How the Scots Invented the Modern World (39 page)

The American Revolution also made Scottish Highland regiments the backbone of the British Army. In the course of the fighting, the number of active Highland regiments doubled. Clansmen, prevented since 1745 from possessing weapons of their own, rediscovered their martial livelihood and their traditional costume of kilt and bonnet, serving in units raised by their landlords. Regiments such as Fraser’s Highlanders, MacDonald’s Highlanders, and the Argyll Highlanders fought in Virginia, New York, and the Carolinas, while others, such as the Atholl Highlanders and Lord Seaforth’s, took the places of other British garrisons in Ireland, Gibraltar, and India. MacDonald’s 76th Highland Regiment surrendered with other British forces at Yorktown, and according to one of its officers, their captors, who included several Scottish emigrants, urged them to desert. However, the officer noted proudly, “not a single Highlander allowed himself to be seduced by these offers, from the duty which he had engaged to discharge to his King and country.”

The revolution splintered the political loyalties of the Scottish Enlightenment. Although William Robertson was convinced that one day “America must in some future period be the seat of the empire,” he chose to support the government in London. David Hume, the archetypal North Briton, worried that hanging on to these far-flung imperial possessions would ruin the British government, both financially and morally. His sympathies lay entirely with the colonists. “I am an American in my principles,” he told Benjamin Franklin in 1775, “and wish we would let [them] alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”

Like Hume, Adam Smith saw more at stake in the struggle than just American liberty versus the sovereignty of Parliament. He sensed the stirrings of forces that would eventually tear Britain apart if it failed to deal with them by changing its imperial policies more in the direction of free trade. His own solution was to give the colonies representation in Parliament—something that, given the current balance of forces at Westminster, was impossible. The only other sensible course, then, had to be—let them go. “It is surely time,” he wrote in the closing sentence of the
Wealth of Nations,
“that Great Britain should free herself from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace. . . .” By abandoning a lost cause abroad, Smith argued, Britain would have to confront the realities at home, “the real mediocrity of her circumstances,” as he put it, and the stagnant state into which her affairs had fallen.

The allies of Witherspoon in the Evangelical Party were more passionate in their support of the American cause. John Erskine, Witherspoon’s friend and colleague, wrote a pamphlet in 1769 titled
Shall I Go to War with My American Brethren?
to which the answer was a resounding
No!
When war broke out, others followed suit, protesting the war and condemning London’s hard-line attitude. Their position sprang from more than just solidarity with their Presbyterian counterparts in the colonies. They also worried that the government might turn to England’s Roman Catholics for support of its policy by giving them a Catholic Relief Bill, offering an olive branch to Catholics and, by extension, to the papacy in Rome, in exchange for help in suppressing the revolt in America. This rather farfetched fear touched not only Scots, but Englishmen as well. In 1780 it triggered the most violent riots London had ever seen. Egged on by the unbalanced but charismatic Lord Gordon, the mob burned Catholic churches and then ransacked the house of Chief Justice Mansfield, attacked the Bank of England, and opened up the Fleet and King’s Bench prisons. The riots took ten thousand soldiers to suppress. Two hundred and eighty-five persons died and another twenty-five were hanged.

It was a particularly low point for Britain, and for North Britons in particular. Had Hume lived to see it, it would have confirmed his sense that the country had entered a period of dangerous decadence, and that certain drastic steps were needed if the United Kingdom was to save itself and avoid dissolving into bankruptcy, chaos, and even revolution. Meanwhile, Britain was embroiled in an unpopular war not only with the thirteen colonies, but also with France, Spain, and Holland. Had Hume lived even longer, he might have appreciated the irony of seeing Britain’s ancient French foe going through the very revolution he most feared—because of the debts they had run up helping the Americans.

Scottish Americans, of course, did not win the American Revolution. It was the alliance with France that did that, and which finally guaranteed British consent to American independence at the Treaty of Paris in 1783. But just as Scots and their Scotch-Irish cousins supplied some of the crucial muscle and inspiration for the American cause, so they played an equally important role in creating the new nation afterwards. Indeed, two additional Scots decisively shaped its character, even though neither ever set foot on American soil.

John Witherspoon had started things moving when the Continental Congress was drafting the first attempt to create a national union, in the Articles of Confederation. There he spoke to the issue that was becoming increasingly important to him, America’s place in the future of the world. “I do expect,” he said to the assembled delegates, “a progress, as in every other human art, so in the order and perfection of human society.” Why, he asked, should the Congress fail in propelling it forward? “It is not impossible,” he said, “that in future times all the states in one quarter of the globe may see it proper by some plan of union to perpetuate security and peace.” Let America, Witherspoon urged the delegates, be the model for such a European union and “hand down the blessings of peace and public order to many generations.”

But the Articles of Confederation proved an abysmal disappointment. Too weak at the center, too fragmented in its granting of powers to the individual states, the American republic seemed doomed to fail. Pessimists such as John Adams even wondered whether the American experiment in self-government would fail with it.

To prevent this, delegates assembled in Philadelphia once again in the late spring of 1787, to draw up a new plan of union. Although Witherspoon did not attend, the Constitutional Convention did offer an indirect tribute to his efforts as America’s foremost educator. Of twenty-five college graduates at the convention, nine were Princeton graduates, while only four were Harvard graduates, and even fewer were from Yale. The two plans put before the delegates for a new constitution were both authored by Princeton men. William Paterson, the son of an Ulster Scot tinsmith, attended Princeton shortly be-fore Witherspoon arrived, but had been instrumental in getting him there. He produced the so-called New Jersey Plan, which strongly supported the rights of the small states against the large, such as New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts.

