachdaire Gaidhealach, 1 April 1857: ‘Missing Friend – John McDairmid, who left the Parish of Waternish, in the Island of Skye, Inverness-shire, Scotland, in the year 1832, for the Australian colonies, and supposed to be now in Port Phillip; is earnestly requested to communicate with his Father and Mother (Donald and Sarah McDairmid) residing at New Norfolk, Tasmania; who are most anxious to hear from him’. Hugh Watson to his parents, 9 September 1839, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, Watson Letters, D6075. Networks in Victoria tended to coalesce in a formal way in the Melbourne Club which gathered the most powerful into its membership, including a disproportion of Scots. See Eric Richards, ‘Ironies of the Highland exodus, 1740-1900’, in Wilfred Prest and Graham Tulloch (eds), Scatterlings of Empire (St Lucia, Qld, 2001), pp. 15-8, also published in Journal of Australian Studies, 68 (2001). Quoted in W. K. Hancock, Discovering Monaro (Cambridge, 1972), p. 35. The distribution of Scots in colonial Australia is subjected to the unusual analysis of gravestones by Alyson L. Greiner and Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, AngloCeltic Australia, Colonial Immigration, and Cultural Regionalism (Santa Fe, 2002). They conclude that ‘Scots were better represented in most of Victoria and several contiguous parts bordering South Australia and New South Wales, as well as in the Northern Rivers and New England districts’. I am grateful to Dr Janet Doust for this reference. Inverness Courier, 9 April 1874. My thanks are due to Dr Malcolm BangorJones for this reference. The dispersion of Scots along the frontier was encountered in the memories of Donald McIntyre (1851-1927) from Stuckendroin in Loch Lomond, in Maurice French, Travellers in a Landscape: Visitors’ Impressions of the Darling Downs, 1827-1954 (Toowoomba, 1994), pp. 139-47. Big John: The Extraordinary Adventures of John McKinlay (1819-1872) (Melbourne, 1995), p. xix. This story is documented in ibid., chap. 1. See D. S. Macmillan, Scotland and Australia, 1788-1850 (Oxford, 1967) p. 77, and Malcolm D. Prentis, The Scottish in Australia (Melbourne, 1987), p. 21. Margaret Steven, Merchant Campbell, 1769-1846: A Study of Colonial Trade (Melbourne, 1965), p. 20. Correspondence of Maclaine of Lochbuie, National Archives of Scotland [NAS], GD 174. See Eric Richards, ‘The Highland passage to colonial Australia’, Scotlands (1995), pp. 28-44. The Maclaines were closely connected with Lachlan Macquarie, the Governor of New South Wales, 1809-1821. Letters of Andrew Hay to his uncle, NAS, RH 1/2/811/1-6. A similar later and unsuccessful version of the model was Glengarry, described in Richards, ‘Ironies of the Highland exodus’, in Prest and Tulloch (eds), Scatterlings of Empire, pp. 13-14. Each was a remarkable effort to recover lost quasi-feudal status on the other side of the globe. See also N. Bristol,

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20 21

22

23

24

25

26 27 28

29

30

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‘Donald McLeod of Talisker’, Notes and Queries of the Society of West Highland Historical Research, 4 (1977) and 5 (1978). See Alexander Henderson, Early Pioneer Families of Victoria and Riverina (Melbourne, 1937), p. 397 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘“This is the bird that never flew”: William Stewart, Major Donald Macleod and the Launceston Advertiser’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 2 (2000), pp. 1-28. Many of them are documented by themselves in Henderson, Early Pioneer Families, and Thomas Francis Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers (Melbourne, 1898). Neil J. MacKinnon, ‘Strath, Skye: a miscellany of history, song, and story’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 54 (1984-6), pp. 222-3. They had probably been involved with the evictions on the Strathaird estate at the time. For suggestive thoughts on this ‘ungulate irruption’ across the new world, see Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep (Cambridge, 1994). The international web of commerce connected the Highlands and Victoria at many points. See, for instance, J. F. M. Macleod, ‘Notes on Waternish in the nineteenth century’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 59 (1995-6), pp. 49-118, p. 50, and Donella Klages (compiler), The Story of Murdoch and Mary Mackay (Normanhurst, NWS, 1975), p. 16. Scottish pedigrees and inter-marriage at the upper end of Victorian society are examined by Paul de Serville, Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria, 1850-80 (Melbourne, 1991), especially p. 164. Marjorie Andrew and Shirley Clissold (eds), The Diaries of John McConnell Black (2 vols, Hawthorndene, South Australia, 1986, and Adelaide, 1991). Marjorie Andrew and Shirley Clissold (eds), Memoirs of John McConnell Black (Adelaide, 1971), p. 14. Andrew and Clissold (eds), The Diaries of John McConnell Black, Vol. 1 (Hawthorndene, 1986), pp. 48, 196. Part of the migration was motivated by health – Black’s mother had been advised to try a milder climate than England and she lived well and happily in South Australia until 1902, in the house which she built for herself near Burnside’, ibid., p. 38. Many of these Scots followed the classic path to colonial pastoral success, first by sheep management which frequently carried with it an arrangement to run one’s own stock – thus allowing the accumulation of capital and animals for pioneering on one’s own account. Examples are found in Hancock’s Discovering Monaro, pp. 33-4, and particularly in Klages, The Story of Murdoch and Mary Mackay. Niel Black, November 1839, quoted in Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday (Melbourne, 1961), p. 26. Kiddle says that Lowland Scots spearheaded middle-class emigration to Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip; and in the Western District they were two-thirds of the pioneer settlers, p. 14. Rev. J. D. Mereweather met all types: ‘Of these squatters many are educated gentlemen, many are enterprising Scotchmen; all are intelligent persons, well calculated to cope with the difficulties which surround them. Many of them began life as prodigals, and have now tamed down into wealthy proprietors’. Quoted in

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31 32

33 34

35 36 37

38

39

40

41

42 43 44 45 46

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Donald Carisbrooke, ‘The influence of the “gentleman settlers” in Australia in 1838’, The Push from the Bush, 11 (1981), pp. 23-35. Their similarity to many English of the same sort is striking. Letters of William Gairdner, NAS, RH 1/825. They had been well-primed by propaganda, especially the works of David Waugh published in Edinburgh which helped to produce a rush of Scots to Port Phillip. Glimpses of a Life in Victoria, by a Resident (Edinburgh, 1872), p. 8. A. Majoribanks, Travels in New South Wales (London, 1847), p. 247. Scots took up about 40 per cent of all squatting runs in Port Phillip, 30 per cent in New South Wales, and more than 50 per cent in the Western District of Victoria. Carisbrooke, ‘The influence of the “gentleman settlers” in Australia’, p. 27. Ibid., p. 29. Quoted by A. G. L. Shaw, The History of the Port Phillip District (Carlton, Victoria, 1996), p. 2. On return migration from Australia see Eric Richards, ‘Running home from Australia: intercontinental mobility and migrant expectations in the nineteenth century’, in Marjory Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000 (Manchester, 2005), pp. 77-104. Dumfries and Galloway Courier, quoted in Jillian Oppenheimer and Bruce Mitchell, An Australian Clan: The Nivisons of New England (Kenthurst, NSW, 1989), p. 20. This is based on Oppenheimer and Mitchell, An Australian Clan, especially pp. 20-30. The transmission of class attitudes from home was widespread among the Scots in Australia. See, for instance, Hugh MacCrae (ed.), Georgiana’s Journal, Melbourne, 1841-1865 (Melbourne 1934, reprinted 1966) which documents the migration of McCrae, a family lawyer, and his wife travelling cabin class in 1840 with four children and two servants for £200. She was especially dismissive of assisted immigrants who unexpectedly joined the ship. See p. 222. See L. J. Jay, ‘Pioneer settlement on the Darling Downs: a Scottish contribution to Australian colonisation’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 73 (1957), pp. 35-49. Maurice French, ‘In search of another Warthill: a Scottish migration to New South Wales in the 1830s’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 73 (1987), pp. 187-204. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 200. Quoted by Jean Farnfield, Frontiersman: A Biography of George Elphistone Dalrymple (Melbourne, 1968), p. 7 He sold up in 1857, retired to Britain, but then roamed again, to Waikato, New Zealand, and died in Sydney in 1881. See French, ‘In search of another Warthill’, p. 200. Norman Ashworth, Our Stewart Heritage: From the Scottish Highlands to Australia on the Sheep’s Back (Victoria Park, W.A., 1994). Ibid., p. 8.

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49 50

51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60

61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

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Ibid., p. 12. There was a further denser and more hidden network of the following generations of children and stepchildren, radiating outwards from the Stewart centre. See Ashworth, Stewart Heritage, chaps 5 and 6. From two letters written by Archibald and John Stuart to their cousins in Britain, March 1862, National Library of Australia [NLA], MS 993. See Macmillan, Scotland and Australia. George Mackenzie to J. A. Mackenzie, 4 February 1836, NAS, GD 46/13/198. See Richards, ‘Ironies of the Highland exodus’. C. Stuart Ross, The Scottish Church in Victoria, 1851-1901 (Melbourne, 1901), p. 107. Return migration for retirement was common. Kiddle mentions Polmont, Torquay, and Glastonbury as retirement destinations. In 1886 there were many Western District squatters gathered in London where they feasted with a 17-course meal, acting ‘the part of the Nabob’. Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, pp. 495-6. Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, p. 141. Ibid., p. 69 (quoted). Ibid., p. 70. A similar method of raising labour in Scotland was employed by the Balfour family in Monaro. See John Mackenzie-Smith, ‘The first Moreton Bay pastoral runs and the Balfour-Barker correspondence of 1839-41’, Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal, 18 (2002), pp. 1-18. I am grateful to Dr Mackenzie-Smith for information on Queensland Scots in the early colonial era. Direct recruiting in England is also documented by Janet Doust, ‘English migrants to eastern Australia, 1815-1860,’ PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2004, pp. 163ff. See MacKinnon, ‘Strath, Skye’, p. 224, and Watson, Caledonia Australis, p. 153. Some Scots actually felt drawn together enough to buy their own ship to sail to Australia. See Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland Since 1600 (London and New York, 2004), p. 332, fn. 23. This information is kindly supplied by Margrette Kleinig from her forthcoming doctoral thesis in the History Department, Flinders University. Ibid. Ibid. Duncan MacDonald to Hector MacDonald, October 1853, NAS, GD1/1196/2/6/1. An Teachadaire Gaedhealach, quoted in Cliff Cumming, ‘“In the language of Ossian”: Gaelic survival in Australia and New Zealand – a comparison’, Australian Studies, 12 (1997), pp. 104-22. See entry on Lang by D.W.A. Baker, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 2 (Carlton, Victoria, 1967), pp. 76-83. Transcripts of Missing Dispatches, 1833-41, Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML A 1267, Gipps to Glenelg. Ibid. Ibid.

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71

72

73 74

75 76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

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Ross Galloway, ‘The Scots and the Manning River, 1840 to 1860’, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1989. This is based on the antiquarian records left by Gordon Dennes. Some of the details are available in Catherine Boer, ‘An early clergyman of the Hunter: William McIntyre, 1806-1870,’ Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 72 (1986), pp. 130-48. [Mrs Mary McConnel], Memories of Days Long Gone By, by the Wife of an Australian Pioneer (n.d., c.1903), p. 51. Their employees included the interesting case of Jame Alpin McPherson who arrived at Cressbrook in 1855 and in 1863 became a renowned bushranger. W. W. Phillips, ‘Christianity and its defence in New South Wales, circa 1880 to 1890’, PhD thesis, ANU, 1969, p. 26. See also Maurice French, A History of the Darling Downs Frontier, Vol. 3: Pubs, Ploughs, and Peculiar People (Toowoomba, 1991), pp. 199-201. Cliff Cumming, ‘Port Phillip Presbyterians: the continuing Scottish connection’ (Australian Studies Centre, Working Paper, 1988). Much of the above is drawn from Malcolm D. Prentis, ‘The Presbyterian ministry in Scotland 1822-1901: recruitment and composition’, in Rowland D. Ward and Malcolm D. Prentis, Presbyterian Ministers in Australia, 1822-1901 (Wantirna, Victoria, 2001), pp. xxi-vliv, 35-6 See D. Chambers, ‘Calvinists and capitalists’, Melbourne Historical Journal, 4 (1964), pp. 9-16. R. J. Scrimgeour, Some Scots Were Here: A History of the Presbyterian Church in South Australia, 1839-1977 (Adelaide, 1986), p. 29. Self-conscious efforts by Scottish settlers in Western Australia to establish separate Presbyterian churches, in reaction to Anglicanism, are charted by Leigh Beaton, ‘Scottish settlement and identity in Western Australia: arrival 1829-1850’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 4 (2002), pp. 51-71. All quoted in Malcolm Prentis, ‘The defection of Scots from their kirk in New South Wales: the significance of 1838’, The Push from the Bush, 7 (1980), pp. 51-7. Phillips, ‘Christianity and its defence’, p. 26 Thus at Robe, in South Australia, services were conducted by Malcolm McInnes, a Gaelic speaking missionary from Victoria. Scrimgeour, Some Scots Were Here, p. 47. Ibid., p. 60. This is quoted from Letters from Highland Emigrants in Australia dated between September and December 1852 (1852). Epitaph evidence suggests concentrations in the Northern Rivers area of the far north-east of New South Wales, the Goulburn Plains, Cooma-Monaro, and Western District of Victoria. Lowlanders were much more prevalent in the port cities. See Greiner and Jordan-Bychkov, Anglo-Celtic Australia, p. 58. Inverness Courier, 14 July 1838, quoted here, p. 12. On Scottish convicts see a recent survey by Malcolm D. Prentis, ‘What do we know about Scottish convicts?’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 90, (2004), pp. 36-52. Galloway, ‘The Scots and the Manning River’, pp. 47-8.

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88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

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D. A. McIntyre, ‘Old Manning River Days’, Wingham Chronicle and Manning River Observer, 3 March 1947. Rev. Scott, ‘Letter to Scotland, 16 June 1898’, in Free Presbyterian Monthly, August 1963. Quoted p. 28. H. W. Ramsey, ‘A Manning River Aboriginal – Billy Russel’, Wingham Chronicle and Manning River Observer, 13 September 1932. M. Hutchinson, Iron in Our Blood: A History of the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales, 1788-2001 (Sydney, 2001), p. 122. There is much evidence of the insistence on Gaelic services and the pressure that this created in the various church histories. See, for instance, J. Heyer, The Presbyterian Pioneers of Van Diemen’s Land (Launceston, Tasmania, 1935); Richard Bardon, The Centenary History of the Presbyterian Church in Queensland (Brisbane, 1949); James Cameron, Centenary History of the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales (Sydney, 1905); C. Stuart Ross, The Scottish Church in Victoria, 1851-1901 (Melbourne, 1901) Quoted by Cumming, ‘In the language of Ossian’, p. 108. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., pp. 104-22. This is based on Scrimgeour, Some Scots Were Here. See M. Prentis, The Scots in Australia (Sydney, 1983), pp. 250-1. Letter from Alexander McIntyre to Duncan Blair, 27 July 1857, quoted in Rowland Ward, ‘Spiritual movements in Scottish Gaelic communities in Australia, 1837-1870’, in M. Hutchinson and S. Piggin (eds), Reviving Australia: Essays on the History and Experience of Revival and Revivalism in Australian Christianity (Sydney, 1994), p. 82. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 81. See also Rowland S. Ward, The Bush Still Burns: The Presbyterian and Reformed Faith in Australia, 1788-1988 (St Kilda, Victoria, 1989), pp. 541-2. The networks of Presbyterians in Australia are charted in the histories of the respective churches, for example, J. Campbell Robinson, The Free Presbyterian Church in Australia (Melbourne, 1947). See also Hutchinson, Iron in Our Blood, especially pp. 63-4. Ward, ‘Spiritual movements in Scottish Gaelic communities’, pp. 75-96. See Ross, The Scottish Church in Victoria, pp. 74-8. In the first six volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Fife accounted for 29 entries among a total of about 450 Scots. Sally Graham, Pioneer Merchant: The Letters of James Graham, 1839-54 (South Yarra, Victoria, 1985). Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 33-4. Ibid., pp. 42-3, 48. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., pp. 51-2. Fifeshire Advertiser, 5 January 1856. Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 5: 1851-1890 (Carlton, Victoria, 1974), pp. 320-1.

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113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

124

125 126 127

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Fifeshire Advertiser, 21 October 1854. On Carmichael and Knox see Fife Family History Society Journal, 7:3 (1995), pp. 11 ff. Fifeshire Advertiser, 5 January 1856. Ibid., 5 January 1854. Ibid., 5 January 1856. Ibid., 5 January 1855. Ibid., 26 March 1864. Ibid., 27 April 1867. Ibid., 29 October 1892. Fife Free Press, 21 February 1890. Ibid., 29 October 1892. Ibid., 3 September 1870. These letters were selected in a collection in the Central Library in Kirkcaldy and a copy was lodged in the State Library of South Australia, Adelaide. Leslie Page Moch, ‘Networks among Bretons? The evidence for Paris, 18751925’, Continuity and Change, 18 (2003), pp. 431-55, pp. 431-2. For a further discussion of networks see Tilly, ‘Transplanted networks’, pp. 79-95. See Eric Richards, ‘An Australian map of British and Irish literacy in 1841’, Population Studies, 53 (1999), pp. 345-59. Page, ‘Networks among Bretons?’, p. 432. This point is reinforced by another European study which argues that ‘we should be careful not to view every migration mode as deeply embedded in personal networks’. See Clé Lesger, Leo Lucassen, and Marlou Schrover, ‘Is there life outside the migrant network? German immigrants in XIXth Century Netherlands and the need for a more balanced migration typology’, Annales de Démographie Historique (2002), pp. 29-50, especially pp. 31, 38, 44-5. On the scope and character of the British diaspora see Richards, Britannia’s Children.

