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American Democracy: The View From Scotland, 1776–1832
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
The American democratic model was utilized by Scottish reformers and conservatives who saw in American events a confirmation of their own ideas and hopes. The ideals articulated by the American Revolution and the political institutions created in the new nation were analyzed as matters that impinged on the deepest commitments of Scottish intellectuals. Conservatives perceived America as a threat to the stability and continuance of British political tradition, which they saw as dependent upon the preservation of Scotland's distinctive national past. The American experience was significant to reformers of all persuasions because it invested their discursive thought with a reality it had not known before. Yet American principles and precepts were not determinative, but rather were used to convey certain carefully selected ideas. As Adam Ferguson, one of Scotland's brightest enlightenment minds, noted, “If nations actually borrow from their neighbors, they probably borrow only what they are nearly in a condition to have invented themselves.” America was useful to Scottish political thinkers because Britain was ready to “invent” her own political forms.
The differences that divided Scotland's most articulate political writers were fundamental. The conservatives firmly believed that man's brutish nature required restraints, an established church, a balanced hierarchical social-political order, and stability. Radical Scots argued that with freedom and democratic institutions society would be humane and prosperous. Reformers spoke out against the worst social evils: they advocated Catholic emancipation, abolition of the slave trade, an end to flogging in the army and navy, prison reform and, in 1832, the extension of the franchise to the middle class.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1974
References
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2 Humanitarian liberalism is discussed in New, Chester W., The Life of Henry Brougham to 1830 (Oxford, 1961), pp. 146–48Google Scholar. Jeffrey's, more pessimistic assumptions are described succinctly in The Collected Essays and Papers of George Suintsbury (London and Toronto, 1923), I: 94–95Google Scholar. and by Jeffrey, himself in the Edinburgh Review, XXV (1808): 222Google Scholar. See also Clive, John, Scotch Reviewers, “The Edinburgh Review” 1802-1815 (London, 1957): 110–117, 86-105CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a good general discussion of the political ideas of the original editors of the Review.
3 Edinburgh, Evening Courant, Feb. 9, 1789Google Scholar. Janet Adam Smith argues that Burns' concern with liberty was a form of “cultural bellicoseness” and was not “associated with any definite strategy of action.” (“Some Eighteenth-Century Ideas of Scotland” in Phillipson, N. T. and Mitchison, Rosiland, eds., Scotland in the Age of Improvement [Edinburgh, 1970].Google Scholar) Another good guide to Scottish opinion about America is Fagerstrom, Dalphy I., “The American Revolutionary Movement in Scottish Opinion, 1763 to 1783” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Edinburgh, 1951).Google Scholar
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