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An Enlightened Empire: Scottish and Irish Imperial Reformers in the Age of the American Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

J. Russell Snapp
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Extract

In January 1773, Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the colonies, received a letter urging him to appoint no more Scots or Irishmen to offices in America. While the author claimed that, as a “Cosmopolite” he had no vulgar “national Prejudices,” he declared that “the English, particularly the Americans,” had conceived such Prejudices against the Scots and Irish, that it is great Impolicy to nominate them for governors or for any Employ in America….” One cannot know exactly what public relations disasters might have inspired this strong advice. Nevertheless, recent changes in both the United Kingdom and the empire at large had clearly heightened age-old English prejudices against these “alien” groups. Never before had so many Scots and Irishmen held public office in Britain and its colonies, and Scottish merchants were making considerable inroads in imperial trade at the expense of their English counterparts. However, jealousy on account of this new-found power does not completely explain the widespread animus against these groups. Many Englishmen and Anglo-Americans also perceived that Scots and Irishmen approached imperial government in ways that threatened English liberty. While it would be going too far to accept the contemporary English notion that Scots, and indeed most non-Englishmen, were “tinctured with notions of despotism,” this stereotype points toward the reality that officials from the fringes of the British Isles took a new approach to imperial government: they emphasized metropolitan authority while, at the same time, regarding the Crown's diverse subjects from a cosmopolitan perspective.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , Fall 2001 , pp. 388 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2001

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References

1 Unknown author to the Earl of Dartmouth, Blackheath, Kent, January 12, 1773, Dartmouth Papers, D(W)1778/II/530, Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford, England.

2 Many sources highlight these changes; for example, Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 117–32Google Scholar, and Richards, Eric, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bailyn, Bernard and Morgan, Philip D. (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 87–98Google Scholar.

3 Colley, , Britons, p. 130Google Scholar. The words are those of John Sawbridge, the radical Whig brother of Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, the equally radical historian of England.

4 Brown, Christopher L., “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 56, no. 2 (04 1999): 281CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For population estimates, see also Steele, Ian K., “The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the British Empire,” in The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998), p. 123Google Scholar, and P. J. Marshall, “Britain Without America—A Second Empire?” in ibid., p. 582. At that time the exact legal status of all these groups in relation to the British empire, and especially of Native Americans, Biharis, and Bengalis, was yet to be determined. Recognition of indigenous authorities existed in tension with British jurisdictional claims.

5 Gould, Eliga H., “American Independence and Britain's Counter-Revolution,” Past and Present 154 (02 1997): 107–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marshall, P. J., “Empire and Authority in the later Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 15, no. 1 (10 1986): 105–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Colley, , Britons, pp. 127–28Google Scholar; Richards, , “Scotland,” pp. 96–97Google Scholar. Irishmen were disproportionately represented in imperial service only if one does not count the country's Catholic majority, who were excluded from such service.

7 Colley, , Britons, pp. 120–32Google Scholar; Kidd, Colin, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish whig historians and the creation of an Anglo-British identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 2, 213–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lenman, Bruce P., “‘From savage to Scot’ via the French and the Spaniards: Principal Robertson's Spanish sources,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Brown, Stewart J. (Cambridge, 1997), p. 197Google Scholar.

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9 Scottish Enlightenment thinkers often emphasized that greater prosperity, peace, and happiness came with movement from primitive to advanced stages of social development, and they generally saw the United Kingdom and the empire as promoting this advancement. See, for example, Phillipson, Nicholas, “Providence and progress: an introduction to the historical thought of William Robertson,” in William Robertson, p. 59Google Scholar; and Bayly, C. A., “The British and indigenous peoples, 1760–1860: power, perception and identity,” in Empire and others: British encounters with indigenous peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Daunton, Martin and Halpern, Rick (London, 1999), p. 34Google Scholar. Some, such as the historian William Robertson, saw this as part of God's providential plan that could best be fostered by strong imperial government (Phillipson, , “Providence and progress,” pp. 68–71, 60Google Scholar; Lenman, , “‘From savage to Scot,’” pp. 203–08Google Scholar). In summarizing Robertson's perspective, which expressed ideas also forged through experience in America, Lenman describes the combination of authoritarianism and benevolence toward “primitive” people that characterized the new perspective on empire: “Few mentalities can be so dictatorial as the enlightened condescension of the authoritarian liberal” (ibid., p. 209). In his article ‘“This famous island set in a Virginian sea’: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801,” Thomas Bartlett under-emphasizes the extent to which leading Irishmen in the mid-eighteenth century also thought idealistically about empire (The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of Oxford History, p. 272).

10 On the political process in Scotland, see Colley, , Britons, p. 132Google Scholar; on Irish politics, see James, Francis Godwin, Ireland in the Empire 1688–1770: A History of Ireland from the Williamite Wars to the Eve of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 287–89Google Scholar, and R. F. Foster, “Ascendancy and Union,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, ed. idem (Oxford, 1991), pp. 163–64.