8 WEAVING THE TARTAN INTO THE FLAX: Networks, Identities, and Scottish Migration to Nineteenth-Century Otago, New Zealand

Tom Brooking When writing the biography of the Highland-born land reformer, John McKenzie, I soon discovered that his near neighbours, the Rosses, travelled to Otago with John and his new wife Annie Munro. McKenzie went looking for work with Donald Ross and he remained friendly with various members of this family for the rest of his life in the colony.1 This interfamily friendship lasted at least another generation into the twentieth century with Professor Angus Ross commenting on how the Ross and McKenzie families of North Otago had remained close friends. Furthermore, later in life when McKenzie had succeeded in politics he brought out several members of his father’s second family, including the foundation Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, Hugh Mackenzie (for some unexplained reason John McKenzie changed the spelling of his name before leaving for New Zealand). In addition, when John McKenzie made a return visit to Scotland in 1899, he also persuaded several young men from the parish of Rosskeen, EasterRoss, to accompany him back to New Zealand. These young men included his nephew and the Urquharts, sons of the former gamekeeper on the Ardross estate on which John McKenzie grew up.2 McKenzie’s maintenance of his chain with his Scottish anchor supports the findings of scholars who stress the vital importance of social networks in studies of migration to New Zealand. Rosalind McClean, for instance, argues that chain migration was important for Scots, many of whom retained regular contact with their Scottish anchor through correspondence and ongoing migration.3 The situation is replicated for the Irish, as work on the Catholic Irish by Lyndon Fraser, and Angela McCarthy’s research on the correspondence of Irish settlers in New Zealand demonstrates.4 McKenzie’s case also seems to be repeated many times in Rollo Arnold’s work on those sassenachs who supported McKenzie’s reforms so

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enthusiastically: the English agricultural labourers of southern England and Oxfordshire, who migrated to New Zealand in large numbers after being locked out during the troubled 1870s.5 Similarities can also be discerned with Terry Hearn’s findings that ethnicity often provided a substitute for kin amongst the supposedly atomized nineteenth-century gold miners.6 One way of checking out the typicality of John McKenzie’s behaviour as well as of determining whether scholars have at least forced a rethink of Miles Fairburn’s controversial reinvention of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis7 is to examine letters and reminiscences written by Scottish migrants in the predominantly Lowland settlement of Otago in the nineteenth century. The leader of the settlement was Captain William Cargill, formerly of the 74th Highland regiment. With his blue bonnet and flaming red toorie, he reminded English visitors such as Charlotte Godley of a character from a Walter Scott novel.8 But Cargill came from Edinburgh and was a Lowlander to the core despite this outward appearance of ‘Highlandism’.9 So too were the great majority of Scottish settlers who migrated to Otago.10 By concentrating on these Lowlanders, who supposedly were more ‘modern’ and less clannish than Highlanders such as John McKenzie, this chapter attempts to discover if these migrants maintained contact with their Scottish anchor, established new networks with a Scottish flavour, and retained a sense of distinctive identity despite the disruptions of the longest migrant voyage in history and the high levels of geographical mobility within colonial New Zealand.11 Indeed, Marjory Harper has concluded from her extensive research that Lowlanders seemed to have been more committed to opportunity, capitalism, and modernity than Highlanders and had less need to cling to memories.12 Harper’s conclusions mesh with some of my own work which has also suggested that Lowland Scots migrants to New Zealand had committed themselves to taking advantage of the opportunities offered by modernity and capitalism and concentrated on ‘getting on’ rather than ‘looking back’.13 They are, therefore, an ideal test group for investigating the extent to which Scottish networks and identities survived in a far-flung colony which had been ‘born modern’.14 This chapter is based on an exploratory investigation of letters and reminiscences which represent the experiences of different groups of Scots in the small society of colonial Otago.15 Four sets of letters and six reminiscences and diaries left by members of Otago’s small social elite, or persons who qualify as local notables, have been examined. In one case this includes reminiscences left by a father and son who arrived together. The comparison between their identification with Scotland as against their allegiance to the new colony is most informative. The diaries of Catherine

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Fulton, who married into the rather closed Scottish community, are included as a control to migrants who came direct from Scotland. Also analysed are letters written by ten persons of middling rank and reminiscences produced by four such persons; the discussion therefore leans towards the middle a little more than a truly representative sample would, yet this very important group have for too long been largely overlooked by New Zealand historians. The inclusion of three sets of letters and two reminiscences produced by persons of very humble origins means that this is far from an exercise in history from below, but given the bias of survival in favour of the higher social groupings this is a surprisingly useful haul, especially for a preliminary exercise of this kind. Rosalind McClean’s examination of letters, undertaken as part of her doctoral research, highlighted the importance of the Scottish anchor and revealed much about chain migration.16 The kind of fine grained analysis employed by Charlotte Erickson, David Fitzpatrick, Kerby Miller, and Patrick O’Farrell17 has increased our understanding of emotional as well as more rational responses to the whole complicated business of migration, that is, leaving and cutting ties as well as arriving and building a new life by maintaining older networks and identities whilst establishing newer networks and assuming different, ethnically mixed colonial identities. The variety of official and private autobiographies, journals, diaries, family histories, and guidebooks, both published and unpublished, manuscript and typed, grouped together under the generic label of reminiscences, are not nearly as valuable as letters for the historian of migration. Yet, as Fiona Hamilton and Rosalind McClean have pointed out, they are more useful than many historians acknowledge.18 The problem is that this genre is usually produced by someone who has been unusually successful such as James Adam, migration agent for the Otago Provincial Government. This type of production is, therefore, prone to view the past through rose tinted spectacles and to emphasize success rather than failure, comfortable continuity rather than disruptive change. These accounts tend to provide histories of winning written by victors and accounts of cosy adjustment written by those flexible enough to cope with change and difference. Conversely, persons bearing a particular grudge, such as the eccentric J.G.S. Grant or the aggrieved Captain Henderson, also published reminiscences in defence of their character.19 On balance, the great majority of reminiscences are imbued with the warm glow of nostalgia just as the majority of letters convey hope for better things in the future. Nevertheless, the jangling of self-justification can also infuse reminiscences just as disappointment and dashed expectations can be conveyed in letters. Still, if reminiscences are read sceptically, with due attention to their

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intended audience, they contain much information on the details of the migration experience, evoke the texture and rhythm of the colonial encounter, and tell us much about the practicalities of establishing a farm or business. Furthermore, they also have plenty to say about both maintenance of Scottish identity and networks and the assumption of newer and blander colonial and/or imperial identities. McClean has shown how useful James Adam is in this respect, but others contain surprising insights as well.20 Family and Kin Connections and Informal Networks Nearly every writer of letters and reminiscences makes lengthy reference to the long, uncomfortable, frequently tedious, and sometimes dangerous voyage of 13,000 miles from Scotland to New Zealand. Personal documents suggest that few formal networks seem to have been forged during the 100 or more days at sea although Rev. Thomas Burns stamped his particular variant of Free Church Presbyterianism upon the passengers of the second immigrant ship, the Philip Laing.21 John Bathgate, a banker from Peebles, also broke down class barriers by mingling with the steerage passengers and advising them on matters of religion when he migrated in 1863.22 John McKenzie claimed that he forged friendships on the Henrietta in 1860 which lasted the rest of his life in the colony.23 Yet little other direct reference is made to networking on board ship in contrast to multiple references to the climate, seasickness, monotonous food, and whether crews were poorly or well disciplined.24 Immediate kin who travelled on the voyage were only occasionally mentioned by letter-writers and composers of reminiscences. John Buchanan, for example noted that his children thrived during the voyage and gained weight.25 Jane Bannerman, daughter of Rev. Thomas Burns, claimed that the voyage restored the health of her mother Clementine who had been very reluctant to undertake such a venture. Jane also remembered saving her baby sister by hauling her out of bed just before a box fell on the cradle.26 George Hepburn tended to refer to the rest of his family as ‘them’ but did remember sharing a bottle of porter with the Captain to celebrate his son’s sixteenth birthday.27 Transition to New Zealand, however, did not result in the termination of bonds with the homeland. Indeed, one of the most interesting features of the letter collections is how long certain families continued to write to each other. The Buchanan family, weavers from Kirkintolloch, provide the most extraordinary example with letters being exchanged between Otago and Scotland from 1848 into the twentieth century. The much more comfortably off Sheenan-MacDonell-Burnett family complex also

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continued to write to one another from the 1860s into the twentieth century. Their descendants even visited Scottish relations when on leave from the New Zealand army during the First World War. Despite what Fairburn argues, even single men displayed great interest in family life and wrote regularly to their parents as well as to their siblings.28 The gender of the correspondents made little difference to the expression of sentimental ties to the Scottish homeland. Male letter-writers seemed as fascinated with family gossip as women correspondents.29 Some, including the men of the Sheenan family, also seemed as sentimental about their children as the women. Robert Sheenan, father of the brothers Watson, Alexander, and John, who had migrated to New Zealand in 1857, wrote his sons a poem lamenting that they would only meet again ‘at the throne of our father in heaven’.30 His words proved eerily prophetic, but not quite in the manner he imagined as Robert died from tuberculosis soon after arriving in Dunedin. John Buchanan, his daughter Jeanie, and son Gilbert, all expressed genuine grief at the death of various family members and genuine concern for the welfare of elderly relatives throughout the lengthy correspondence stretching across two generations.31 Interestingly, both Watson Sheenan and Arch Henderson, despite the fact that they came from opposite ends of the social spectrum, wanted to hear more family gossip. Watson indulged partly to help him find a suitable wife befitting a successful sheep farmer, especially once he had to dismiss his fourth housekeeper in a matter of months,32 but Arch just enjoyed catching up with family doings. As Arch commented to his ‘Dear Neace’ in 1869 it was ‘a great pleasure’ to hear news of the family.33 George Hepburn regularly wrote to his aunts as well as his parents and siblings.34 What we could call ‘the ache of separation’ is evident in most letters and even conceded in the most rose tinted reminiscences. Despite being determined not to be upset at leaving his family, Thomas Adam admitted to his mother and father that he constantly imagined friends and family sitting around the fire.35 Even the normally phlegmatic Arch Henderson blurted out, ‘The lord love you all. I never thought to hear any more of you’, when his brother and sister wrote unexpectedly in 1875.36 James Adam displayed little emotion in his reminiscences but even he conceded that ‘the greatest difficulty I ever experienced was breaking away from the loving hearts of a father’s home’.37 Sometimes the sheer frustration of not being close to moments of either joy or tragedy bursts from the pages of contemporary writings. An unexpected death and the inability to attend a funeral always evoked expressions of despair and loss. John Buchanan expressed great sadness at the news of his father’s death soon after his arrival in 1848 and also

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complained of the frustration of the delay in receiving such news.38 Jeanie Stevenson reported that she forgot all about Scottish probity and burst into tears on hearing of the death of her cousin Jessie during childbirth.39 Similarly, the discovery of a birth or wedding months after the event elicited mixed emotions; delight at the good news, but disappointment at not being able to visit the new infant or attend the nuptial ceremonies. George Hepburn, for example, not only complained regularly about the lack of letters, but also lamented that the slow delivery meant he missed out on the excitement of births and weddings as well as the sadness of a death. His letters are also full of enquiries about friends as well as family in addition to discussion of business matters and requests for crockery and rye grass seed. He tried to compensate by providing plenty of detail on his social life, including the numerous weddings and dances held on his property.40 It seemed that gender or class made little difference to the sense of palpable loss brought about by the sudden death of another family member, whether elderly or infant. Nor did class or gender appear to disconnect the strong chain back to the Scottish anchor provided by letterwriting. Informal networks worked in other ways as well. Some correspondents, such as Arch Henderson, used links with family and friends to provide accommodation. He was reunited with his bother James in Dunedin at the house of a family friend – Mrs Laws.41 Despite the stereotype of Presbyterians being teetotal killjoys, prominent elder, George Hepburn, held regular social gatherings at his farm at Halfway Bush high above Dunedin. These events featured enthusiastic dancing and were fuelled by an extraordinary range of beers, wines, and whiskeys. Usually dances went on till dawn. Hepburn also operated an open house policy for recently arrived Scottish immigrants and provided informal welfare support to such persons. He made his house available for the weddings of young migrants. Once a neighbour who had been widowed with three young children remarried and held the post church service celebrations in the Hepburn farm. ‘Port, Sherry, Brandy and Whiskey’ accompanied the dance which went to two o’clock in the morning. On another occasion Andrew McNeill from Balclutha, fifty miles to the south, married Mary Lindsay in Hepburn’s house. Unfortunately flooding delayed the arrival of the bridegroom by a day. Unfazed, Hepburn provided a wedding breakfast in ‘sumptuous’ style for the assembled guests. He then provided another equally grand breakfast the following day and held a dance in the barn.42 Perhaps even more remarkably, dancing went on until after 5 a.m. to complete the celebration of a harvest home which featured ‘groaning tables, fine plate – 2 chandeliers’.43

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The successful banker John Bathgate behaved in similar fashion towards immigrants from Peebles whenever he travelled around New Zealand. On a journey to parliament in Auckland in 1864, for example, he called on a friend in Wellington and sought out young Peebleshire immigrants including a carpenter, a mason, and a gardener in Auckland. He visited these men and their families when he took time off from his duties in the House of Representatives and offered them advice on business, finance, and religious matters. Sometimes he even bumped into former residents of Peebleshire by accident, hence his observation, ‘It is most remarkable how Peebles men turn up everywhere and in a most unexpected manner’.44 Occasionally informal networks could extend around the Empire and beyond. William McCaw, for example, a lifelong correspondent to The Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser before emigrating to New Zealand at the relatively advanced age of 63, wrote letters to relatives in Australia and the United States as well as Scotland. Furthermore, he continued corresponding with The Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser and reported his impressions of every aspect of New Zealand life to his Scottish readers in over 200 articles before his death in 1902. In this case he extended his Scottish networks around the globe as well as the Empire on which the sun never set.45 He therefore contributed to the web of connections which tied together both the Empire and a global village connected by steam ships and the international telegraph linked to New Zealand in 1876.46 Informal networks generally were supportive of Scottish immigrants to New Zealand in much the same way as they supported Irish immigrants. There are many words of encouragement in both letters and reminiscences, especially if immigrants wanted other family members to join them. Such letters suggest that wages were high, work abundant, and land cheap. Thomas Adam felt that his uncle and aunt as well as his brother should join him. He argued ‘you will work a long time where you are before you can make as much’. To drive home the point he sent home a £5 money order to brother Alick. On the other hand, he asked that the larger family group delay arrival for another year or two so he could develop the farm more and have accommodation available to house the whole family.47 Words of discouragement also appeared. Arch Henderson, for example, argued that his struggles should discourage any other family members from joining him, at least until the unreliable New Zealand economy achieved greater prosperity. He complained that farming seemed rather ‘low’ much of the time and reported that he had no luck with gold mining either. Even after he finally succeeded in acquiring a small farm he warned that his niece should be very cautious about migrating to New Zealand.48 Similarly the

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stonemason William Wilson advised his family that the ‘beast plan [is] to stop at home’. Bad ‘wither’, racial war, fluctuating wages, and the difficulty of travel were cited in support of his case against migration.49 He concluded his correspondence in 1875 with the suggestion that if he had his time again he would never have left Scotland.50 Such commentary provides a powerful corrective to the unending good news reported by the likes of James Adam, John Cargill, and James Barr, and echoes the discouragement as well as encouragement found in the letters of Irish migrants in New Zealand.51 On balance, informal networks clearly helped Scottish immigrants adjust to the vagaries and hardships of colonial life. Scots may not have stuck together like glue but they helped one another out through the provision of hospitality and advice in a newer and different Britain. Ties to their Scottish anchor also helped them adjust to a new life in this most Anglo-Celtic of colonies (some 96 per cent of New Zealand’s nineteenth-century immigrants came from Britain: 55 per cent from England – 6 per cent if the Cornish are counted as Celtic; 21 per cent from Scotland; 14 per cent from Southern Ireland; 4 per cent from Northern Ireland; and 2 per cent from Wales).52 Formal Networks A first reading of both letters and reminiscences seems to support Fairburn’s argument regarding the absence of community organizations and social infrastructures in colonial New Zealand in that few make much reference to Caledonian societies even though they were established in the early 1860s or the Burns’s Club set up from 1891. Like McCarthy’s Irish letter-writers they also make scant reference to lodges.53 Indeed there were no overtly Scottish lodges equivalent to the Hibernians amongst the Catholic Irish, but some 56 Masonic lodges were founded in New Zealand under the Scottish constitution. Seven of these have survived to the present in Otago. A more careful reading soon reveals that the Presbyterian Church made up for any such lack.54 Indeed many of the lives glimpsed through the letters and reminiscences were deeply enmeshed in the activities of the Presbyterian Church. Leaving aside church insiders Tom Burns, Jane Bannermann, and James Blackie, at least another half dozen correspondents made enthusiastic comment on church activities. All of the reminiscences make frequent reference to Presbyterianism. John Buchanan became the Beadle at First Church and his son-in-law Gilbert Stevenson even rated the Melbourne churches inferior to those of Dunedin.55 Watson Sheenan spent considerable energy on raising money to build a local church and to employ a minister, although he admitted to missing the

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richer ceremonial of the older Church of Scotland services.56 Ann Fraser and one of the 1848 group of settlers considered Tom Burns to be a good preacher. Ann also liked Dr Donald Stuart’s sermons at the more liberal Knox Church.57 Only Thomas Adam dared to criticize Burns for not speaking out more against drunken behaviour.58 Hepburn’s letters and diaries are full of his journeys to church as well as his work for the institution.59 The well known elder and Sunday School teacher Arthur James, whose topsy-turvy fortunes constituted what Marjory Harper calls the ‘snakes and ladders’ experience of emigration,60 received his reward when the Presbyterian church found him a job as secretary to the Otago Traders’ Protection Society in the early 1890s.61 Scottish women seem to have centred their lives even more on the church than the male writers of letters and reminiscences, although many of the men studied were regular churchgoers and office holders. The women studied mainly attended church at this stage with more active roles in the form of deaconesses not really becoming available until the 1890s.62 Ann Fraser, though, did teach Sunday school while Catherine Fulton celebrated her conversion from Anglicanism by playing the piano and organ. All the reminiscences stressed how central Presbyterianism was to life in Otago with only the much-aggrieved J.G.S. Grant complaining that the local Church was morally deficient.63 Perhaps, though, the most perceptive comment written by anyone on the link between the Presbyterian Church and Scots migration can be found in historian James Barr’s Old Identities when he observes: the particular woof of Christian belief, has, until thirty years ago, at any rate, been weaving into the singularly well adapted warp of the Scots nature – into their hard metaphysical heads until … it has become so interwoven with the modes of thinking of the majority, that you come to regard as synonymous – a Scotchman, and a Presbyterian.64 All of this supports the earlier findings of Rosalind McClean concerning Tom Burns’s success in building strong pastoral support for all his parishioners from the very beginnings of the Otago settlement.65 It also supports Harper’s claim that: For innumerable Scots the cultivation of religious roots was the crucial way to maintain memories of the old country, and until the end of the nineteenth century founding or joining a Scottish church was probably the major mechanism through

