The Scots who built the United States — from Independence to the Gilded Age
Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine were born in Scotland or had Scottish fathers. The man who persuaded the reluctant Middle Colonies to vote for independence was a Scottish minister. The father of the American Navy was born in Kirkcudbrightshire. The man who out-Carnegie'd Carnegie was himself Scottish. The first Secretary of the Treasury emigrated from Nevis, the son of a Scottish merchant.
The Scottish imprint on the United States is deeper, wider, and stranger than most Americans know — including Americans of Scottish descent.
The Scottish Enlightenment was the intellectual engine of the American Revolution. The ideas that animated the Declaration of Independence — natural rights, social contract, government by consent — flowed directly from Scottish philosophers: Francis Hutcheson, who articulated the right to resist tyranny; David Hume, whose scepticism of inherited authority permeated colonial thought; and above all Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, the same year as the Declaration, and would shape American economic thinking for generations.
Born in Gifford, East Lothian, Witherspoon emigrated to New Jersey in 1768 to become president of Princeton (then the College of New Jersey). He became the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence and trained dozens of future American leaders — including James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution." Witherspoon coined the term "Americanism" and was central to establishing American English as distinct from British English.
Born in Fife, Wilson was one of six people to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution. He was among the primary architects of the Constitution's structure and was appointed to the first Supreme Court by George Washington. Wilson argued consistently that the Constitution derived its authority from the people directly, not from the states — a view that won out and defines American constitutionalism.
Born John Paul in Kirkbean, Kirkcudbrightshire, Jones emigrated to Virginia and added "Jones" after a violent incident at sea. He became the most celebrated naval commander of the Revolutionary War, famously responding to the demand for his ship's surrender with "I have not yet begun to fight." He is buried in the crypt of the Naval Academy Chapel at Annapolis, Maryland.
Born on the island of Nevis, the illegitimate son of James Hamilton of Stevenson, Ayrshire, Hamilton emigrated to New York at about age 17. As Washington's aide-de-camp, first Secretary of the Treasury, and co-author of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton shaped the financial architecture of the United States more than any other individual. His vision — a strong federal government, a national bank, industrial policy — defined one pole of American politics for generations.
Eleven US presidents have documented Scottish ancestry. The concentration is remarkable for a country that draws from every corner of the world.
The late 19th century transformation of America from an agricultural to an industrial economy was led disproportionately by Scots and Scottish-Americans.
Born in Dunfermline, Fife, the son of a handloom weaver displaced by the industrial revolution, Carnegie emigrated to Pittsburgh at age 13. He built Carnegie Steel into the largest steel company in the world, sold it to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million (roughly $16 billion today), and spent the rest of his life giving it away. Carnegie Hall, 2,509 Carnegie libraries across the English-speaking world, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace are among the results. He remains the second-wealthiest American of all time by proportion of GDP.
Born in Edinburgh, Bell emigrated first to Canada, then to Boston, where he patented the telephone in 1876. He had been working on a device to help deaf people communicate — his mother was deaf, and his wife, Mabel Hubbard, had been deaf since childhood. Bell considered his work with the deaf more important than the telephone and spent much of his later life on education for the deaf.
Born in Glasgow, Pinkerton emigrated to Illinois after involvement in the Chartist movement. He founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850, foiled an assassination plot against Lincoln in 1861, and created much of the vocabulary and methodology of American private investigation. The phrase "private eye" derives from the Pinkerton logo of an open eye with the motto "We Never Sleep."
The relationship between Scottish culture and the American South is deep, complicated, and often poorly understood.
The Highland Scots and Scots-Irish who settled the Appalachian frontier carried with them a martial culture, a deep attachment to personal honour, and a Protestant theology that emphasised individual conscience. These values shaped the culture of the American backcountry — and, through the backcountry, much of what became the American South.
The "Scots-Irish" settlers of western Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, the Carolinas, and Tennessee became the frontier culture that eventually dominated Appalachian America. Their descendants — including many Americans who don't know this about themselves — gave the South its music (bluegrass and country music descend directly from Scots-Irish folk traditions), its religion (Presbyterianism, Methodism, Baptist evangelicalism all have Scottish roots), and its political character.
The Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was of Scots-Irish descent. So were Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett. The Scots-Irish imprint on the South is so pervasive that it is effectively invisible — it is the background against which other cultures stand out.
Scottish emigration to America came in several distinct waves, each with its own character and destination.
Scottish merchants established themselves in colonial towns from Boston to Charleston, often operating as factors for Scottish tobacco merchants. Educated Scots took positions as ministers, doctors, and educators. Indentured servants and transported prisoners (many of them Jacobite supporters after the 1715 and 1745 rebellions) arrived involuntarily.
The suppression of the Highland clans after Culloden pushed many Highlanders into emigration. Cape Fear, North Carolina became a major Highland Scottish settlement — significant enough that Gaelic was spoken there into the 19th century. Nova Scotia ("New Scotland") took thousands more. The Loyalist Scots of the Carolinas largely departed for Canada after the Revolution.
The Highland Clearances — the forced eviction of crofting communities to make way for sheep pasture — drove hundreds of thousands from the Highlands and Islands. Many went to Canada (Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, Ontario); others to Australia and New Zealand; some to the United States. The crofting diaspora is the source of much of the romantic attachment to Scotland that characterises Scottish-American heritage culture.
Scottish engineers, miners, and skilled workers emigrated to industrial America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago all had significant Scottish immigrant communities drawn by the steel and automotive industries.
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