George Fraser Black

“ One other cause of uncertainty, and it is a very annoying one, is the careless method of many biographers in putting down a man's origin as "Irish," "from Ireland," "from the north of Ireland," etc., where they clearly mean to state that the individual concerned is descended from one of the many thousands of Scots who settled in Ulster in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Notwithstanding this uncertainty the proportion of men of undoubted Scottish origin who have reached high distinction, and whose influence has had such far reaching scope in the United States, is phenomenal. ”

“ He is usually a public-spirited citizen, a useful member of society, wherever you find him. But that does not lessen the warmth of his attachment to the place of his birth, or the land of his forbears. Be his connection with Scotland near or remote, there is enshrined in the inner sanctuary of his heart, memories, sentiments, yearnings, that are the heritage of generations with whom love of their country was a dominant passion, and pride in the deeds that her children have done an incentive to effort and an antidote against all that was base or ignoble. ”

“ The union, centuries old, in the Scottish mind and heart of the most uncompromising devotion to individual liberty with the most fervid patriotism, is a sentiment of which the world stands greatly in need to-day. We need not go far to find evidence of how perilous it is to sink regard for the great conception of human brotherhood in a narrow, nationalistic concern for individual interests. In the Scottish conception of liberty, duties have always been rated as highly as rights ”

“ It is as difficult to separate the current of Scottish migration to the American Colonies, or to the United States that grew out of them, from the larger stream which issued from England, as it is to distinguish during the last two hundred years the contributions by Scotsmen from those of Englishmen to the great body of English literature. ”

“ The light of learning may have waxed dim at times, but it was not from an illiterate land that Scottish scholars carried into Europe all through the Middle Ages the name and fame of their country, any more than it was from a people unversed in the arts of war that Scottish soldiers went abroad to fight foreign battles, giving now a Constable to France, a General-in-Chief to Russia and still again a Lieutenant to Gustavus Adolphus. ”

“ There is no question that from the Scots Presbyterians and their descendants came many of the leaders in the struggle for independence, as Bancroft has well pointed out in the following words: "The first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain came not from the Puritans of New England, nor the Dutch of New York, nor the planters of Virginia, but from the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians." ”

“ Scotsmen, as a nationality, are everywhere spoken of as good and loyal citizens, while Americans who can trace a family residence of a century in the country are proud if they can count among their ancestors some one who hailed from the land of Burns, and it is a knowledge of all this, in turn, that makes the American Scot of to-day proud of his country's record and his citizenship and impels him to be as devoted to the new land as it was possible for him to have been to the old had he remained in it. ”

“ Parker, the historian of Londonderry, New Hampshire, speaking of the early Scots settlers in New England, has well said: "Although they came to this land from Ireland, where their ancestors had a century before planted themselves, yet they retained unmixed the national Scotch character. Nothing sooner offended them than to be called Irish. Their antipathy to this appellation had its origin in the hostility then existing in Ireland between the Celtic race, the native Irish, and the English and Scotch colonists." ”

“ Posterity will not fail to accord justice to the character and memory of a man to whom this country is most deeply indebted for much of its science and for many of its most important institutions, and of whom the State of New York may well be proud. ”

“ The distinguished place which men of Scottish or of Ulster origin had asserted for themselves in the councils of the Colonies was not lost when the Colonies became independent States. Among the first of the thirteen original States two-thirds were of either Scottish or Ulster-Scottish origin. Of the men who have filled the great office of President of the United States, eleven out of the whole twenty-five come under the same category. About half the Secretaries of the Treasury of the Government of the United States have been of Scottish descent, and nearly a third of the Secretaries of State. ”

“ Again many Irish-American writers on the Scots Plantation of Ulster have assumed that the Scots settlers were entirely or almost of Gaelic origin, ignoring the fact, if they were aware of it, that the people of the Scottish lowlands were "almost as English in racial derivation as if they had come from the North of England." ”