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The enthusiasm for involvement in church life is further explained by Ali Clarke’s recent revelations that Presbyterians in nineteenth-century Otago shared a rich ceremonial life. Elaborate rituals marked special occasions such as the harvest home. Quarterly communion services involved an intense preparation more often associated with Catholicism and other more liturgically inclined denominations. In short, at least until the 1890s, the Presbyterian Church met the spiritual and social needs of Scottish immigrants during the time when other social infrastructures were frequently absent, that is, the period when ‘atomization’ was at its height. Once many other alternatives became available for socialization and the church became embroiled with the Temperance movement, even the vigorous Bible Class movement failed to stop young men deserting to sports clubs, amusement parlours, the movies, and the pub.67 Identities Various scholars, including Linda Colley and John MacKenzie, have pointed out that identities can be multiple and are not like a hat or item of clothing that can only be worn one at a time.68 Sometimes people exhibited only one identity according to the circumstances in which they found themselves and the company they happened to be keeping at the time. They could be Highland Scottish, Catholic, and somewhat reluctant British; Highland Scottish, Presbyterian, and more enthusiastic British; or Lowland Scottish, Presbyterian, and British (with enthusiasm ranging from reluctantly pragmatic to extremely enthusiastic). On the occasion of the Highland games, for example, that part of their identity would receive greatest emphasis whereas the British side would be highlighted at an important imperial moment such as a declaration of war or celebration of a supposedly significant victory such as the relief of Mafeking.69 Scots in New Zealand exemplified this tendency to an even greater extent than in Scotland and quickly assumed multiple identities. They took pride in being members of the British Empire, colonial New Zealanders, and champions of the new province of Otago as well as persons of Scottish background, or parentage. Once settled, sometimes within a matter of months, they also represented the tiny communities in which they lived with parochial fervour as well as larger county units. Being Scottish in New Zealand also had a regional cast in that Scots clearly dominated Otago and Southland which was self-consciously the most Scottish part of the whole colony. Sometimes these southern Scots liked to imagine that they constituted the

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most Scottish portion of the entire empire outside Scotland. Mark Twain and the Irish land radical, Michael Davitt, at least, both accepted this construction. Twain described the people of Dunedin as ‘scotch’ when he visited in 1895. Michael Davitt, who visited at the same time as Twain, wrote with equal enthusiasm about Dunedin as ‘this antipodean Edinburgh’.70 Yet Scots were also represented in significant numbers in parts of Canterbury, Nelson, Wellington, Manawatu, Hawke’s Bay, and Auckland.71 Recently, historian James Belich, despite the competing claims of Eastern Canada, has extended Twain’s characterization to the whole colony by arguing that ‘Outside Scotland itself, there probably is no country in the world in which Scots had more influence … New Zealand is the neo-Scotland’.72 Scottish identity seemed to easily survive both the length of the voyage and the so-called ‘wash of the sea’. Passengers of all classes regularly celebrated Scottish rituals throughout the voyage and sang either wellknown hymns or ‘old’ Scottish songs on a daily basis. Although the majority of Lowlanders had nothing to do with bagpipes either on departure or arrival,73 they carried with them a strong sense of their Scottishness which they hoped would flourish in the distinctively Scottish settlement of Otago. Naturally, many immigrants writing about their arrival in New Zealand stressed the exotic appearance of the country. Yet some also found similarities. This propensity to familiarize the strange is normal amongst migrants anywhere, yet some obviously felt quite comfortable with the new land of their choice. Tom Burns thought that the Otago harbour looked like a Scottish Loch,74 while one of his passengers narrowed the comparison to ‘Loch Catrine’. Another rather compared it with the Trossachs.75 Research by James Beattie also suggests that some soon came to appreciate the bush and native birds and lamented their passing.76 Numerous comparisons were made between the weather of Scotland and Otago with almost everyone coming down in favour of their new home while conceding the fickleness of the climate of both places. The original schoolteacher in Dunedin, James Blackie, for example, wrote that he liked the fine days and clear skies compared with the grey of Scotland, but he complained of the frost and large diurnal range of temperature. Blackie recommended, therefore, warm and durable clothing as well as stout boots to cope with the ever present mud.77 In the case of some Scottish immigrants it almost seemed that they had sailed 13,000 miles around the world only to end up where they started. Mark Twain caught something of this when he wrote after his visit to Dunedin in 1895, ‘They stopped here on their way from home to heaven - thinking they had arrived’.78

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Generally, pioneers of Scottish origin were as obsessed as any of their other British peers with weather, coping with mud, erecting buildings, and planting crops and running, but some references occur in their writings which are peculiarly Scottish. The ultimate objective of Ann Fraser’s father’s hard work, for example, was to build a stone house in the Aberdeen style.79 A more tantalizing example of a somewhat different Scottish expression of identity relates to Edmund Smith, who grew up in India despite his Scottish parentage. Smith recorded that before he went on to become a successful banker he grew potatoes in the Maori style. This meant that he elevated them above the ground rather than planting them deep.80 Such a practice runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy amongst environmental historians that white settlers seldom took much notice of Maori environmental learning and land use practices.81 Yet Smith’s open mindedness also seemed to be reflected in the Balclutha area, 50 miles south of Dunedin, where Scots settlers noticed that Maori managed to use fern covered land by digging out the roots before firing and tilling. British fern indicated sour land whereas New Zealand fern land could be utilized for agriculture. It seems that these observant Scots learnt this lesson much more quickly than their English peers elsewhere in New Zealand.82 A further practice that certainly marked out Scottish settlers was the emphasis placed upon celebrating the New Year via the Hogmanay ceremony rather than Christmas. Initially, the Free Church settlers upset the likes of Charlotte Godley by not marking either Yuletide or Easter.83 This distinctive refusal to commemorate either Christmas and Easter slowly faded but Hogmanay continued to be celebrated especially in country areas until well after the Second World War.84 As none of the migrants incorporated in this paper were Gaelic speakers there is scant reference to Gaelic terms. The proud Lowlanders of Dunedin and Otago occasionally employed some Scottish English. Gilbert Stevenson predicted that his wife Jeanie would become ‘a renewed lassie’ after her coach trip from Dunedin to Duntroon and James Barr admitted that the dominant Scotch had been ‘just a wee thocht bigoted and jealous’.85 The most interesting comment on speech habits came from the somewhat censorious Thomas Adam who complained to his brother that far too many immigrants were trying to speak in the English rather than the Scotch manner.86 His complaint provides a perceptive insight into the powerful desire of the Scots in New Zealand to integrate with the English as quickly as possible and so merge into a new kind of Briton, or even a different kind of colonial known as a New Zealander.87 Barr summed up this aspiration rather neatly when he quoted a poem by the ‘lesser Burns’ of Otago, John Blair:

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I love Bonnie Scotland and England’s blest shore But I love the new land of the Maori more, Where labour’s a blessing, and freedom’s supreme, And peace and contentment endears every scene. With its flax, and its fern, and rare cabbage tree, Its freedoms, its blessings – New Zealand for me.88 The letter-writers and authors of reminiscences examined in this chapter generally took pride in their good fortune in living in a Scottish enclave. Both Arch Henderson and William Wilson, however, found it brought them no particular advantage and deserted the deep south for greener pastures in the North Island. Yet, apart from more official spokesmen such as James Barr, James Adam, and John Cargill, most correspondents made little fuss about being Scottish. The exception is when they travelled overseas to somewhere like Irish Catholic Melbourne, when they suddenly became conscious of what was special and distinctive about themselves. This sudden rediscovery of one’s Scottishness is revealed by a series of delightful letters written by Gilbert Buchanan, about his trip to the gold boom city of Melbourne in 1873. On the one hand, Gilbert tried to pass on his sense of wonder and excitement at visiting such a dynamic place. Melbourne he enthused ‘is truly a wonderful city’ with large buildings where ‘people are all on the rush’. On the other hand, he regularly engaged in self-censorship to avoid any possibility of suggesting that he liked this ‘marvellous’ new metropolis better than Dunedin. He commented adversely upon the preponderance of intemperate Irish and complained that although the theatre buildings were superior the companies were not as strong as in Dunedin. He also noted somewhat censoriously that the presence of women of all ages thronging the streets at night was a ‘disgrace’. Interestingly, he also judged Dunedin’s fine Presbyterian churches superior to any places of worship he viewed in Melbourne. He concluded, before boarding the steamer home, that Dunedin was ‘a far prettier place’ with much superior scenery to Melbourne. There is never any suggestion that he did not want to return to a much smaller city and its cooler climate.89 Conclusion The letters and reminiscences produced by Scottish settlers who migrated to Otago in the nineteenth century, then, supports the contention of scholars who argue that ethnicity often substituted for the absence of kin and community in a typical new settlement, pioneering situation. A sense of Scottish identity and ongoing networks at least helped migrants from the

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Lowlands of Scotland cope with the problems of atomization, alienation, and loneliness, which did afflict some sectors of colonial New Zealand society. A difficulty remains in that these letters and reminiscences tell us much more about the general experience of migration and pioneering than about what was particularly Scottish about that experience. The Scottish dimension can only be distilled if the correspondent discusses Presbyterianism or happenings in Scotland, or makes direct comparisons with things Scottish. The majority of surviving letters and reminiscences written by Scots migrants, therefore, need to be read very carefully by someone with reasonably deep knowledge of Scottish folkways and beliefs. Having issued that caution, reading these sources has reinforced Rosalind McClean’s argument that Scottishness in New Zealand in general, and Otago in particular, reconstituted a nexus of interconnections between Kirk, ‘hame’, and school.90 These three institutions were fundamental in establishing Scottish identity, values, and lifestyles. Presbyterianism, a belief in universal education regardless of gender or location, and a hefty emphasis upon the centrality of family, represented the core of Scottish identity. In combination, the support offered through both informal and formal networks and this set of beliefs helped Scottish migrants cope with the disorientation caused by the transience of colonial life and the shock of encountering a new landscape, environment, and, sometimes, indigenous people.91 This Scottish core overrode class and political difference to a considerable extent and here I dissent from McClean’s view that Scottish identity was tied in with class. Certainly early Otago, as McClean shows, had a remarkably homogenous class character in that most Scottish migrants belonged to either the lower middle class, or the respectable, skilled, and literate working class. This composition changed somewhat under pressure of the gold rushes of the 1860s, but the core Scottish identity remained. In the case of the more radically inclined, or the moderately conservative, membership of parliament house or the holding of local office, could be added as vehicle for both promoting and defending essential Scottish values. Again, core Scottish values cut across political divisions just as they ran over class boundaries. So although Captain William Cargill and Rev. Thomas Burns amongst the early leaders, or Adam Hamilton and Peter Fraser as late as the 1930s, represented the conservative and more radical ends of the political spectrum, they also held many values in common.92 Distinctively Scottish associations such as Caledonian Societies, Burns’s Clubs, and St Andrew’s associations clearly became more important in

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maintaining identity as time went by and links with Scotland weakened. The minority group of Scottish Catholics highlighted their identity through promoting pipe bands in the manner of Kenneth Cameron of ‘Glenfalloch’ and ‘Closeburn’ sheep stations, or made a different kind of statement through distilling amber liquid.93 Yet the Scottish Catholics remained a small minority and maintenance of Scottish core values proved more difficult for them than Presbyterians despite such outward displays of Scottish behaviour. The rather interior religion of Presbyterianism, or more stripped down Presbyterian value systems, held the key to the Scottish/New Zealand variant of the universal human drama. In this version father and mother, teacher and minister, played the leading roles and in so doing helped many immigrants overcome the sense of being strangers in a strange land. Notes 1 2 3

4

5 6

7

8 9

Tom Brooking, Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand: A Biography of John McKenzie (Dunedin, 1996), p. 31. Ibid., p. 218. Rosalind McClean, ‘Scottish emigrants to New Zealand, 1840-1880: motives, means and background’, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1990. A copy is held in the Hocken Library, Dunedin, New Zealand [HL]. Lyndon Fraser, To Tara Via Holyhead: Irish Catholic Immigrants in NineteenthCentury Christchurch (Auckland, 1997); Angela McCarthy, ‘Personal letters and the organisation of Irish migration to and from New Zealand, 1848-1925’, Irish Historical Studies, 33:131 (2003), pp. 297-319; Angela McCarthy, ‘“In prospect of a happier future”: private letters and Irish women’s migration to New Zealand, 1840-1925’, in Lyndon Fraser (ed.), A Distant Shore: Irish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (Dunedin, 2000), pp. 105-16; and Angela McCarthy, ‘“Bands of fellowship”: the role of personal relationships and social networks among Irish migrants in New Zealand, 1862-1937’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23:2/3 (2005). Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the Nineteenth Century (Wellington, 1981). Terry Hearn, ‘Scots miners in the goldfields, 1861-1870’, in Tom Brooking and Jennie Coleman (eds), The Heather and the Fern: Scottish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (Dunedin, 2003), pp. 67-86. Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society, 1850-1900 (Auckland, 1989). For a critique of this ‘thesis’ see the special number of the New Zealand Journal of History, 25:2 (1991). See Tom Brooking, And Captain of Their Souls: An Interpretative Essay On the Life and Times of Captain William Cargill (Dunedin, 1984), pp. 134-5. On Highlandism, Walter Scott, the process of Balmoralization, and the invention of Highland tradition see T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600-

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12 13

14

15

16 17

18

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1815 (London, 2003), pp. 353-60; and Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands (London, 1989). See Tom Brooking, ‘“Tam McCanny and Kittie Clydeside”: The Scots in New Zealand’, in R. Cage (ed.), The Scots Abroad: Labour, Capital, Enterprise (London, 1985), pp. 156-90; and McClean, ‘Scottish emigrants to New Zealand’. See Fairburn, The Ideal Society; David Pearson, Johnsonville: Continuity and Change in a New Zealand Township (Sydney, 1980); Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham, 1880s-1920s (Auckland, 1995); Caroline Daley, Girls and Women, Men and Boys: Gender in Taradale, 1886-1930 (Auckland, 1999); James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland, 1996), pp. 412-50; and Tom Brooking, Dick Martin, David Thomson, and Hamish James, ‘The ties that bind: persistence in a New World industrial suburb, Caversham, New Zealand, 1902-1922’, Social History, 24:1 (1999) pp. 55-73. Marjory Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003), pp. 370-1. Tom Brooking, ‘Sharing out the haggis: the special Scottish contribution to New Zealand history’, in Brooking and Coleman (eds), The Heather and the Fern, pp. 49-65. See Belich, Making Peoples, pp. 278-410; Olssen, Building the New World; and Erik Olssen, ‘Mr Wakefield and New Zealand as an experiment in postEnlightenment experimental practice’, New Zealand Journal of History, 31:2 (1997), pp. 197-218. A fuller study could take a series of censuses over the nineteenth century and try to align letters and reminiscences in a similar manner to that employed by oral historian Paul Thompson in selecting interviews for his study of Edwardian England. See Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London, 1992). McClean, ‘Scottish emigrants to New Zealand’. Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1972); David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork, 1995); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1995); Patrick O’Farrell, Letters from Irish-Australia, 18251929 (Kensington, 1984). See Fiona Hamilton, ‘Pioneering history: negotiating Pakeha collective memory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, New Zealand Journal of History, 36:1 (2002), pp. 66-81. James G. S. Grant, Twenty-Five Years in Dunedin, HL, Pamphlet 90/48; and Aliquis (Captain Henderson), Otago and the Middle Island of New Zealand: A Warning to Emigrants (Melbourne, 1866), HL, Pamphlet 40/13. See McClean, ‘Scottish emigrants to New Zealand’, pp. 375-434. Brooking, And Captain of Their Souls, pp. 52-70. John Bathgate, ‘Autobiography’, Otago Settlers Museum [OSM], Ms BB0122, pp. 30-2. Brooking, Lands for the People?, p. 27.

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25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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See Brooking, And Captain of Their Souls, pp. 51-70. Just about everyone commented on both the fear and exhilaration of the longest voyage ever undertaken by immigrants. Aberdeen-born immigration agent James Adam in his otherwise very positive reminiscences contended that the long passage ‘taught patience and tolerance and economy and discipline’: James Adam, Twenty-Five Years of Emigrant Life in the South of New Zealand (Edinburgh, 1876, 2nd edn), p. 13. John Buchanan to his brothers and sisters, 24 November 1848, HL, Buchanan family letters, Misc Ms, 1628/2. Jane Bannerman, Reminiscences of Her Life to 1855, HL, M., 1 536/B, pp. 40-2. William Downie Stewart (ed.), The Journal of George Hepburn (Dunedin, 1934), p. 69. Fairburn, The Ideal Society, pp. 125-87. On the role of Scots women as Sunday School teachers see David Keen, ‘Feeding the lambs: the influence of Sunday Schools on the socialization of children in Otago and Southland, 1848-1901’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, 1999. Robert to John Sheenan, August 1858, HL, Watson Sheenan Family Letters, 1858-1890, 01-070. For example, John Buchanan to his sisters and brothers, 24 November 1848, conveying sadness upon news of his father’s death; Jeannie on her mother’s death, 2 September 1900; Gilbert expressing concern at the fact that owning a small house prevents his mother from being able to take out the old age pension, 4 July 1899. All from the HL, Buchanan Family Letters, Misc Ms 1628/2. Watson Sheenan to Mrs Burnett, (his future Scottish mother-in-law), 12 January 1875, HL, Watson Sheenan Family Letters, 1858-1890, 01-070. Arch Henderson to his niece, 2 December 1869, OSM, Arch W. Henderson Letters, 1860-1875, AB 018. For example, George Hepburn to ‘Aunt Janet’, September 1854, refers to a newsy letter from ‘Aunt Catherine’, HL, George Hepburn Letters, W. D. Stewart Papers, Ms-985, Series 24, Box 62. Thomas Adam to his parents, 30 May 1857, OSM, BB-0003. Arch Henderson to his brother and sister, 11 February 1875, OSM, AB 018. Adam, Twenty-Five Years of Emigrant Life, p. 12. John Buchanan to his sisters and brother, 24 November 1848, HL, Buchanan Family Letters, 1872-c.1892, Misc Ms 1628/2. Jeanie Stevenson to her parents in Dunedin, 2 April 1872, HL, Buchanan Family Letters, Ms 1628/2. For example, George Hepburn to Thomas Martin, 12 March and 14 May 1855, HL, George Hepburn Letters, Ms-985, Series 24, Box 62. Arch Henderson to his brother and sister, 4 November 1860, OSM, AB 018. George Hepburn to Thomas Martin, 28 June 1856, HL, George Hepburn Letters, Ms-985 Series 24s, Box 62. George Hepburn, Journal of George Hepburn, p. 153.