The alternative plan, the one that was, with some modification, eventually adopted as the blueprint for the American Constitution, was authored by one of Witherspoon’s closest disciples, James Madison. He came from one of central Virginia’s wealthiest families, and was part of the state’s Episcopalian squirearchy, which was disdainful of religious enthusiasts of the Great Awakening, and proud of its links to England. Yet he had gone to Princeton, where he became deeply attached to President Witherspoon, and even delayed graduation in order to continue special work with him. This included tutoring in Hebrew, and exposure to the most advanced of the Scottish thinkers, from Hutcheson and Kames to Adam Smith and David Hume.

It was above all to Hume, Witherspoon’s avowed nemesis, that Madison found himself drawn. Detached, ironic, charming but devastating when engaged in intellectual debate, always interesting and frequently outrageous: Hume represented a new kind of intellectual persona that Madison admired and cultivated, both as a thinker and as a public figure. He also embraced the basic premises of all Scottish social science: that human beings act the same when they find themselves in similar circumstances, and that uniform human causes produce uniform effects. It enabled him to zero in on the question that had stumped not only speculators on the makeup of a future American republic, but also the grand classical tradition of political analysis running from Aristotle to the universally admired—even Kames and Smith quoted him— French philosopher Montesquieu.

How can a self-governing republic rule over a vast expanse of territory, which a future United States of America must inevitably do, without becoming an empire, and therefore acquisitive and corrupt? There seemed to be no clear answer. Montesquieu had summed up an entire body of thought in his
Spirit of the Laws,
published in 1748, which postulated that only a small community, composed of persons who all knew one another or nearly so, could perpetuate true liberty. A large continental republic was doomed. Geographic distance and conflicting interests, arising from differences in social development, bred civil conflict; the only solution would be tyranny, the rule of the strong in order to maintain order. Rome had succumbed to this ironclad rule, the experts said. If the former American colonies, stretching from Maine to Florida and pressing beyond the Appalachians to the Mississippi, tried to create a strong national government, they would succumb, too.

Madison thought otherwise. His rejection of accepted wisdom rested on his reading of a little-known text by David Hume published as part of his
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary,
titled, “The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” In it, Hume broke with Montesquieu and proposed that a large or “extended” republic, for all its its geographic and socioeconomic diversity, might turn out to be the most stable of all. “In a large government which is modeled with masterly skill,” Hume declared, “there is compass and room enough to refine the democracy.” The masses find a place for themselves in the first level of elections and selection of magistrates. “Although the people as a body are unfit for government,” he wrote, “yet when dispersed in small bodies”—such as individual colonies or states—“they are more susceptible both to reason and order; the force of popular currents and tides is, in great measure, broken.” Meanwhile, the elite spend their time coordinating the movements of the various parts of the whole, rather than plotting its overthrow. “At the same time,” Hume observed, “the parts are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest.”

As Douglass Adair has suggested, Hume’s words must have struck Madison like a hammer blow. He incorporated them into his plan for the new American constitution in his “Notes on the Confederacy,” published in April 1787, just eight months before he wrote his essay defending the Constitution as part of the
Federalist Papers.
In it (the tenth
Federalist
) Madison laid bare the heart of the new American system. The theme was not unity, but countervailing interests; in contemporary terms, gridlock. Federal versus state power, executive versus legislative, and judicial versus them both: add the disparate economic interests of bankers versus farmers, slaveholding southerners versus commercial-minded northerners, and thirteen semisovereign political units, plus indirect elections at the senatorial and presidential level to frustrate the raw, crude will of the people—and what you have is not chaos, as the critics might expect, but stability, and above all liberty.

Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the
Federalist
Papers.
If scholars sometimes joke that David Hume is the “real” author of the Tenth
Federalist,
it is not just because it lays out Hume’s vision of an extended republic managing to govern itself into perpetuity. It is also because it co-opts Hume’s skeptical, cynical understanding of human motives into an American context. Madison states, “if men were angels, there would be no need of government”—a thoroughly Hume-like aphorism—and in the eternal struggle between liberty and authority in a modern society, the only way to preserve the one is to perpetually hobble the other.

The two other key figures in the making of the new constitution were both of Scottish extraction, and, like Madison, steeped in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. Alexander Hamilton was the son of a West Indies Scottish merchant, and prominent in New York political circles. He enthusiastically endorsed Madison’s federal plan, and helped author the
Federalist Papers.
Hamilton even signed the Constitution in defiance of the wishes of his own state of New York. But his vision of a strong nationalist government probably owed less to Hume than to Adam Smith’s mercantilist nemesis, James Steuart (although he knew the
Wealth of Nations
almost chapter and verse).

The other was a native-born Scot, the lawyer James Wilson. Born in Carskerdy, he attended St. Andrews and sat in on classes at the University of Glasgow before emigrating to Philadelphia. He found work as a tutor at the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania), which was, like Princeton, Scottish-dominated, before training for the bar and becoming a wealthy attorney in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, arranging land deals for his Ulster Scots clientele. His neat, tight-lipped, bespectacled figure became a familiar sight on the floor of the Constitutional Convention, where he spoke at virtually every session—more than anyone else, in fact, including Madison. It was Wilson who reconciled Madison’s plan for a strong national government with his opponent’s desire to preserve popular sovereignty, and it was Wilson who thrust into the midst of the debate the ideas of the man most associated with that third great center of Scottish Enlightenment, Aberdeen: the philosopher Thomas Reid.