“ It may be confidently asserted that, whether regarded as a race or a people no members of the great English-speaking family did more promptly, more cheerfully or more courageously make the sacrifices required to perform their full part in the struggle to defend the freedom that belongs to our common heritage and to preserve the ideals without which we should not regard life as worth living. ”

“ SCOTTISH SOCIETIES IN THE UNITED STATES
That the Scots in America have not been solely devoted to business and the promotion of their own selfish welfare is evidenced by the remarkable growth of their numerous Societies based upon the extension of fellowship among Scots in the New World and for the collection and distribution of charitable funds among the poor and needy of their countrymen. The oldest of these Societies, the Scots' Charitable Society of Boston, was founded January 6, 1657, with twenty-seven members. ”

“ Cotton Mather put forth a plan to settle hardy Scots families on the frontiers of Maine and New Hampshire to protect the towns and churches there from the French and Indians, the Puritans evidently not being able to protect themselves. He says, "I write letters unto diverse persons of Honour both in Scotland and in England; to procure Settlements of Good Scotch Colonies, to the Northward of us. This may be a thing of great consequence;" and elsewhere he suggests that a Scottish colony might be of good service in getting possession of Nova Scotia. ”

“ The Scots have largely contributed to raise the standard of education and culture in the United States. They furnished most of the principal schoolmasters in the Revolutionary Colonies south of New York, and many of the Revolutionary leaders were trained by them. While Harvard still continued under the charge of a president and tutors and had but one "professor," William and Mary College had had for many years a full faculty of professors, graduates of the Scottish and English universities. ”

“ Although many Scots came to New England and New York they never settled there in such numbers as to leave their impress on the community so deeply as they did in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the south. There were Presbyterian churches in Lewes, Newcastle (Delaware) , and Philadelphia previous to 1698, and from that time forward the province of Pennsylvania was the chief centre of Scottish settlement both from Scotland direct and by way of Ulster. By 1720 these settlers had reached the mouth of the Susquehanna, and three years later the present site of Harrisburg. ”

“ There is excellent authority for the statement that, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War one-third of the entire population of Pennsylvania was of Ulster-Scottish origin. A New England historian, quoted by Whitelaw Reid, counts that between 1730 and 1770 at least half a million souls were transferred from Ulster to the Colonies—more than half of the Presbyterian population of Ulster—and that at the time of the Revolution they made one-sixth of the total population of the nascent Republic. ”

“ James MacGregor (1677-1729) to Governor Shute in which the writer says: "We are surprised to hear ourselves termed Irish people, when we so frequently ventured our all for the British Crown and liberties against the Irish papists, and gave all tests, of our loyalty, which the government of Ireland required, and are always ready to do the same when demanded."
Down to the present day the descendants of these Ulster Scots settlers living in the United States who have maintained an interest in their origin, always insist that they are of Scottish and not of Irish origin. ”

“ The kind of democracy for which Scotsmen have deemed that the world should be made safe is a human brotherhood, indeed, but a brotherhood imbued with the generous rivalry of effort, the enthusiasm of emulous achievement, and not one of inglorious, monotonous and colorless equality. ”

“ Bancroft says the movement for freedom was assisted by "the calm wisdom of Samuel Johnston, a native of Dundee, in Scotland, a man revered for his integrity, thoroughly opposed to disorder and revolution, if revolution could be avoided without yielding to oppression." ”

“ In America, the old traditions, the old blue flag with its white cross, the old Doric, are not forgotten, but are nourished, and preserved, and honored, and spoken by Scotsmen on every side with the kindliest sentiments on the part of those to whom they are alien. ”

“ Many jibes are made at the expense of the Canny Scot, but American business men have realized his value. In business and commercial life the success of the average Scot is remarkable and many of the guiding spirits among America's successful business men are Scots or men of Scottish descent.
James Blair (b. 1807) , brother of John Inslee Blair, was largely identified with the development of banks and railroads in Pennsylvania. George Smith (1808-99) , born in Aberdeenshire, founded the Wisconsin Marine and Fire Insurance Company (1839) and was later a prominent banker in Georgia. ”