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44

45 46

47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54

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A. H. Reed (ed.), Bathgate Expeditions From New Zealand’s Commercial Capital Of The Sixties Autobiographic Sketches By John Bathgate (Wellington, 1952), OSM, pp. 23 and 29-31. Mary Stewart, ‘Notes from New Zealand: a window into a settler mind’, MA, University of Otago, 2004. See Tony Ballantyne, ‘Archive, discipline, state: power and knowledge in South Asian historiography’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 3:1 (2000), pp. 87-105. Rollo Arnold makes a similar point about the English agricultural labourers who emigrated to New Zealand corresponded around the Empire and also with relatives in America, or who set up newspapers which reported happenings throughout the formal and informal Empire as well as in the USA and trade rivals such as Denmark. See Rollo Arnold, ‘The village and the globe: aspects of the social origins of schooling in Victorian New Zealand’, Australia New Zealand History of Education Society Journal, 5:2 (1977), pp. 1-12. Thomas Adam to his family, 30 May and 18 June 1857 and 6 July 1867, OSM, BB-0003. Arch Henderson to his brother and sister, 4 November 1860; to his niece, 2 December 1869; to his brother and sister, 11 February 1875, OSM, AB 018. William Wilson to George Wilson, 1 June 1862, 14 June 1862, 29 November 1869, and William Wilson to his brother and parents, 4 June 1865, OSM, BIDG Box 56-31. Arch Henderson to his brother and sister, 11 February 1875, OSM, AB 018. See McCarthy, ‘Personal letters and the organisation of Irish migration’, pp. 306-10. W. D. Borrie, Immigration to New Zealand, 1854-1938 (Canberra, 1991) and Donald Harman Akenson, Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand, 1860-1950 (Wellington, 1990), pp. 3-64. This summary seems to have been largely supported by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s immigration project led by Terry Hearn. McCarthy, ‘“In prospect of a happier future”’, pp. 105-16; and ‘“Bands of fellowship”’. Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies, pp. 191-265. For a fuller discussion of this subject of leisure including the most easily identifiable of Scots sports – golf and curling – see Tom Brooking and Jennie Coleman, ‘Newest Scotland: life and leisure of Scottish immigrants to New Zealand to 1840’, in Norma Bethune (ed.), Work ‘n’ Pastimes: 150 Years of Pain and Pleasure, Labour and Leisure (Dunedin, 1998), pp. 3-22; and Eliot Campbell, ‘Scottish identity in Dunedin and Christchurch to c.1920: an application of the “new British history” to New Zealand’, MA, University of Canterbury, 2002. On the Burns’ clubs see Lenore Satterthwaite, The Burns Heritage: A History of the Dunedin Club (Dunedin, 1991). Undated letter of Jeanie Stevenson 1896 and Gilbert Stevenson, 4 January 1873, Buchanan Family Letters, HL, Ms 1628/2. Watson Sheenan to the Reverend William Burnet (his future father-in-law), 14 May 1863, HL, Watson Sheenan Family Letters, 01-070.

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57 58 59

60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68

69 70 71

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Ann Fraser Black, I Remember, 1848-1866 (Dunedin, 1937), pp. 10 and 21; [n.a.], Letters from Otago, 1848-1849 (Dunedin, 1978), p. 40. Thomas Adam to his brother Alick Adam, 18 June 1857, OSM, BB-0003. For example, in September he reports how busy he is helping to build churches and manses and on 15 March 1855 he reports on Presbytery work carried out with the Reverend William Will, HL, George Hepburn Letters, Ms-985-Series 24, Box 62. Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, p. 280. Adams’ Family History, HL, Ms 1067-1. See Dennis McEldowney (ed.), Presbyterians in Aotearoa, 1840-1990: Presbyterian Church of New Zealand (Wellington, 1990); Ian Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford, 2001); and Karyn-Maree Piercy, ‘“Presbyterian pioneers”: the deaconess movement, Dunedin, 1900-1920’, BA Hons Long Essay, University of Otago, 2000. Grant, Twenty-Five Years in Dunedin (1880), HL, Hocken Pamphlet collection, Pamphlet 90/48. Barr, The Old Identities, p. 225. Rosalind McClean, ‘Class, family and church: a case study of interpenetration Otago, 1848-1852’, BA Hons Long Essay, University of Otago, 1981. Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, p. 337. Ali Clarke, ‘ Feasts and fasts: holidays, religion and ethnicity in nineteenthcentury Otago’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2003. Also see Margaret Morgan, ‘The right man for his time: Donald McNaughton Stuart D.D.’, MA, University of Otago, 1992; McEldowney (ed.), Presbyterians in Aotearoa; Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia; Piercy, ‘“Presbyterian pioneers”’; and Keen, ‘Feeding the lambs’. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1992); and John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities: the case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 8 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 215-31. See Colley, Britons; MacKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities’; and Clarke, ‘Feasts and Fasts’, pp. 288-349. Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Australia and New Zealand (Ringwood, Victoria, 1973), p. 287; M. Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia (London, 1908), p. 351. See O. A. Gillespie, South Canterbury: A Record of Settlement (Timaru, 1958); Stevan Eldred-Grigg, A New History of Canterbury (Dunedin, 1982); Jim McAloon, Nelson: A Regional History (Nelson, 1997); Jessie Annabell, ‘Caledonian, stern, and wild: Scottish identity in Wanganui and Rangitikei, 1880-1918’, MA, Massey University, 1996; M. D. N. Campbell, ‘The evolution of Hawke’s Bay landed society, 1850-1914’, PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1972; Graham Bagnall, Wairarapa: An Historical Excursion (Masterton, 1976); and R.C.J. Stone, Young Logan Campbell (Auckland, 1982) and The Father and His Gift (Auckland, 1987). James Belich, Reforging Paradise: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000 (Auckland, 2001), p. 221. Also see Belich, Making Peoples, pp. 315-16.

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74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81

82

83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91

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See Jennie Coleman ‘The transmigration of the Piob Mhor: the Scottish Highland piping tradition in the South Island of New Zealand with particular reference to Southland, Otago and South Canterbury, to 1940’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, 1996. Tom Burns, 15 April 1848, ‘Journal of the Reverend Thomas Burns, 18471848’, OSM, Ms 77. [n.a.], Letters from Otago, pp. 12-13 and 15. James Beattie, ‘Lusting after a lost arcadia: European environmental perception in the Dunedin area, 1840-1860’, BA Hons Long Essay, University of Otago, 1999. James Blackie to John McGlashan (Edinburgh), 22 July 1848, HL, John McGlashan papers, MS 463. Twain, Mark Twain in Australia and New Zealand, p. 287. Fraser, I Remember, pp. 4-5, 14, 26. Edmund Smith, Early Adventures in Otago, ed. W. D. Stewart (Dunedin, 1940), p. 52. See, for example, Geoff Park, Nga Uru Ora: The Groves of Life. Ecology and History New Zealand Landscape (Wellington, 1995); or Evelyn Stokes, ‘Contesting resources: Maori, Pakeha and a tenurial revolution’, in Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (eds), Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Melbourne, 2002), pp. 35-6. Anthony Lynch, ‘The garden of Otago: a history of small scale farming in the Clutha area, 1848-1870’, MA, University of Otago, 1989; and Vaughan Wood, ‘Soil fertility management in nineteenth century New Zealand agriculture’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2003, pp. 150-61. See Brooking, And Captain of Their Souls, p. 135. Clarke, ‘Feast and fasts’; and Brooking and Coleman, ‘Newest Scotland’, pp. 3-22, pp. 9-10. George Hepburn’s letters provide full descriptions of New Year celebrations. Gilbert Stevenson, 4 April 1901, HL, Buchanan Family Letters, Ms 1628/2; and Barr, The Old Identities, p. 31. Thomas Adam to his brother, 18 June 1857, OSM, BB-0003. See Tom Brooking, ‘Sharing out the haggis’, pp. 49-65. Barr, The Old Identities, p. 363. Gilbert Buchanan writing to his Dunedin based family 4 and 18 January and 21 May 1872, HL, Buchanan Family Letters, Ms 1628/2. See McClean, ‘Class, family and church’. Scots settlers in Otago seemed more relaxed about and tolerant towards the local Kai Tahu people than English settlers elsewhere in New Zealand but the subject of race relations and intermarriage remains so vast that it will require much more research before any generalizations can be generated. See Brooking, ‘Sharing out the haggis’, pp. 49-65. See Coleman, ‘The transmigration of the Piob Mhor’.

9 ETHNIC NETWORKS AND IDENTITIES AMONG INTER-WAR SCOTTISH MIGRANTS IN NORTH AMERICA Angela McCarthy In 1992, at 76 years of age, Allan Gunn warmly recollected the intricate story of his family’s staggered migration from Glasgow to New York which had begun seventy years earlier. As Allan recalled, the family initially had two options – the United States or Australia: My mother’s uncle went to Australia. We had a neighbour who came to America. My uncle kept writing he would like us to come to Australia and my father was leaning to going to Australia. The other neighbour came to America. He used to write and tell us how nice it was here. He had a job lined up for my father if he was interested. My mother said ‘well Australia’s an awful far away place to go to’, but she would be willing to come to America. So evidently she convinced my father to try America first. So he came about two and a half to three years before we did to get situated and to determine whether he’d like to emigrate. The decision to select the United States was further influenced by the content of the neighbour’s letters which emphasized, ‘How nice the climate was for one thing. The winters were so nice compared to our winters which were very dreary and mostly very damp. We don’t get much snow. And he said kids seem to have so much more fun over that way. They seem to have more things and enjoy life.’1 Allan Gunn’s testimony is uncommon among the Ellis Island interviews with Scots, as very rarely are migrants asked about or raise themselves the possibility of settlement in competing destinations.2 Allan’s recollection is also valuable in explaining why, for his family, the United States was

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chosen instead of Australia. Not only were positive images vital, but also in his mother’s mind, the proximity of the United States to Scotland was critical in the decision to migrate. The choice of destination in this case depended on how close it was to the place of origin and demonstrates that ongoing links to Scotland were central to the act of leaving. During the period that Allan Gunn’s father lived alone in the United States, he remitted money back to his family who eventually voyaged to New York in 1925 on board the vessel Athenian. Upon arrival the family stayed with friends in the Bronx for two weeks. Quite apart from discussing the complex mechanics that brought the family to New York, Allan also raised issues relating to ethnic identities: We had to have Scottish dancing … and we had to do the sword dance, single sword, double sword dance, Highland fling, Sailors Horn Pipe and, of course, any time a church or some kind of function going on we were invited to dance and I hated it. And we had our kilts, of course. The only way I could get even, show my disapproval when we did the double sword dance, I would walk off the stage and let my sister pick up the swords. Scottishness in Allan Gunn’s account was a public and cultural demonstration, rife with symbols of national pride. Yet there was also a firm sense of becoming American in his testimony: I was just going to tell you a little story about when I became Americanized. We were going, my mother, my sister, and I were walking along the street and she asked me to do something and I said, ‘no’. I thought I was safe being out on the street. Well, at the first alleyway that we came to up we went, down came my pants, and I got a beating so I wasn’t quite 100 per cent Americanized yet.3 These aspects of Allan Gunn’s testimony illuminate the main issues this chapter is concerned with. First, the interview reveals that the Gunn family’s move to the United States was part of an intricate procedure drawing upon the advice and assistance of those already settled abroad. Images of the United States proved influential in this regard, and the chapter incorporates examination of the predominantly positive impressions of the United States held by intending migrants. While the chapter acknowledges that close connections had a social role in facilitating

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the settlement of newcomers after arrival, this chapter focuses predominantly on the initial practical purpose of these networks, particularly the way in which pioneering migrants aided newcomers with vital access to accommodation and employment. These informal personal networks were primarily composed of family and friends known to new arrivals, though in some cases the origins of such ties stretched back to earlier generations. The chapter therefore highlights the essential role of a broadly defined family network in the process of migration and initial settlement. Interviews also reveal that formal networks, particularly Scottish societies, proved important after arrival and could be comprised of Scots from localized regions. Yet the involvement of Scottish migrants from diverse backgrounds in ethnic societies meant that a broader encompassing ethnicity was articulated. Social, cultural, and recreational in purpose, these formal associations helped maintain a sense of Scottish identity. Yet as Allan Gunn revealed, for those Scots who moved to the United States as youngsters their sense of Scottishness co-existed and competed with a degree of Americanization. This finding is perhaps due to the substantial number of interviews conducted with Scottish migrants who arrived as children. As the interviews show, child migrants were more prone to lose or underplay elements of their Scottishness. Yet, like adult migrants, their testimony reveals conclusively that informal personal networks were critical in their family’s relocation to and settlement in the United States. All told, this chapter utilizes 17 interviews with Scottish migrants who moved to the United States between 1921 and 1928, 12 of whom were ten years of age or less. The interviews were conducted between 55 and 75 years after arrival, with 78 being the median age of the migrants interviewed. In any analysis, then, we should remain alert to the difficulties in using oral testimony as a source, including problems with memory and a tendency to reconceptualize events at a later date.4 This article also draws upon the voluminous personal correspondence sent by Ernest Younger, a native of Tillicoultry who settled in Toronto in the early 1920s. His letters, which span the inter-war period, are utilized in order to contrast contemporary written accounts with later oral memories and demonstrate the merits and drawbacks of both sources in exploring ethnic networks and identities.5 While letters document better than oral testimony the day-to-day encounters with other expatriates, interviews are more likely to illustrate the critical operation of personal networks prior to and immediately following a migrant’s arrival. Letters, on the other hand, rarely digressed into such matters, given that the correspondent’s recipients were generally aware of the mechanics surrounding the initial move. As

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with interviews, however, personal letters likewise highlight the role that impressions, positive and negative, of potential destinations played in the decision to migrate. Personal Networks During the inter-war period almost half a million Scots left their homeland.6 Of this total, approximately 160,000 chose, in the 1920s, to move to the United States, thus contributing substantially to a recorded presence there in 1930 of almost 355,000 Scottish-born migrants.7 Indeed, Scots were nine times more likely to settle there than their English counterparts.8 Yet compared with Canada, where numerous studies of Scottish (predominantly Highland) settlement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exist,9 the experience of the Scots in the United States is manifestly neglected in the history of Scottish migration. A few scattered works exist, but as with other destinations these are primarily confined to the period before 1900.10 In those few discussions of the twentieth-century migration experience, newspapers, magazines, and society records are the main sources deployed.11 The thrust of such work suggests that external markers of Scottishness, such as the immigrant press and Highland games, were in decline especially in the inter-war period.12 Thereafter, as one study of the American South argues, Scottish identities were revitalized due to the involvement of later generations.13 Yet as this chapter demonstrates, Scottish identities were still fervent in the inter-war period. Such was the exodus that between 1921 and 1930 that Scotland had the highest rate of emigration out of all European countries.14 Broad explanations for this notable outflow emphasize the decline of heavy industry, the rise of mass unemployment, and increasing social problems pervading Scotland in the twentieth century.15 As has been summarized, ‘[T]he continuation of heavy out-migration in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was falling off elsewhere in the UK, can be explained by Scotland’s characteristic mix of heavy, export-oriented industries which were peculiarly vulnerable for much of the inter-war period’.16 As argued elsewhere, however, it is important to consider a range of interacting factors for migration including: the availability of assisted passages supplied by friends, families, and agencies; the influence of returned migrants; the networks of family and friends already settled abroad; and images of life outside of Scotland.17 Indeed, the images that migrants held of potential destinations proved influential. While their youthful age at migration meant that many interviewees had no knowledge of the United States prior to their departure, others had positive, if somewhat exaggerated, impressions of the

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country. Anne Quinn, who departed at nine years of age in 1928, for instance, indicated that her mother viewed the country as a land of opportunity.18 Eighteen-year-old Mary Dunn who left Stirling in 1923 likewise anticipated the United States in these terms, believing there would be gold in the streets and money growing on trees.19 Dundee-born Jack Whitecross Carnegie, five years old at the time of his departure, reiterated this belief of a promising life in the United States, as a result of letters received from his father: ‘We thought there would be gold in the street [laughs]. I don’t know. I didn’t find any’.20 John Patrick Daly, meanwhile, was just six years of age when his family left Dumbarton. He recollected, ‘I remember in Scotland I’d hear people singing a song, “I know a happy land far, far away, where you get ham and eggs ten times a day”. So there was apparently this kind of image of this panacea country some place’.21 Generally, such images were relayed in two ways: by the correspondence of family and friends already settled abroad (as depicted in Allan Gunn’s story), or by the accounts supplied by close kin who had returned home after a period abroad. The riveting descriptions they provided either seduced or repelled those contemplating departure. Among those enticed was Motherwell-born Agnes Schilling, who left at 15 years of age in 1922. Her testimony reveals how entranced she was by the seductive glamour of returned migrants: ‘I think I was very impressed with visitors coming over from United States and Scotland and I guess I was always sort of style conscious. Their clothing, their manners, everything impressed me that I thought it must be beautiful, it must be a nice country, lovely to be over there, to go there’.22 Indeed, the clothes adorned by return migrants were a major visible measure of success that lingered in the minds of potential migrants. Perhaps women moving to the United States required more encouragement by way of inflated rhetoric and visible signs of success which suggested that they too could achieve such a lifestyle. Though such images should be treated with caution, in many emigrant minds the United States promised an elixir of success and satisfaction. The images of competing destinations in Australasia, by way of contrast, differed in content. Whereas images of the United States were dominated by symbolical signs of financial success, Australasia’s unfamiliar physical environment preoccupied intending migrants.23 Despite such contrasts, returned migrants were a crucial source of information in directing Scots to all destinations. Prior experience of mobility was therefore significant in shaping further migration flows. If images provided by close connections proved tantalizing to Scots, just as critical were the logistics involved in the process of relocation. As with

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Allan Gunn, whose story opened this chapter, ten other Scots indicated that their move to the United States was to join their father or stepfather who had already settled abroad. This astute strategy was designed to enable the father to assess the country before sending for the remainder of the family. For example, Jack Whitecross Carnegie was just five years of age when he left Dundee on board the Columbia. His father William had gone to the United States in 1918 where he worked in a dye company in Hawthorne, New Jersey. According to Jack, ‘He wrote and he sent money and then his employer found out that he was saving, saving up his pay to bring his family over and he gave him the money to bring us and then he worked it out you know which was very nice’.24 In some cases a father’s relocation resulted from the encouragement of friends already settled abroad. James Fanthorpe Cooper, a shipbuilder, left Glasgow in 1922 for Pittsburgh where friends resided. He continued to remit money for the remainder of the family to join him, a reunion accomplished two years after his departure.25 In the majority of cases where the father initially preceded his family abroad, however, he was lured by other family members settled in the United States, rather than friends. Mary Kendrick’s father, for instance, was persuaded to go to the United States in 1926, during the National Strike, after a visit to Auchinleck from a cousin. The remainder of his family joined him a year later.26 William McGuire, meanwhile, was seven years of age when he left Blantyre in 1928 with his mother and siblings. The passage of William’s father had been facilitated by Bill and Katie Patterson, William’s uncle and aunt.27 Ann Nelson’s father went to the United States in November 1922 accompanied by two of Ann’s maternal aunts. He moved to New Jersey and in 1923 Ann, her mother, and two sisters voyaged out on the Columbia.28 In August 1923 ten-year-old Isabella Macdonald travelled to New York on the Berengaria with her mother and two brothers. They would soon reunite with Isabella’s father David Macdonald, who had settled at Carney in March 1923. According to Isabella, her father had been encouraged by his brother to migrate.29 Family involvement across the generations was therefore heavily implicated in the process of migration. Some testimonies reveal more complicated family strategies. Thomas Allan, together with his brother, went to the United States in 1927 on the Caledonia. They were leaving to join their recently remarried father who, as a widower, had emigrated to his brother.30 Other family relationships were also important in the process of relocation. Eighteen-year-old Mary Dunn, for instance, was encouraged to leave her native Stirling by two maternal aunts living in Pennsylvania who spoke of ‘the land of opportunity’.31

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Joseph Delaney’s passage, on the other hand, was paid by his stepfather’s brother, Jimmy O’Neill. His stepfather Thomas had settled in Pennsylvania where two of his brothers resided. The family left on the Columbia in 1922 when Joseph was 18 years old. They went initially to Wilkes-Barre.32 Meanwhile, Patrick Peak’s family elected to move to the United States because an aunt and uncle were in Holyoke. His sister migrated first before his eldest sister and brother relocated. Patrick’s father and brother then voyaged out, and five or six months later were joined by Patrick, his mother, and the remainder of his siblings.33 Anne Quinn went to the United States in 1928 with her father, mother, and brother to join a brother, sister, and cousin who had moved there earlier. Anne’s mother also had a brother living in Kansas City and he financially assisted their move. They lived in Harrison before moving to Carney which came to be known as ‘little Paisley’ due to the presence of Scottish migrants. As Anne’s husband interjected during her interview: Carney was the target of a lot of Scottish migrants at that time because there were mills in Carney that were actually part of the mills in Scotland, Paisley. The Coat and Clark Mill at that time were huge in this area. It was a tremendous complex. And they stayed in this area. They started phasing out in the 1930s, and they weren’t moved to the South until the 1950s. But the Coats and Clark mills were great, and there were several other plants in Carney that had their parent company in Paisley.34 These movements raise the question of when cycles of departure begin. As suggested elsewhere, Scottish migration was a continuum based on the unrelenting involvement of personal networks.35 Heavy inter-war flows were facilitated by a familial infrastructure that was firmly established by departures prior to 1914. We know, for instance, that Lowland migration during the eighteenth century was predominantly composed of individuals and families, but what was the degree of separation between the two?36 Furthermore, to what extent did families dominate during the nineteenthcentury flow? An analysis of assisted migrants to New Zealand during one year, 1876, reveals that Scots were almost two times as likely as the Irish to travel as married couples and one and a half times more likely to move in family groups.37 Is it possible then that there is an unbroken continuum between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries concerning family migration from Scotland? Or is there a new dynamic in the twentieth century which sees the flow become increasingly family oriented building

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on patterns becoming apparent, but not widespread, during earlier centuries? While personal testimonies suggest a strong family dynamic in the migration process, no definitive answer is available without broader statistical analyses. Not all migrants, however, moved because of the influence of kin settled abroad. Maisie Pedersen, for instance, went to the United States to join her friend, the friend’s mother, and the friend’s brother. Maisie was 18 years old when she left in 1924 on the Baltic. Maisie’s sisters came after her, a situation reflecting a further practical dimension to Scottish networking.38 While movements organized by family groups embraced all genders, it appears that single women without family abroad were more inclined to be assisted by female friends. Margaret Kirk likewise had no relatives to join when she ventured to the United States in 1923 at 22 years of age. She was sponsored by an English woman whose boarder was an apprentice of Margaret’s father’s. Such sponsorship was clearly crucial as Margaret Kirk incisively revealed: America was very fussy about who they let in to the country … No woman could come in to America in these days unless she had a sister claiming her or a brother claiming her but he had to show that he was her brother but it was mostly a sister or an aunt claiming you because they were afraid of prostitution or whatever it would be but no girl could come in here without somebody claiming her.39 In light of regulations governing entry to the United States, which included the necessity for a sponsor, migrants were obliged to draw upon a range of personal connections abroad. Intimate associates were clearly of great importance, but Scots also utilized more distant contacts usually recommended by their family and friends. In this way immigration restrictions in the United States necessitated the creation of chains of migration which for some migrants in earlier generations may have been looser or non-existent. It is unknown, though, whether reciprocal obligations were a consequence of such engagement. These extensive examples have been cited to establish the broad significance of ongoing contact with family and friends abroad among Scots in supplying information about the country, arranging their passage, and encouraging migrants to their destination of choice. Although a range of motives contributed to their decision to leave Scotland, social networks were vitally important in generating and facilitating migration.40 Local attachments rather than a broad sense of ethnicity, however, mattered

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more to these Scottish migrants in their movement to the United States. These intimate connections also proved crucial to newcomers in the immediate aftermath of their arrival particularly in organizing employment and providing initial accommodation. Such assistance was generally fulfilled swiftly not only to satisfy sponsorship commitments, but also to prevent newcomers from becoming a financial burden to their associates. This network of informal personal ties not only drew upon family members already in the United States, such as brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and in-laws, but also upon friends derived from specific localities in Scotland. Agencies could also be important and in some cases a range of networks interacted. Although Mary Dunn had maternal aunts in the United States who encouraged her to migrate there, Mary travelled in the care of the Travellers Aid, an agency that advised her how to interact with officials at Ellis Island. Upon arrival in New York Mary recalled being examined on board ship before being taken to Ellis Island for questioning. She took the train to Buffalo and from there continued on to her relations in Pennsylvania. Due to her aunt’s illness, Mary initially lived with her grandfather’s sister. Not long after her arrival in New York she recollected, ‘I got in contact with some of my Scottish friends that lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and they said come over to Youngstown because there are a lot of wealthy people that had big homes and you got more so I got a job then at $15 a week’.41 Meanwhile, Joseph Delaney’s uncle Jim McDaid secured him a job.42 Motherwell-born Agnes Schilling, on the other hand, claimed she had no relatives in the United States when she migrated there in 1922 at 15 years of age. Yet she had friends who visited her throughout her ten-day stay on Ellis Island and eventually took Agnes to their home in Newark, New Jersey. Despite the initial absence of family in the United States, Agnes’s brother reunited with her two months later and they were then joined by a sister, a further feature of several testimonies. Agnes Schilling’s sister worked for a family at Montclare in New Jersey and through them Agnes obtained employment with a judge’s family.43 Maisie Pedersen of Greenock was another who followed her friend and friend’s family to the United States initially residing with them in New York.44 Other Scottish migrants went to family members. Originally from Cupar in Fife, John Will and his family left in 1924 and stayed with a maternal aunt before moving on to Los Angeles, where their sponsor, his mother’s second cousin, lived. Once in Los Angeles they lodged with their sponsor, Alexander Munro, for several weeks.45 Clearly this extended conceptualization of kinship meant that intending migrants had a greater chance of securing support from their relatives already settled abroad.

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Even those families with fathers already settled in the United States made use of their personal networks for accommodation. Isabella Deeks’ family stayed with an uncle for a couple of weeks after being reunited.46 William McGuire’s parents, meanwhile, had both been in the United States and the children went with their mother in 1928 where they lived for a time with an aunt and uncle.47 Anne Quinn also had two sisters and three brothers in the United States and ‘They all had jobs, were working, and they had taken an apartment for us and had it furnished’.48 As these examples demonstrate, networks based on close durable connections with family and friends were instrumental in the processes of relocation and settlement. Kinship ties and intimate friendships based on local origins and work affiliations were therefore of more importance than a broad identification with natives of Scotland. Yet despite the assistance provided by established networks of family and friends abroad, some evidence suggests that these early connections faded in significance after arrival. Anne Quinn, for instance, mentioned that her parents had met newly arrived neighbours from Scotland and her mother helped the husband get an apartment and set it up for them, you know. She was a much younger woman than my mother but they were quite friendly. And things like that happen, the friendship kind of trailed off, you know, and we didn’t see an awful lot of them after that. Because she, you know, they made new friends of their own. By this time my mother had made other friends also. And the families, you know, had all their own friends by this time.49 Formal Networks and Identities In such circumstances, the declining importance of these informal personal networks could be counteracted by the role played by Scottish associations. Despite the existence of societies catering to migrants from distinct areas of origin, other clubs drew their membership from the broader Scottish ethnic community with diverse origins in Scotland. They also supplied an outlet for Scots to audibly and visibly parade their ethnic identities. Indeed, for Scots in North America it is the frequent reference to Scottish societies which stands out when compared with stories of their associates settling elsewhere.50 Accounting for this might be the timing of their arrival. These Scots arrived in Ellis Island in the inter-war period, whereas existing testimonies from their compatriots in Australasia arose mainly from those voyaging after the Second World War. Another factor is the nature of their settlement abroad. Whereas these Scottish migrants in the United States

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tended to settle in populated urban areas, Scots in Australia were more likely to geographical scattering in suburban areas, a feature which Jim Hammerton insists ‘inclined against ethnic concentration; such dispersal was not congenial to the fostering of cultural nationalism.’51 For most Scottish migrants, their involvement in such formal organizations centred on the celebration of traditions exported from their homeland. But as scholars have stressed, such activities were constantly negotiated and adapted, both privately and publicly, according to the purpose they were intended to serve.52 For the majority of Scottish settlers, their participation was a result of the social elements offered by clubs and organizations with a Scottish ethnic ethos. Scholars have also argued that this invented ethnicity encompassed a ‘constellation’ of symbols, rituals, and slogans which enabled migrants of a certain nationality with divergent origins, dialect, class, political, and religious backgrounds to develop a unified identity.53 For Scots, then, their diverse local identities and allegiances at home were tempered by broader associations in the New World. In the United States, Scottishness became a visible culture enabling Scots to see themselves as a people apart. It empowered Scots to distinguish themselves from other British migrants and emphasize the cultural element of their ethnic identities at a time when newcomers from other countries in southern and eastern Europe were viewed with hostility due to being perceived as less skilled, predominantly Catholic, and more illiterate than the host population.54 Moreover, unlike some other ethnic groups in the United States, ethnic identity for the Scots was not politically motivated. As with personal networks, some Scottish societies also catered to migrants from specific origins. This was particularly evident in the testimony of migrants from Lewis. Several interviews conducted with Lewis migrants verify the existence of vibrant Lewis societies in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Montreal.55 The most intriguing testimony emerges from Mary MacIver: The Lewis Society met once a month on a Saturday night. They had it in the Ketchum Hall, right opposite the church on Devonport Road. They had like a concert first, and the dancing after that. Of course, we had to be out before twelve. There were good Gaelic singers here, those days. We used just to get up and sing this and sing that, and sing together. We used to have a cup of tea, and we were the first society in Toronto who started to give you the potatoes and salt herring in the winter time. We made a special night and everybody

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Despite mentioning that various societies catered for diverse origins in Scotland, the testimony also exposes the sense of collective involvement bringing together the various societies. This is similarly evident in recollections from the Ellis Island migrants whose associations were more national than regional, catering to a general sense of Scottishness. Jack Whitecross Carnegie, whose mother was half Irish, recalled that she ‘belonged to a Caledonian club, Daughters of Scotia, and they were, they used to meet every month down at Patterson … and she liked to do the Irish jig’.57 Helen Hansen of South Queensferry migrated in 1923 at nine years of age. The family moved to Gary ‘a regular Scotch colony’. She reminisced how her family ‘belonged to a Scottish clan and they had meetings every two weeks or something and they used to have the dances and the bagpipes and do the Scotch dancing’. The women’s organization was the Daughters of Scotia and the men’s was Clan MacNeill. Helen’s involvement resulted in a lifetime membership.58 Agnes Schilling’s sense of external Scottishness existed prior to her migration. As a youngster she recollected Highland dancing sessions. Once in the United States Agnes and her sister attended Scottish and Irish dances in New York. She would also dance for the family she worked for.59 According to Mary Dunn, it took her five years to become acquainted with other Scots in the United States. Yet Mary’s visible Scottishness was evident at the time of her interview. She declared eagerly: Last Saturday night we went to a dinner dance honouring Robert Burns and that’s his picture up there on the wall and we’re going to one next Wednesday night to honour Robert Burns who is the poet, the Scottish poet, who died very young. And then we, the dance all the Scottish dances at these things you know. And I have oodles of Scottish records. When I get homesick I put them on and play them. I don’t really get homesick because I don’t have anybody at home now.60 Scottishness for these migrants was deeply social and cultural, encompassing the pervasive national identifiers of clans, societies, pipes, kilts, and dancing. Yet as these testimonies show, Scottishness was also amplified within a family context, for families were frequently the transmitter of identities.

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How, though, did Scottish children perceive their ethnicities? According to Anne Quinn, the ‘Scottish, the highland dances, the Highland Fling, that we learned in school. We used to do that, but I soon forgot it, because after a while I didn’t do it any more. You get teased about things like that’.61 A similar reception was had by Mary Kendrick: ‘The school you know was hard and, of course, we spoke with a decided Scottish brogue and the kids would make fun of us’.62 Likewise Patrick Peak miserably recalled of his school in New Bedford, ‘I had an awful school life in this country because anyone that comes over here a foreigner or with a foreign brogue, especially a Scots brogue, he gets picked on every time he turns around. I got into more fights over there than I ever did with the kids over in the old country’.63 Also remembering her Pittsburgh school days Lillian Hopkins rued, ‘They made fun of me because we were Scotch’.64 This merciless teasing was a consequence of the way Scottish children spoke English and shows that they were just as susceptible to attacks levied at the children of other ethnic groups. The result of such pestering was the rapid and resolute adoption of American speaking habits. As well as being audibly identified as different, visible displays of Scottishness such as wearing kilts also attracted derision and resulted in Scottish children quickly favouring American clothes. John Will, for instance, wore a kilt to church in Los Angeles. It caused such a commotion that American children heckled him, apparently having never seen anything like it before. It was the first and last time, John stated, that he wore a kilt in the United States.65 For these Scottish children, then, their ethnic identities were less likely to be ‘complementary’ as Jon Gjerde has indicated for migrants in the nineteenth-century American rural Middle West.66 Rather, external identifiers of their ethnic origins were swiftly abolished. This did not entail, though, the disintegration of internal Scottishness. Adult migrants, not surprisingly, were more likely to retain their Scottish speaking patterns. At times, though, this could be somewhat contrived: In fact, my mother never really lost her accent. Her accent seemed to become more pronounced the older she became. And I have one brother, my older brother. Jim really could not understand him at all. And he married a Scottish woman, and she had come from a different part of Scotland than we did, and she spoke in, and still does, in, very fast. So my brother, you know, he got into this way of speaking also. And he was very broad Scottish. And Jim really had a hard time understanding him. But, of course, I didn’t, and my kids love it when I put on a Scottish accent.67

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Recollections such as Anne Quinn’s reveal a further benefit of deploying personal testimonies to examine the processes of migration and settlement: that is, the rich emotions prevalent in individual accounts. Other Ethnic Identities Identity formation is, of course, highly complex and Scottishness was only one of many multiple loyalties held by these migrants. It is worth bearing in mind, therefore, that the frequent reference to a sense of being Scottish generally arose due to the interviewer’s questions. While the probing Ellis Island interviews were predominantly concerned with the entire process of relocation, questions concerning identities were also important in terms of issues of acculturation and adjustment. Occasionally, too, a sense of other ethnic identities beyond Scottishness filters through the testimonies. For Anne Quinn, her ethnic identity was complex for it incorporated an Irish as well as Scottish heritage and was linked to her religious affiliation. As she recounted: And there were a lot of Irish in this town also, Irish immigrants. And, of course, in Scotland because of our name we were considered Irish. And that was one, another reason it was difficult for members of, the older members of my family to get jobs because, you know, there would be signs up ‘No Irish Need Apply’. And, oh, yeah, yeah. And we were Catholic, Roman Catholic, which was another plot against us in Scotland because Scotland is a very Protestant country.68 The issue of becoming American occasionally suffused the interviews with Scottish migrants. One of the more sustained memories emanated from Anne Quinn who described her brother’s efforts to dress in an American fashion: [T]he style in Britain at that time, the boys wore knickers and long socks, knee socks. And once we got to America he wanted pants, you know, stretch that word out, ‘pants’. Just like the American boys. So there was a men’s and boy’s shop down the street from us. If we stood in our dining room window we could see the shop on the main street and on, my mother had said to him, ‘All right. Saturday morning we’ll go to the store, to the shop’ – she didn’t call it store, shop – ‘and get your pants’. He wanted to be so Americanized right from the minute that we got into Harrison, it was unbelievable.