“ The builder of the world famed Smithsonian Institution in Washington was Gilbert Cameron (d. 1866) , a native of Greenock, and Scottish stone-masons were largely employed in the construction of many of the most important buildings in the country, such as the Metropolitan Museum and Tombs in New York, the Capitol in Albany, the State House in Boston, the City Hall in Chicago, etc. Alexander McGaw (1831-1905) , born in Stranraer, Wigtownshire, was famous as a bridge-builder and as builder of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. ”

“ Andrew's Society, or Burns or Caledonian Club, which serves to keep alive the memories of the home-land, to instil patriotism toward the adopted country, and to aid the distressed among their kinsfolk. There are now more than one thousand of these Societies in America, including the Order of Scottish Clans (organized, 1878) a successful fraternal, patriotic and beneficial order, with more than one hundred separate clans, and the Daughters of Scotia, a rapidly growing order for women of Scottish blood, organized in 1898. ”

“ Hard, dry and practical in its attitude to the ordinary affairs of life, it is apt to catch fire from a sudden enthusiasm, as if volatility were its dominant note and instability its only fixed attribute. ”

“ He took an active part in the public affairs of the colony of New Jersey, and in the convention which met to frame a constitution he displayed great knowledge of legal questions and urged the abolition of religious tests. In June, 1776, he was elected to the Continental Congress, and in the course of the debates he displayed little patience with those who urged half measures. When John Dickinson of Pennsylvania said the country was not ripe for independence, Witherspoon broke in upon the speaker exclaiming, "Not ripe, Sir! In my judgment we are not only ripe, but rotting. ”

“ For the most part the settlers appear to have been selected from the shires of Dumbarton, Renfrew, Ayr, Galloway, and Dumfries. Emigration from Scotland to Ireland appears to have continued steadily and the English historian Carte estimated, after diligent documentary study, that by 1641 there were in Ulster 100,000 Scots and 20,000 English settlers. In 1656 it was proposed by the Irish government that persons "of the Scottish nation desiring to come into Ireland" should be prohibited from settling in Ulster or County Louth, but the scheme was not put into effect. ”

“ The most wayward scions of the Scottish family have known that influence, and have borne testimony to the beauty of the homely virtues which they failed to practice and the nobility of aspirations which fell short of controlling their life. ”

“ James P. Lee, born in Roxburghshire in 1837, was inventor of the Lee magazine gun which was adopted by the United States Navy in 1895. His first weapon was a breech-loading rifle which was adopted by the United States Government during the Civil War. Later he organized the Lee Arms Company of Connecticut. The production of the telephone as a practical and now universally employed method of "annihilating time and space" in the articulate intercourse of the human race will forever be associated with the name of Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh in 1847. ”

“ The Scots were not long settled in Ulster before misfortune and persecution began to harass them. The Irish rebellion of 1641, said by some to have been an outbreak directed against the Scottish and English settlers, regarded by the native Irish as intruders and usurpers, caused them much suffering; and Harrison says that for "several years afterward 12,000 emigrants annually left Ulster for the American plantations." The Revolution of 1688 was also long and bloody in Ireland and the sufferings of the settlers reached a climax in the siege of Londonderry (April to August, 1688) . ”

“ In educational work in the eighteenth century no name stands higher than that of William Smith (1727-1803) , born in Aberdeen, first Provost of the College of Philadelphia. He was the introducer of the system of class records now used in all American universities. Isabella Graham (1742-1814) , born in Lanarkshire, ranked as one of the most successful teachers in New York at the end of the eighteenth century. James Dunlap (1744-1818) , of Scottish descent, was President of Jefferson College, Pennsylvania. ”