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And Saturday morning, early, he and I were the only two up because everybody else was sleeping. You know, they went to work during the week and they got a chance to sleep late Saturday mornings. So he was standing at the dining room window and he saw the owner open the door and go in. Well, he rushed into my mother’s room and starts shaking her. ‘Mr. Gas just went into the store! Mr. Gas just went into his store! Get up, and we’ll go get my pants.’ ‘All right, all right’. The poor soul had to get up and have her breakfast and get dressed and off they went to get his pants. And it was dungaree-style.69 Older migrants were also considered Americanized for Mary Dunn claimed that ‘my two aunts were Americanized’.70 The Letters of Ernest Younger In Canada By contrast with these oral testimonies of Scots arriving at Ellis Island, the personal letters of Ernest Younger in Canada enable further insight into issues relating to ethnic networks and identities. Unlike interviews, letters are contemporary and reveal complementary material. Few letters, for instance, actually demonstrate the importance of networks in influencing a letter-writer’s decision to migrate; they do, however, show how that migrant could influence and offer support to intending newcomers, as well as expose daily engagements with other expatriates. Ernest Younger migrated to Toronto in the early 1920s. He initially boarded with a fellow migrant from Tillicoultry and his letters document his widespread interaction with other Scots, particularly those from his native Tillicoultry. As he revealed in July 1925 of a close friend, ‘Her house is quite a meeting place for Tillicoultronians, who are now Torontonians’.71 Indeed at Christmas that year ‘The guests were all Tilly people’.72 That said, it seems that the Tillicoultry connection only proved significant once settled abroad. As Ernest contemplated, ‘It is curious how few people in Tilly really [k]new who I was’.73 As with other societies in Canada, such as the Lewis, Caithness, and Skye societies, some consideration was given to establishing a society in Toronto specifically for natives of Tillicoultry: ‘Geo. Speedie talked again of forming a Tillicoultry Club, to meet 2 or 3 times a year, but that was about as far as it got’.74 Informal personal linkages, however, remained vigorous. Ernest Younger’s letters indicate that he socialized frequently with these individuals. Cards, movies, car tours, dinners, dances, picnic, fish, miniature golf, bowling, and bridge all featured. Nostalgic conversation was also undertaken: ‘I went back to work

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yesterday afternoon but Bill Howieson came in & there was nothing done. We talked of Tilly, Devonside & Coalsnaughton & had many a laugh over his reminis[c]inces.’75 There was, however, a downside to such proximity with these expatriates. As Ernest lamented, ‘I was sorry to hear that Adam Keir had got into trouble, but I hope the gossip doesn’t follow him over here, but I suppose it will as there are so many Tilly folks here, altogether too bad’.76 This comment indicates that close connections could generate conflict as well as co-operation. The importance of local connections is also discernible in Ernest Younger’s discussions of other Scots in Toronto. When telling his parents of a new acquaintance, Ernest linked the individual to a specific locale in Scotland: ‘The new draftsman is Scotch from Dunoon. His people came over here when he was about the size of ten cents (one year old).’77 Ernest told also of ‘Another young fellow, just two weeks out from the Old Country, started in the office the other day, from Motherwell this time.’78 As for Jean Ford, chosen to be Miss Toronto, Ernest remarked, ‘I understand she, or at least her people come from Edinburgh so that is rather gratifying to us Scotch folks, if it is the case’.79 And in early 1931 Ernest announced, ‘I was at church last night with Jack Ross. The minister was a Scotsman from Fifeshire, who had been in West Kilbride for fifteen years’.80 Local origins in Scotland were clearly crucial in matters relating to ethnic identities for Scottish migrants. Indeed, the voluminous correspondence of a Scots woman in New Zealand in the 1950s likewise testifies to this geographical belonging.81 Local proximity rather than a broad national identifier was therefore of greater significance for many Scots and while affirming findings from oral testimony, enables it to be analyzed at a deeper level. What though was the significance of these ethnic networks? As Ernest Younger’s correspondence reveals, social functions were of prime importance. But occasionally his letters reveal the practical aspects of networking among Scots. In April 1925, for instance, Ernest revealed, ‘I had another letter from Bobby Nicholson urging me to go to the States, but I don’t think I’ll move in a great hurry. He was saying I could command from $30 to $40 a week there’.82 Ernest also recognized his ability to offer assistance to newcomers: ‘I was surprised to see that Sinclair Malcolm had sailed for Canada. I wish I had known sooner, because I know what it means to arrive here, knowing no one, although I wasn’t like that, I was lucky … Perhaps I could help him find a job’.83 Ernest’s comment is insightful in the absence of direct testimony concerning his own move to Canada for it clearly alludes to the fact that his relocation was

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assisted by those he knew already settled in Toronto. In some cases the economic climate prevented Ernest from explicitly encouraging others to migrate: ‘I don’t think it would be advisable at the present time. Work isn’t too plentiful & there are a lot of men walking the streets, but I’ll gather as much reliable information as I can get, & write him’.84 Such practical assistance, however, was not simply confined to the family and friends of Ernest Younger. At other times, references were simply made to associates being from Scotland who both proffered and benefited from efficient aid: ‘I have had several offers of board from neigbo[u]rs, one being Mrs McCallum, Mrs Hardie’s sister’.85 On another occasion, ‘Mrs Yeo has rented her flat to a Scotch lady & her two daughters’.86 Apart from lodging, financial assistance was also offered to natives of Scotland: ‘The family two doors below Mrs Yeo have had pretty hard luck. The husband has only worked about four weeks this year. He was in hospital for about three months & hasn’t been so very strong since but like hundreds of others he just can’t get a job & they are broke. He is a Scotsman & I have helped him a little, so have some of the neighbours’.87 In some cases, then, simply being a Scottish expatriate mattered as much as close family and friends. By contrast with the extensive references to friends and acquaintances from Scotland, there are very few indications of formal Scottish connections in Ernest Younger’s correspondence. Indeed, in most cases Ernest mentioned such events only in passing: “Rabbie’s” anniversary has come & gone again, the 25th is always “held” by all the Scottish Societies here’.88 He did, however, write of his participation in a dance organized by retired affiliates of the Black Watch, the oldest Highland regiment in Canada in 1930: ‘We are supposed to be going to another dance with Jack Ross a week from Friday April 4th. It’s the Black Watch dance in the Prince George Hotel. I think it is a club formed by ex-members of the Black Watch. There should be lots of Scotch dancing there’.89 In a later letter he wrote in detail about the night: ‘It was a very Scotch dance … They danced eightsome reel, quadrelles, military two step etc & the music was very good. They had five pipers there & they sure skirted. Quite a number of the men were wearing kilts & it was good to see’.90 Ernest Younger also documented a public expression of Scottishness during a return trip to Scotland from Canada in 1929 which shows the Lowland appropriation of Highland symbols. Writing of a shipmate, Ernest recounted: A lady rigged him up in one of my rugs (the cheaper one) & he had a little glengarry that someone had given him to take to a friend & with a water bottle under his arm he led the

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A GLOBAL CLAN parade round the lounge. He got the prize for the most original costume. He was done up as a billie, & little whisk brush for a sporran & the water bottle was supposed to be the bagpipes.91

On first reading, this account seems a somewhat spurious rendition of Scottishness. On closer examination, however, it shows a public, positive, and novel representation of Scottish identity, presumably for the benefit of other (non-Scottish) travellers. Such popular ethnic stereotypes, rather than inducing division, served to foster good relations among various national groups. Ernest Younger’s letters are also significant in the comments they contain about daily life in Toronto. His correspondence covered a range of topics including employment, accommodation, and the natural environment. Such subjects show what aspects of their settlement abroad concerned migrants, as well as what elements were critical to those contemplating migration. In May 1925, for instance, Ernest told how he had bought a new hat. He explained: ‘I hate parting with money for personal adornment. However it’s got to be done. Everybody is so well dressed here. One doesn’t like to be left in the cold, & here, if anywhere, it pays to be smart & it pays, as I have found out, to be willing.’92 In reading such accounts, potential newcomers would either have responded favourably or negatively to requirements for personal adornment and a flexible disposition. Positive accounts of the climate and employment opportunities would likewise prove essential to those contemplating departure from Scotland: ‘The climate here seems to agree with me, & chances are big here, compared with home.’93 Yet impressions varied according to the time of writing for just a few months later Ernest wrote, ‘You were asking if this place is better than home, well it isn’t. Lots of freedom, good eats etc but it just isn’t home, although it is the next best’.94 Ernest Younger may, of course, have been playing to his home audience, not wishing to boast too eagerly about his new abode. Yet in writing cautiously a week later about the keen competition for employment in Toronto, Ernest may have been wary of painting too fine a picture of life in Toronto, perhaps to warn potential migrants. Certainly by 1931, he was forthright in his depiction of the gloomy state of affairs arising from the Depression: ‘I notice in the paper yesterday where snow shovelling & general cleaning up of the snow is giving employment to about six thousand men so that will give you an idea just how many men are out of work in the city & there are lots who don’t go in for snow shovelling’.95 Personal networks, then, functioned more broadly than simply providing practical solutions based on physical proximity. They could also operate as conduits of communication and information for family and friends who were separated by vast distances.

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What though is the significance of Ernest Younger’s testimony when considered in conjunction with oral reminiscence? First, it allows the respective and complementary merits of both sources to be illuminated. Correspondents such as Ernest Younger reveal that allegiances based on specific local origins were essential on a day-to-day basis. For Ernest, the place of his birth was significant in his daily interactions in Toronto. While he did associate with other city dwellers, he also stressed the robust ties to folk from his local origin in Scotland. Retrospective testimony has, instead, highlighted the importance of such affiliations only shortly before and soon after arrival. This may, though, reflect the drawback of oral testimony in that such matters are usually only discussed when provoked by the interviewer. Second, a broad sense of Scottish ethnicity was primarily confined to the very rare references to Scottish clubs in Toronto, though practical assistance was sometimes given to natives of Scotland. Third, Ernest Younger’s correspondence highlights the omissions in differing forms of testimony. Discussion of the networks facilitating his own migration, for instance, are absent though he reveals how crucial he was as a source of assistance for those contemplating migration. The fluctuating impressions he had of life in Toronto were frequently relayed and must have been alluring or repellent to potential newcomers, just as he was presumably influenced by his contacts prior to his decision to migrate. Such findings reinforce the necessity of approaches that blend both contemporary and retrospective sources. Quite apart from contrasts with the source material, Ernest Younger’s geographical setting also differs. Canada, unlike the United States, was still part of the British Empire and tied politically, economically, and culturally to Britain. Yet as the chapter shows, there was little to distinguish Scottish networks and identities in Canada from the United States as both fulfilled similar aims and functions. Conclusion In conclusion, personal testimonies allow important insight into the way ordinary migrants constituted and articulated their networks and identities. For migrants, such ethnic networks and identities served significant purposes in their migration to and settlement in North America, directing them to certain destinations, providing assistance with housing and work, and access to social events. Such functions, rather than the influence of ethnic networks on social and economic mobility, were more readily expressed in the testimony. Unlike the contemporary culture of consumption by later generations linked with ethnic identities, viewed as bogus and kitsch by some, ethnicity was critical for Scots after arrival. Close connections based on family and friends prior to and immediately

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after arrival were, however, more fundamental than a broad sense of Scottishness which was generally evident only in connection with Scottish societies. Yet being identified as Scottish could be traumatic for some, particularly children who encountered teasing on a frequent basis. As seen, this could result in the abandonment of external identifiers of Scottishness which were swiftly replaced with aspects of American culture. Personal testimonies, though, only offer partial insight into ethnic networks and identities among Scots. Greater attention, for instance, needs to be paid to these locales of ethnicity. To what extent, for instance, has Carney’s allegedly strong Scottish presence continued and has this led to the appropriation of Scottish culture in the local community in a process termed localization?96 What aspects of Scottishness have become imbedded into an ‘American’ culture? Have these symbols and rituals of Scottishness decayed over time? To what extent did changing perceptions of Scottishness by local communities lead to its downfall or preeminence? Perhaps, too, the ongoing significance of Scottish ethnic networks was dependent on geographical concentration; this also requires intensive scrutiny. We also need to ask just how exceptional were Scottish ethnic networks and identities in North America compared with other destinations and with other ethnic groups as discerned through the use of personal testimonies? First, Scots migrating to all destinations in the twentieth century displayed a propensity to move in local networks comprised of family and friends which aided newcomers with access to employment, housing, and social events.97 By contrast with the personal testimonies of Scottish migrants in New Zealand and England, however, Scots in North America were more likely to highlight the public character of their ethnicity. Elsewhere, Scottishness was more likely to be a private affair.98 Furthermore, when compared with similar testimony from Irish migrants, the Scottish inclination to use personal networks was not unusual. Irish migrants also mentioned, though on a lesser scale than Scots, dancing, clubs, and brogue, all with an Irish flavour. Where the testimony of Irish migrants differed substantially from the Scots, however, was in the absence of discussion of symbols of their ethnicity. Though other studies reveal that shamrocks and harps were symbolic of an Irish ethnicity, the testimony of Irish migrants failed to discuss such elements of Irishness.99 Scottish migrants in twentieth-century North America, on the other hand, reminisced about the visible, audible, and celebratory appeal of kilts, tartan, and pipes. These features distinguished Scots from other groups and provided them with a conspicuous and identifiable symbolic ethnicity that lingers to this day. That non-Scots participated in ‘Scottish’ events in both

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the twentieth and earlier centuries100 further testifies to the lingering attraction of visible elements of Scottishness. Clan gatherings, games, and parades were conducted in full view of a wider public. A further broader finding is the dearth of institutional elements of Scottishness, societies excepted. Presbyterianism, a central defining element of Scottishness, is conspicuously absent in many testimonies. In some cases this is the result of migrants emerging from alternative religious heritages. Yet it is also the consequence of the divisive element of such religious affiliations at home being superseded in their new contexts in favour of a broad cultural Scottishness. Irishness, on the other hand, became an ethnic militancy as the Irish in the United States increasingly pursued the nationalist cause with vigour.101 This suggests a further contrast with the Scots: the Irish pursued these aims publicly and volubly among their own. Scottishness, on the other hand, void of a political agenda to the degree of Irishness, transcended ethnic divisions by being non-threatening and inclusive. Notes I am grateful to Andrew Mackillop, Enda Delaney, and T. M. Devine, for their comments on this chapter. 1 Interview with Allan Gunn by Paul E. Sigrist Jr., recorded 20 June 1992, Ellis Island Oral History Programme [EIOHP], Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island National Monument, EI Series 179. 2 The importance of competing destinations is outlined in Megan Hutching, Long Journey for Sevenpence: An Oral History of Assisted Immigration to New Zealand from the United Kingdom, 1947-1975 (Wellington, 1999). 3 Interview with Allan Gunn. 4 There is a large literature on the theory, method, and use of oral history. A useful collection of essays can be found in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (London and New York, 1998). 5 For an analysis of the oral and written testimony of one Scottish migrant see Angela McCarthy, ‘Personal letters, oral testimony, and Scottish migration to New Zealand in the 1950s: the case of Lorna Carter’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23:1 (2005), pp. 59-79. 6 See Table 6.1.1, Michael Flinn (ed.), Scottish Population History from the Seventeenth Century to the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977), p. 441. 7 Rowland Tappan Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1950 (Cambridge, 1953), Tables 1 and 2, pp. 5, 7. 8 Richard J. Finlay, Modern Scotland, 1914-2000 (London, 2004), p. 105. 9 J. M. Bumsted, The People’s Clearance: Highland Emigration to British North America, 1770-1815 (Edinburgh, 1982); Marianne McLean, The People of Glengarry: Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820 (Montreal, 1991). 10 See, for example, Ferenc Morton Szasz, Scots in the North American West, 17901917 (Norman, 2000); Anthony W. Parker, Scottish Highlanders in Colonial

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Georgia: The Recruitment, Emigration and Settlement at Darien, 1735-1748 (Athens, Ga, 1997). Rowland Berthoff, ‘Under the kilt: variations on the Scottish-American ground’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 1:2 (1982), pp. 5-34. Marjory Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2003), p. 372. Celeste Ray, Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (Chapel Hill and London, 2001), p. 2. See Table 3, Dudley Baines, Emigration from Europe, 1815-1930 (Basingstoke, 1991), p. 10. See Christopher Harvie, No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Twentieth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 3rd edn, 2000) and a number of articles in T. M. Devine and R. J. Finlay (eds), Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 1996): P. L. Payne, ‘The economy’, pp. 13-45; R. J. Finlay, ‘Continuity and change: Scottish politics, 1900-45’, pp. 64-84; E. A. Cameron, ‘The Scottish Highlands: from congested district to objective one’, pp. 153-69. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700-2000 (London, 1999), p. 485. Angela McCarthy, ‘Personal accounts of leaving Scotland, 1921-1954’, Scottish Historical Review, 83:2 (2004), pp. 196-215. Interview with Anne Quinn by Dennis Cloutier and Peter Kaplan, recorded 8 December 1983, EIOHP, NPS Series 146. Interview with Mary Dunn by Dana Gumb, recorded 23 January 1986, EIOHP, AKRF Series 127. Interview with Jack Whitecross Carnegie by Janet Levine, recorded 15 February 1996, EIOHP, EI Series 729. Interview with John Patrick Daly by Elysa Matsen, recorded 20 October 1994, EIOHP, EI 558. Interview with Agnes Schilling by Janet Levine, recorded 16 June 1992, EIOHP, EI 172. This finding is based on research forthcoming in Angela McCarthy, Distant Voices: Life Stories of Irish and Scottish Migrants, 1921-1961 (Manchester: 2006). Interview with Jack Whitecross Carnegie. Interview with Lillian Hopkins by Kate Moore, recorded 18 July 1994, EIOHP, KM Series 70. Interview with Mary Kendrick by Paul E. Sigrist Jr., recorded 7 July 1994, EIOHP, EI Series 492. Interview with William McGuire by Kate Moore, recorded 30 July 1994, EIOHP, KM Series 77. Interview with Ann Nelson by Janet Levine, recorded 8 December 1996, EIOHP, EI Series 832. Interview with Isabella Deeks by Janet Levine, recorded 30 April 1997, EIOHP, EI Series 869. Interview with Thomas Allan by Jean Kolva, recorded 16 July 1984, EIOHP, NPS Series 149. Interview with Mary Dunn. Interview with Joseph Delaney by Dana Gumb, recorded 5 September 1985, EIOHP, AKRF Series 23.

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33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

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Interview with Patrick Peak by Nancy Dallett, recorded 15 November 1985, EIOPH, AKRF Series 84. Interview with Anne Quinn. McCarthy, ‘Personal accounts of leaving Scotland’. T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman, and T. M. Devine, ‘Scottish emigration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 1994), p. 111. Donald Harman Akenson, Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand, 1860-1950 (Wellington, 1990), Table 10, p. 44. Interview with Maisie Pedersen by Paul E. Sigrist Jr., recorded 26 February 1994, EIOHP, EI Series 442. Interview with Margaret Kirk by Paul E. Sigrist Jr., recorded 25 February 1994, EIOHP, EI Series 440. See Angela McCarthy, ‘Personal Accounts of Leaving Scotland’. Interview with Mary Dunn. Interview with Joseph Delaney. Interview with Agnes Schilling. Interview with Maisie Pedersen. Interview with John Will by Elysa Matsen, recorded 16 September 1994, EIOHP, EI Series 547. Interview with Isabella Deeks. Interview with William McGuire. Interview with Anne Quinn. Ibid. Angela McCarthy, ‘Scottish national identities among inter-war migrants in North America and Australasia’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (forthcoming, 2006). See Jim Hammerton’s chapter in this volume, p. 229. For examples, see Kathleen Neils Conzen et al, ‘The invention of ethnicity: a perspective from the U.S.A.’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 12:1 (1992), pp. 3-41; Anthony Cohen, ‘Culture as identity: an anthropologists view’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), pp. 195-209. Conzen et al, ‘The invention of ethnicity’, pp. 5, 28. Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York, 1983), pp. 152-3. These are contained in Jim Wilkie, Metagama: A Journey from Lewis to the New World (Edinburgh, 1987 and 2001). See transcript of interview with Mary MacIver in Wilkie, Metagama, p. 127. Interview with Jack Whitecross Carnegie. Interview with Helen Hansen by Andrew Phillips, recorded 30 August 1989, EIOHP, DP Series 46. Interview with Agnes Schilling. Interview with Mary Dunn. Interview with Anne Quinn. Interview with Mary Kendrick. Interview with Patrick Peak. Interview with Lillian Hopkins.

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Interview with John Will. Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), p. 8. Interview with Anne Quinn. Ibid. Ibid. Interview with Mary Dunn. Ernest Younger (Toronto) to his parents (Tillicoultry), 26 July 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 27 December 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 25 May 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 11 October 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 5 April 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 26 May 1930, NLS, Acc 9407/3. Ibid., 19 April 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 6 June 1926, NLS, Acc 9407/2 Ibid., 15 August 1926, NLS, Acc 9407/2. Ibid., 19 January 1931, NLS, Acc 9407/4. McCarthy, ‘Personal Letters, Oral Testimony’. Ernest Younger (Toronto) to his parents (Tillicoultry), 19 April 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 19 July 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 15 November 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 2 March 1930, NLS, Acc 9407/3. Ibid., 26 October 1930, NLS, Acc 9407/3. Ibid., 8 December 1930, NLS, Acc 9407/3. Ibid., 27 January 1930, NLS, Acc 9407/3. Ibid., 24 March 1930, NLS, Acc 9407/3. Ibid., 8 April 1930, NLS, Acc 9407/3. Ernest Younger (Athenia) to his parents (Tillicoultry), 5 October 1929, NLS, Acc 9407/2. Ernest Younger (Toronto) to his parents (Tillicoultry), 3 May 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 10 May 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 8 November 1925, NLS, Acc 9407/1. Ibid., 1 February 1931, NLS, Acc 9407/4. Kathleen Neils Conzen, ‘Mainstreams and side channels: the localization of immigrant cultures’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 11 (1991), pp. 5-20. See, for instance, McCarthy, ‘Personal accounts of leaving Scotland’. See McCarthy, ‘Scottish national identities’. This conclusion is based on the interviews with Irish migrants who arrived in the United States after 1920, which form part of the EIOHP. Berthoff, ‘Under the kilt’, pp. 5-34. See Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in A New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame, 2001), p. 361.

10 ‘WE’RE NOT POMS’: The Shifting Identities of Post-war Scottish Migrants to Australia

A. James Hammerton In 1950 David Wills emigrated with his parents, at the age of 12, from Edinburgh to Hobart. Interviewed 50 years later about his family’s experience, he recounted the family migration story with great relish.1 The account was replete with ‘letter in a bottle’ curiosities which framed the narrative and bolstered David’s enthusiasm for the story telling. A Tasmanian woman employed packing apples in 1945 had attached a ‘hello’ note to a box of exported apples, thinking they were bound for the United States, asking for a response. The apples arrived at the family’s Edinburgh grocery shop, and triggered a correspondence which culminated in the apple packer sponsoring David’s family to Tasmania five years later. The coincidence served to condition the family through their intense ‘migration talk’ for nearly five years before their move, and by the time they embarked David was an enthusiastic child-migrant. He recalls that on arrival he promptly shifted his loyalty from Scotland to Australia. Unlike his parents, who adopted their new homeland but were resistant to formal citizenship, ‘I always denied, through my compliance and change of accent, denied my Scottishness.’ But in later years this identity became subject to uncertainty. ‘It is only in recent years’, David reflected, ‘that I am almost beginning to take some degree of interest in, not quite pride, but bordering on pride, of my Scottish heritage’. This has accompanied sympathy for Scottish nationalism and independence, just as he supports an Australian republic. He described being ‘very choked up, very emotional’ on his first visit to Edinburgh: ‘I stood in Princess Street and I thought, “I’m home. I’m home.” I didn’t want to go back to anywhere. Never at all’. Yet, a short time later, ‘the next time I went back, no, it was different. I didn’t feel that same inflection’.2 Migrant Identities and the Decline of ‘Public Scottishness’ David Wills’s account of his ambivalent loyalties, while unique in the way of all migrant stories, hints at the shifting process of identity formation

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which affected the generation of Scots who migrated from Scotland to Australia in the three decades following the Second World War. Migrants of all ages at departure are prone to experience ambivalence and confused loyalties after return visits many years later. In these ways David’s confusion is characteristic of the migrant experience; indeed, the most common truism repeated by migrants of all backgrounds is their sense of not belonging fully in either country, a lifelong uncertainty about the nature and location of ‘home’, and there is no reason to believe that the Scottish migrant identity is materially different from others in this respect.3 Like other migrants, too, the post-war Scots experienced the shock and challenge of the ‘the new’, which, from the moment of embarkation on the six week ship voyage, had the potential to transform their identity and national loyalties as much as their life fortunes. The most famous evocation of the Scottish-Australian post-war migrant experience is Mary Rose Liverani’s quasi-fictional memoir of her childhood years, The Winter Sparrows.4 Mary’s Scottish pride informs much of her book, where, for example, she is at war with the perceived shallowness of Australian students and the ethnocentrism of teachers.5 In the migrant hostel her Scottishness confronts the unfamiliar ways of Italian, German, and Dutch migrants, alternatively posing a threat of strangeness and migrant solidarity against hostile Australians, but in the end she celebrates her mother’s indomitable ‘sense of adventure’ as a uniquely Scottish strategy for coping with poverty.6 Liverani’s account, at once a celebration of a child’s Scottishness and her adaptability as a migrant, makes for compelling reading. But other life stories, from autobiographical writing and oral testimony, give a less romanticized and more complex impression of the Scottish migration experience. Like most migrant narratives, for example, they complicate versions of national and cultural identity which rely upon institutional records of church and national loyalty organizations for their chief perspective. The mere existence of these organizations, in themselves, tells us little about Scottish-Australian migrant identity. From the 1950s in Australian cities there was a proliferation of Scottish, English, and Welsh loyalty organizations which catered to new migrants – Caledonian societies, Burns clubs, British clubs, and United Kingdom Settler societies, to name only a few.7 These could serve important social adjustment functions and foster supportive migrant networks. But it is easy to overestimate their heritage role as nurturers of enduring Scottish national identity among new migrants; at its most simplistic this can be an exercise in simply counting the number of Scottish societies and taking their vitality and importance for granted.8 The insights of personal testimony, while never conclusive on

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such questions, provide valuable correctives. John and Margaret Hardie, for example, who settled in the industrial region of the La Trobe Valley in Victoria in 1964, were surprised to find second and third generation Scots who were ‘obsessed’ with Scottish heritage: ‘They seemed to want a link with Scotland, they wanted to be able to turn around and say my grandfather or my grandfather’s father was a, fought at the Battle of Glencoe. There seemed to be an obsession with some of them’. By contrast, John Hardie resented Australian expectations that he should act out his Scottishness: ‘They’re always looking for us running about with kilts on, eating haggis and tossing cabers all over the bloody place, it’s an image.’9 He recalled their use of the local Caledonian Society as nothing more than a convenient social outlet: We did go to the Caledonian Society, little dances, things like that. I think it was mainly just to get out, especially linked to that 12 week period where I was [working] seven in the morning to 11 at night … So I think we, that was one of the reasons we went there was to, not to get ties with home but to still do things that you’d been going to anyway. And no I don’t think, we didn’t get hold of the tartan rugs or the Lion, the blue flag.10 Ayr migrants Anne and George McLanaghan recalled simply that ‘we didn’t bother’ to seek out Scottish societies, partly because there were no local branches in their Melbourne suburb of Box Hill in the early 1950s.11 Relationships in the local community could offer more to newly settled migrants than remote heritage organizations in the city centre. These experiences accord with more general findings about the long-term declining attractiveness of ‘Scottish societies’ for migrants. Even in the 1950s and 1960s Scottish patterns of settlement across Australian outer suburbs, like those of the British generally, inclined against ethnic concentration; such dispersal was not congenial to the fostering of cultural nationalism.12 In more recent decades ageing memberships have presided over steady decline in their numbers. ‘Public Scottishness’, as Irene Bain notes, ‘has become the prerogative of Australians in search of their heritage’.13 Life stories based on oral testimony can do much to illustrate these processes, showing, for example, how, in conditions of suburban dispersal, migrants’ evolving valuation of their Scottish identity was played out in the family rather than in public institutions. These stories complicate common stereotypes of migrant identity, for example the view that adult migrants arrive in the new country with a deep Scottish identity which

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wanes over time, while child migrants attach more importance to their Scottish heritage later in life. Oral Testimony and Scottish-Australian Identities This chapter draws upon the resources emanating from a larger project on post-war British migration to Australia – English, Scottish, and Welsh – which is the subject of a book co-authored with Alistair Thomson.14 The study is based on approximately 1,500 written accounts and 200 recorded interviews in both Australia and Britain. The database of volunteer informants includes migrants of the 1940s to 1970s who settled across Australia as well as returnees in Britain.15 The majority, roughly 78 per cent, were English, but approximately 19 per cent of our stories, from both permanent settlers and returnees, come from Scottish migrants. Our attempt to encompass the full range of British identities highlights the commonalities as well as the differences in recorded testimony from migrants with different ethnic and regional origins, and my observations about Scottish identity will reflect this alongside some uniquely Scottish characteristics. A brief statistical and cultural background should provide some context for the life stories which follow. The post-war British-Australian ‘ten pound’ assisted migration scheme was one of the largest planned migrations of the twentieth century. Between 1947 and 1972 it assisted more than a million British migrants, of whom, at different periods, between 20 per cent and 30 per cent returned to Britain (the scheme was designed to discourage premature return through a requirement to repay the balance of the subsidized fare if migrants returned within two years of arrival). The Scottish emigrant proportion was 13.7 per cent, an actual over-representation alongside their 10.3 per cent of the British population; the disproportion is a subject of routine comment by students of ScottishAustralian migration.16 The standard explanation for it is that during times of high unemployment, like the 1960s, the Scottish unemployment rate was double that in England and Wales; in particular the decline of Scottish heavy industry, alongside slow growth of new industries, stimulated a disproportionately high rate of Scottish emigration.17 Certainly the evidence from our informants lends some support to the view that awareness of emigration as an escape solution – what Appleyard calls ‘emigrationmindedness’ – was strong in Scottish urban areas. Bill and Catherine Bradley, for example, recalled emigration being a common topic of conversation among their Glasgow neighbourhood and extended family before they went to Australia in 1952, and, while the point should not be overstated, among a predominantly nuclear family migration project our

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most substantial examples of large-scale chain migration of extended families, mainly of adult siblings, have been Scots.18 In their testimony Scottish migrants are quick to recall the ways in which, once in the new country, their awareness of ethnic difference was most acutely registered by the need to assert their historical distinction from the English. This was most frequently apparent in responses to derogatory taunts about ‘Poms’, most often in the guise of ‘whingeing Poms’. By the 1960s the term ‘whingeing Pom’ had become a metaphor for complaining British migrants. Indeed, the image of the vocally dissatisfied Briton attracted widespread scorn, not least because it clashed with the Australian attraction to a mythological self-image of uncomplaining ‘struggle, courage, and survival, amidst pain, tragedy and loss’ – the essence of the Australian ‘battler’.19 But the whingeing stereotype was varied in its application and reception. Scottish and Welsh migrants vigorously asserted that the term referred exclusively to the English, that they were not Poms, and they almost invariably recall that the English were the most visible complainers and, accordingly, suffered the worst abuse. A Kilmarnock migrant, Bobby Stirling, recalled that at parties in Melbourne in the 1960s ‘as sure as fate, the first person you got complaining or whingeing happened to come from England’.20 Edinburgh couple Robert and Maggie Smith, in Melbourne at the same time, thought that ‘the Scots were lucky, we didn’t get the hard time the English got. I think English people got it much harder than we did’. The uniquely anti-English prejudice was informed by a long history of Australian contempt for English superiority and complaint, whether from experience or reputation.21 But of course it also coincided with a tradition of similar Scottish-English hostilities. Frank Kemp was insistent that, from the start, ‘I didn’t mix too much with the Pommies here, you didn’t want the Pommies; … and we didn’t like being called Pommies, neither!’22 Catherine Bradley, a Glaswegian who emigrated with her husband in 1952, began to distinguish herself from the English from the moment of arrival, usually by rejecting the ‘Pom’ taunt: ‘We’re Scottish! [laughter]. When they said it, we’d say “we’re not Poms”’.23 In this respect the early years of settlement in Australia facilitated a sense of Scottish distinctiveness, particularly among the larger British cohort. Alongside this it was common for newly arrived Scots to detect a greater sense of Australian acceptance in employment preference and social life over the English. From his experience working in the Perth police force and other Western Australian employment, George Adam concluded that ‘the majority of Australians looked up to Scots people with great favour’, in contrast to explicit hostility to the English.24 Anne McLanaghan, in Melbourne, linked Australian favour for the Scots to

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perceptions of the stereotypical conceit of English migrants which had taken hold in Australia decades earlier: ‘I think the Scottish people were accepted easier in Australia than the English were. Because I think the English went out there sort of, big-headed, you know … whereas we knitted in with them’.25 On the other hand, Scottish migrants were not immune to those homogenizing migration processes which tended to subsume awareness of ethnic and cultural difference into a common migrant identity. Just as George Nadel has described for nineteenth-century migration, this process began on the ship voyage;26 migrants of varied backgrounds were thrown together, and, during the six week trip, began to develop both a sense of their common experience, as well as difference from those they had left behind and those they were soon to join. Passengers from all British backgrounds testify to this unifying migrant identity, noting the distinctive characteristics of passengers from different parts of the country. In their diaries and later recollections migrants portray the varied regional and ethnic characteristics of British passengers with good natured and tolerant celebration, often as a proud affirmation of a common British identity. For diarist Matt Dickinson a dominant theme was the humour and camaraderie in his mixed cabin, with ‘two Scotch lads, a Cockney, a Yorkshireman, an Irishman, a lad from Birmingham and myself, a Geordie’. In his fourth week of the voyage, in 1955, he described a talent and community song night on the Fairsea, when passengers sang songs from all over Britain. ‘The real memory of the evening for me,’ he noted, ‘will always be a great burly, rough looking Scot … who sang a heartfelt and unaccompanied “Bonny Strathyre” which carried you back to those fells … more than one Scotch heart would have had an ache in it’.27 If such episodes seemed to reinforce popular ethnic stereotypes, in this instance the mainstream Scottish Highland identity, they also facilitated a unique degree of British cultural mixing, a developing awareness of what migrants had in common as well as their differences. But they were also melded by a shared identity as migrants. Margaret Reardon from Edinburgh still recalls the liminal world on the ‘New Australia’ that brought the different passengers together: It was quite strange really that we were all under this canopy, we were all migrants on a migrant ship. And it was very strange that although we had different, like, it was like the Tower of Babel, we had different dialects and things like that but we were all, we all had the one name, you know we were probably descriptive individually but nondescript as migrants.28

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Englishwoman Sandra O’Neill, reflecting on her Scottish and English friends on the Northern Star, found that they all had a ‘common goal though, everybody was going, everybody was talking about the future, and their hopes’.29 Case Studies: The Family Contexts of Migrant Identities To pursue these themes of mixed identity a little further I will recount two stories told of their families’ migration experience by two women who left as child or teenage migrants, and who have fashioned their parents’ wellrehearsed iconic stories into their own. In each case their parents’ stories, with a transcendent parental hero at the centre, have provided strategies for them to reflect on their own identity. In the process they illustrate the seamless ways in which Scottish identities can merge into migrant identities, how they vary within families, and how, more widely, national and cultural identity is something never complete, always in flux and always subject to transformation. The contingent nature of identity in this sense is rarely evident in institutional sources, but requires close scrutiny of the intimate detail of personal texts which do not easily lend themselves to normal tests of typification. But their insights into the relationship between identity, personal histories, and family dynamics compensate for the limits of sociological precision. The weaknesses of oral testimony thus go handin-glove with its strengths. Patricia Wall’s story of her father’s mission to contribute to the building of Canberra illustrates a serious dimension of Scottish pride and patriotism bound up with migration, career ambitions, and accommodation to a new country.30 In October 1949 her family, at that time parents and two children (with Patricia aged 11), left Aberdeen for Canberra on the Georgic. Her father James Hardie, a carpenter, had been sponsored by Peak Constructions, along with 24 other workers with their families, to support the intensive building projects then underway in Canberra. James later explained to Patricia that the move was motivated by a quest for greater opportunity: ‘There are more opportunities in a new society for you to do whatever you want to do’, he told her. But there were other considerations. The family, her mother especially, suffered long-lasting war trauma when their house was bombed in 1944. In 1947 they lost a baby daughter, and James determined to give his wife a fresh start; the decision, as so often, was bound up with intimate family dynamics, including Mrs Hardie’s alienation from her sister. Beyond that, though, James seems to have approached his migration as though it was a sacred mission, convinced by the recruitment officers that he and the entire family were coming to ‘build

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the new national capital’. Before the Hardies even landed that mission was to be put to the test. As the Georgic approached Melbourne early in November the children among those 25 families suddenly became aware of agitation among the parents. Patricia recalls the event vividly: All of a sudden on board ship life became a bit hectic, because parents were running round like scared cats, or there was something wrong. And it wasn’t until we reached Melbourne that the children were actually told that we were not welcome in this new land, that we had to find our way back to the UK as there were no jobs, no accommodation, nobody wanted us. The cause of the commotion was the news that Peak Constructions had gone bankrupt, and although the families had emigrated under the government ten pound scheme, they were told initially that they must return to Britain. Before the ship docked James took a leading role in a ‘sit in’ in the ship’s saloon, where the 25 families declared their refusal to leave the ship until new arrangements were made for their employment in Canberra. There they reiterated James’s vow, ‘Right, we were contracted to come to build the national capital in Australia.’ Hasty negotiations resulted in the families being transferred to a holding camp in inner suburban Albert Park. Patricia recalled the family’s shock on seeing the bleak compound: ‘When they took us there by, by bus, the adults, I can recall them saying, “Why has it got barbed wire?” And they said, “that will be removed”. It was never removed’. Teenagers soon learned to defy the night curfews by cutting the barbed wire, but the Hardies had to undergo three months in the camp until misunderstandings about their status were resolved and all the families were allowed to remain in Australia. In time some of these Georgic families took work, found accommodation, and settled permanently in Melbourne. But the Hardies refused to leave the camp, following James’s vow to settle nowhere but the national capital where he could realise his ‘mission’. He did, though, seek temporary work, while the rest of the family attempted to return to a degree of normality and the children attended Prahran Primary School. After investigating an offer in the more distant suburb of Werribee he reported that, although he could see a future there, ‘it wasn’t the national capital, and he was determined, he had a promise from the government, with his migration officer, that he was coming to build the national capital and build it he would!’ A job with Jennings Constructions in Melbourne turned the tide.

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Discussions with the Union about his ambitions resulted in a high profile interview with the recently defeated Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, which was reported in the Melbourne press. Just three months after their unpropitious arrival the Hardies were on their way to Canberra through a transfer with Jennings. James Hardie came to take enormous pride in the capital he had helped to build: the Academy of Science, the Space Tracking Station, the Canberra Centre, foreign embassies, and retirement as a project manager, were just a few of his claims to achievement. In later years, when James and his wife became active with church and community groups, his proud guided tours around ‘his’ national capital were the highlight. The pride was inseparable from the future he felt he gave his children. Patricia reflects: I think, on returning to the UK, I can see what he meant by a better life. We had the freedom, we had the ability to say what we want, when we want it, we have the ability to do something about constructing the type of society that we want to live in, and I’m very proud that he, he took the step! Very proud! Unfortunately his parents never saw the profit of his work here. James Hardie would have taken deep pride in his work if he had never left Aberdeen, but from 1949 this work identity was bound up with his awareness as a migrant. A deeply religious Presbyterian who ‘lived his religion’, according to Patricia ‘he considered it an honour to be a carpenter, because he felt that there was only one very, very famous carpenter’. He was equally attached to his Scottish heritage, and to Freemasonry in both Aberdeen and Canberra, where he set up a new lodge, the ‘Lodge Caledonia’. He regularly wore his kilt at lodge meetings and, with his wife, conducted Scottish dancing classes on their front lawn at Narrabundah. But none of this was inconsistent with a parallel pride in deep commitment to Australia and a sense of social obligation, evident in his work for the Good Neighbour Council helping European immigrants in Canberra to find employment; many of his later friends were new immigrants from mixed backgrounds. His only reservation about Australians stemmed from familiar British scepticism about working standards: ‘“Don’t worry about it mate, it’ll be right!” Dad, no, it has to be right, first time or no’. His exacting standards on the job were, in effect, all of a piece with his identity as respectable Scottish migrant, devout Christian, and committed Australian. His story is unusual, even for 1949, in evoking a powerful streak of idealism beyond individual ambition.

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James Hardie’s prompt resort to Masonic attachments in Canberra in the early 1950s conforms to familiar views of the ways migrants seek and express their ethnic identities, through ethnically based institutions, after leaving their homeland. But his daughter was at pains to qualify this. Even James, intensely attached to his Scottishness, used these outlets primarily to socialize and overcome a homesickness, which moderated over time. Patricia recalled her parents’ initial membership of the Burns Club: ‘They joined the Burns Club more or less to keep, I think, the homesickness at bay. But then they dropped it as they found their niche in society, once they moved over to O’Connor, and they felt that they really were established, they were settled in’.31 In this respect their attachment to Scottishness through institutional frameworks differed little from that of other British migrants, especially the English, for whom initial socializing, mostly through ballroom dancing, was the major attraction, which then waned rapidly as they developed other Australian networks through neighbourhood and the workplace. Patricia’s Scottish pride, alongside her celebration of her father’s mission and her appreciation of her family’s opportunities in Australia, captures the evolving and contingent nature of the migrant identity. Her father’s epic migration story, instructive in its own way, serves for Patricia as a chapter in the development of her own Scottish-Australian migrant identity. One of the most colourful accounts in our archives is that of Margaret Reardon, who emigrated from Edinburgh in 1951, with her family, the Dochertys, at the age of 16.32 Her story provides further variations on the theme in Patricia Wall’s account. Margaret’s mother is the hero of her story of a family’s struggle against the odds to do well in Australia and rise above a dismal future in Edinburgh, where her father had been stuck in unskilled work in a grocery shop. The resistant husband had tired of overseas postings during the war and wanted simply to return to a quiet life in Edinburgh. Against the common stereotype of reluctant migrant wives, Margaret’s mother eventually persuaded him, under quiet protest, to go along with her emigration plan. She was, Margaret felt, ‘very brave ... to embark on this voyage because she was going on, I’d say, a dream ... she made all the arrangements for getting a sponsor, accommodation and a job for father.’ All this had to be accomplished despite what Margaret called ‘that friction’ whenever the brown envelopes arrived from Australia House. When, within 24 hours of their arrival in Australia, the family suffered the disaster of father’s prearranged job collapsing at Tumut, miles into the country from Sydney, she again described her mother as the consummate manager. Mrs Docherty negotiated, fiercely, with the reneging employer, left the farm, sought new work for father, and accommodation for the

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family. And so it continued throughout the story of their lives in Australia, with father the permanent reluctant migrant, supported by a resentful teenage Margaret, and mother fighting fiercely for her family’s welfare. Recalling the marital difference, Margaret attributed it to the impact of wartime disruption on her parents’ attitudes, where each had grown accustomed to ‘Mum’ becoming ‘the decision maker in big issues like coming to Australia … because of the five year gap’.33 The Australian difficulties with employment and housing reinforced the hostility of both Margaret and her father to the move, and in response each nurtured pride in their Scottish heritage, in part a strategy of defiance among their complex family dynamics. But over the years this moderated for both of them into recognition of the profound benefits conferred on the family by Mrs Docherty’s courageous move. As Margaret tells it the migrant story was expressly her mother’s, but Mrs Docherty’s emphatic loyalty to Australia gradually infected the family sceptics. In one of those defining moments of migrant remembering, Margaret recalls the night in 1971 of her family’s celebration of the twentieth anniversary of their arrival, complete with the new Australian extended family of spouses and grandchildren. Her mother, dressed impeccably for the occasion, enjoyed the limelight: She just looked absolutely radiant, and so happy. I thought, how could you, you couldn’t possibly grudge her, or be awful about this happiness that she’s got, you know. And, I mean even Dad looked happy beside her … the happiness was spilling out over onto him. And she said ‘Well - we had our difficulties.’ She actually made the speech - which I thought was, she was ahead of her time. She actually, you know, Dad was supposed to say a few words, but she actually said, ‘Well, I’d like to say something’, you know. And she said – ‘we had our difficulties, but,’ she said, ‘we would have had them in Edinburgh, and maybe more so, but’, she said, ‘when I look around the table, tonight’, she said, ‘it’s all been worthwhile, really worthwhile’. And she looked across at me, and I was looking at her, and she gave me this, she just winked at me, across the table [laughs] as much as to say, ‘now come on, you’ve got to admit it’.34 For Margaret the sight of Edinburgh Castle on return visits still brings tears to her eyes; like her father, she retains pride in her Scottish heritage, although this is little more than a curiosity to her own children.35 But her

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reflections about identity and loyalty now focus more on her attachment to Australia, and the remembering of her parents’ history remains central to this part of her story. Margaret’s mother, while proud of her Scottishness, ‘gave total commitment to her decision,’ accepting the common view that ‘assimilation and integration was the natural follow on from migration’. Her father’s views remained more complex; always a Scot first, he nevertheless accommodated to a migrant identity in the context of commitment to his wife and family. In Margaret’s explanation his commitment was symbolic of the general contribution of the post-war generation of British migrants to Australia: My father did not take out Australian citizenship – not because he had anything against being known as an Australian citizen – he just had an intense love and loyalty to his Scottish birthplace. The only reason he was in Australia was because he thought it was the place where he should be – with his family – to give us the opportunity to have an even better life than the one we had left behind. Though he was a ‘reluctant migrant’ he worked hard, obeyed the laws, and helped my mother keep a stable home environment for his family. In this way he contributed, as so many other British migrants, like a small cog maintaining and encouraging stability to the betterment of the whole of Australian society.36 Her parents’ contribution in this respect was symbolized for Margaret by the emotionally affecting ceremony of Australia Day, 1999, when the ‘Migrant Wall’ – a huge plaque naming several thousand post-war migrants from different national backgrounds – was opened officially by the Governor-General in Darling Harbour. The event was a classic multicultural moment, with ‘fifty children of the world’ in national dress signifying Australia’s celebration of national unity in ethnic diversity: ‘How proud my parents would have been, as we were’, Margaret wrote, ‘to see the clan tartans very prevalent in the parade’. Her own pride was embodied in the Docherty parents’ names on the plaque, a testament to their heroic migrant story, despite the fact that husband and wife carried sharply different migrant identities with them during their long years in Australia. Peoples from many Lands were gathered as one Nationality – and cheered in unison as one flag, the Australia Flag, was saluted and raised high for everyone to acknowledge. I felt proud that with my sisters’ unhesitating encouragement and

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co-operation when I first broached the idea, I had been able to add my parents’ names indelibly to what, I believe, will become an important Australian icon for the future. We had honoured our mother and father in a unique and fitting manner – just as a Lady and Gentleman should be – with class. Ironically their names are on Panel Three, facing directly opposite the dock where the ‘New Australia’ arrived at Piermont, bringing the Dochertys to Australia for the first time, in June 1951.37 Scottish Migrant Identities and the Transnational Family Margaret’s narrative of the diverse ways migration affected her family’s fortunes embodies a range of different identities which, at different times, revealed the transformative and fluctuating effects of migration on each family member, including Margaret herself. It also illustrates diverse ways in which identities can be influenced by family dynamics as much as attachment to national heritage and loyalty. Her own teenage resistance evolved into pride in her parents’ courage and risk-taking alongside an appreciation of Scottish heritage and thorough integration (as her mother wished) into Australian life and culture. Her mother, the ‘heroine’ of her story, stands as a woman ‘ahead of her time’, explicitly managing and speaking for the family welfare, but also a proud new Australian dedicated to assimilation; her migrant identity, it might be ventured, overshadowed her Scottish identity. Her father’s stubborn reluctance and attachment to his birthplace evolved into a shared recognition with his wife of the benefits of her initiative, all the while balancing an abiding Scottish patriotism. But it was a patriotism expressed mostly in the private domain rather than in institutional frameworks, just as Mrs Docherty celebrated her family’s successful adaptation as migrants in a private family reunion. Like all migrant identities these were unstable and shifting, never complete, and in Margaret’s case the national recognition of the Migrant Wall commemoration has no doubt added a further dimension of awareness of her migration story. These rich and complex identities, perhaps, are the point at which Scottish migrants share most, with migrants from other backgrounds, the lifelong effects of migration. The fact that these fluctuating and nuanced Scottish identities were played out predominantly in the private sphere, and in family contexts, accords with more general findings about the decline of ‘public Scottishness’ in Australia.38 In this respect the Scottish migrant identity seems to have differed little from that of the English, since their post-war experience shared a similar individualist character, focused inwardly on the

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suburban nuclear family; their stories, like those of the Scots, link their attitudes to homeland closely to accounts of transnational family networks and attachments.39 But if there is a case to be made for Scottish exceptionalism in these narratives it might be found among the distinctive ways in which migrants often narrate their sense of nostalgia and longing for the homeland. Our English informants focused their nostalgia, to a remarkably uniform degree, upon an idealized English countryside. The idyllic remembrance is invariably that of the southern home counties, even for migrants who had never lived there and whose origins were urban and suburban.40 By contrast, Scottish nostalgia tends to focus on more generalized symbols and icons of the nation or an undifferentiated commitment to a Scottish sense of nationhood. For David Wills and Margaret Reardon it was the sight of Princess Street and Edinburgh Castle which stirred their loyalty. For both Patricia Wall and Margaret Reardon the themes they adapted from their parents’ memories into their own stories incorporated explicit symbols of Scottishness: the Scottish dancing and clan tartans, icons of yearning which have become distinctively national rather than local or regional. But if these features distinguish Scottish migrant identities, the lesson from migrant testimony is that they will be misunderstood if considered apart from the larger context of life stories and family history. Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

Interviews cited in this chapter derive from two archives on post-war BritishAustralian migration, one housed at the History Program, La Trobe University (LU), the other, on returnees, at the Centre for Continuing Education, Sussex University (SU). Interview with David Wills, recorded 30 September 1999, LU 1009. The resulting complexities have been most thoroughly explored in Australia for Italian migrants; see especially Loretta Baldassar, Visits Home: Migration Experiences Between Italy and Australia (Melbourne, 2001), pp. 6-9. Mary Rose Liverani, The Winter Sparrows: Growing Up in Scotland and Australia (Sydney, Nelson, 1975). Ibid., pp. 216-34. Ibid., pp. 235-70, 356-7. A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, ‘Ten Pound Poms’: Australia’s Invisible Migrants. A Life History of Postwar British Emigration to Australia (Manchester, 2005), chap. 11. Ian Donnachie and Adrian Graves, ‘Scotland and Australia, 1901-1988’, in [n.a.], That Land of Exiles: Scots in Australia (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 123. Interview with John and Margaret Hardie, recorded 9 September 2000, SU H11. Ibid.

‘WE’RE NOT POMS’

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32

241

Interview with George and Anne McLanaghan, recorded 5 September 2000, SU M13. Ian H. Burnley, The Impact of Immigration on Australia: A Demographic Approach (Melbourne, 2001), pp. 182-4. Irene Bain, ‘Post-war Scottish immigration’, in James Jupp (ed.), The Australian People (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 672-4. Hammerton and Thomson, ‘Ten Pound Poms’. 63% of interviewees were female, partly reflecting the greater longevity of women and perhaps their greater willingness to respond to requests for information; 61% were married adults with children at the time of migration; 14% childless couples; and 25% were single adults. The majority of respondents, 66%, reported skilled and semi-skilled occupations, which reflects the occupational profile of the scheme as a whole, but 23% of ‘semiprofessionals’ reflects the considerable number of nurses and teachers, mostly female, who took advantage of the cheap passage opportunity for what was intended to be a two year ‘working holiday’. Donnachie and Graves, ‘Scotland and Australia’, p. 122; Bain, ‘Post-war Scottish immigration’, p. 669. Bain, ‘Post-war Scottish immigration’, p. 669. Interview with Bill and Catherine Bradley, recorded 28 March 2000, LU 0093; for examples of extended family migration see separate interviews with Eddie Carruthers, recorded 4 August 1999, and Patsy Carruthers, recorded 25 October 1999, LU 0154. Anne Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, exodus, and exile in white Australian historical mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies (1999), p. 3. Interview with Robert Stirling, recorded 4 September 2000, SU S16. Interview with Robert and Margaret Smith, recorded 4 September 2000, SU S13; see also Bain, ‘Post-war Scottish immigration’, pp. 668-74. Interview with Frank Kemp, recorded 12 June 1999, LU 0491. Interview with Bill and Catherine Bradley, recorded 28 March 2000, LU 0093; see also Eddy Carruthers from Glasgow, who recalled using similar language: ‘And there’s no way in the world could they call me a Pom, you know, we’re not Poms, we’re Scotsmen’. Interview with George Adam, recorded 23 March 2000, LU 0003. Interview with George and Anne McLanaghan, recorded 5 September 2000, SU M13. George Nadel, Australia’s Colonial Culture (Melbourne, Cheshire, 1957), pp. 4552. Matt Dickinson, ‘Our diary of our migration from England to Australia, 1955-1956’, State Library of Victoria, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, 13116, Box 3805/9, p. 35. Interview with Margaret Reardon, recorded 12 July 1998, LU 0743. Interview with Sandra O’Neill, recorded 21 September 2000, SU S2. Interview with Patricia Wall, recorded 18 May 2000, LU 0944. Ibid.; see also Interview with Eddie Carruthers, recorded 4 August 1999. Interview with Margaret Reardon, recorded 12 July 1998, LU 0743.

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

A GLOBAL CLAN

Ibid., and correspondence, LU 0743. For other examples of wives who took the lead in emigration, see Hammerton and Thomson, ‘Ten Pound Poms’. Interview with Margaret Reardon, Australian Broadcasting Commission ‘Hindsight’ program, ‘Ten Pound Poms’, Radio National, 19 August 2001. Ibid. Written addendum added by Margaret Reardon to project interview, LU 0743. Ibid. Bain, ‘Post-war Scottish immigration’, pp. 672-4. Hammerton and Thomson, ‘Ten Pound Poms’. Ibid., chaps 9, 11.