11 In part because of their local contexts, the Enlightenment taught leading Scots, and probably Protestant Irishmen, different lessons than their English counterparts. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were generally “middle- and upper-middle class professional men” who emphasized moderation and balance (Sher, Richard B., Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh [Edinburgh, 1985], pp. 10–11Google Scholar). In their minds, the struggles of populists in the Church of Scotland to overthrow the established patronage system highlighted the dangers of participatory politics. As a result, the Enlightenment literati shared with imperial administrators “enlightened elitism and tolerant conservatism,” as compared with the “political liberalism and religious intolerance” of more populist elements (Fitzpatrick, Martin, “The Enlightenment, politics and providence: some Scottish and English comparisons,” in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in eighteenth-century Britain, ed. Haakonssen, Knud [Cambridge, 1996], pp. 76–81Google Scholar; Sher, , Church and University, p. 263Google Scholar).

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14 Bellot, , Knox, pp. 4–9Google Scholar. Though he reared his children in the established Church of Ireland, William Knox's father was originally a Scots-Irish Presbyterian who retained his Calvinistic beliefs and passed them on to his children.

15 Knox, William, Extra Official State Papers, 2 vols. (London, 1789), 1 (pt 2): 13Google Scholar. In the same work, Knox declared that he hoped to “treat every thing which respects Government systematically as parts of the whole…,” ibid., p. 19.

16 Knox, , Justice and Policy, pp. 6 and “B.”Google Scholar

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18 Ibid., p. 5.

19 Ibid., 2: 32.

20 Ibid., 1 (part 2): 5.

21 Knox, , Justice and Policy, pp. 21–25Google Scholar; Bellot, , Knox, p. 209Google Scholar.

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23 Knox, , Justice and Policy, p. 40Google Scholar.

24 Knox to unknown, Savannah, May 20, 1760, in HMC, Report, 6: 85. In a tract advocating efforts to convert American Indians to Christianity, Knox also recommended a diplomatic approach in which “nothing is to be pressed on them” (Knox, , Three Tracts Respecting the Conversion and Instruction of the Free Indians, and Negroe Slaves in the Colonies Addressed to the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts [London, 1768], p. 15Google Scholar).

25 Lawson, Philip, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal and Kingston, 1989), pp. 124–25, 51Google Scholar.

26 Knox, , Justice and Policy, pp. 19–28Google Scholar; the quotation is on p. 24.

27 Landsman, Ned, “The Legacy of British Union for the North American Colonies: Provincial Elites and the Problem of Imperial Union,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. Robertson, John (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 305–06Google Scholar.

28 Knox, , Justice and Policy, pp. 12–14Google Scholar; Lawson, , Imperial Challenge, p. 55Google Scholar.

29 Greene, Jack P., ed., “William Knox's Explanation for the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30 (1973): 305Google Scholar; Knox, , Extra Official, 2: 30Google Scholar.

30 Knox, , Three Tracts, pp. 16–20Google Scholar. Not everyone agreed with Knox that “British laws disown perpetual servitude.” Courts in the early eighteenth century had issued conflicting decisions regarding the legality of slavery in England. Even the famous James Somerset case of 1772, which many have regarded as ending British slavery, did not do so definitively (Gerzina, Gretchen, Black England: Life Before Emancipation [1995; reprint London, 1999], pp. 111–12, 120–23Google Scholar). Significantly, however, Lord Mansfield, the Scottish Chief Justice who freed Somerset on the grounds that British law did not permit a slaveowner in England forcefully to recapture a slave and sell him abroad, shared the enlightened imperialists' combination of authoritarianism and liberalism and, like them, was scorned by radical English Whig nationalists.

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37 Ibid., pp. 186–91; Cashin, Edward J., Lachlan McGillivray, Indian Trader: The Shaping of the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens, Ga., 1992), 214–15Google Scholar; Crane, Verner, ed., “Hints relative to the Division and government of the Conquered and Newly Acquired Countries in America,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 8 (1922): 367–73Google Scholar. Crane argues that Ellis authored this document, which advocated provisions that appeared in the Proclamation.

38 Henry Ellis to Lord Hawkesbury, Marseilles, March 31, 1788, Liverpool Papers, Additional Manuscripts 38, 416, fols. 69–70, British Library, London.

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40 Clarke, Desmond, Arthur Dobbs, Esquire, 1689–1765: Surveyor-General of Ireland Prospector and Governor of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1957), pp. 14–15Google Scholar. Dobb's mother had fled to Scotland to give birth to him in relative safety.

41 Ibid., pp. 31–32.

42 Ibid., pp. 29–30.

43 Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (1959; reprint New York, 1968), pp. 149–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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47 Snapp, J. Russell, John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier (Baton Rouge, La., 1996), pp. 55–56Google Scholar.

48 When drawing a map of the proposed colony of Vandalia in 1771, Stuart demarcated an area west of the colony as “Land Ceded to His Majesty by the Cherokees but not to be Granted to or occupied by any of his white Subjects,” implying that Indians qualified fully as subjects (Sosin, Jack M., Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 [Lincoln, Nebr., 1961]Google Scholar; the map is between pp. 188 and 189). On Stuart's plan for frontier government, see Snapp, Stuart, ch. 3.

49 Knox, , Justice and Policy, p. 6Google Scholar.

50 John Stuart to the Board of Trade, Charles Town, Mar. 9, 1764, Public Record Office (Kew, England), Colonial Office, series 323, vol. 17, part 2, fol. 270.

51 Lawson, , Imperial Challenge, p. 49Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., pp. 48–50; the quotation is on p. 48.

53 Ibid., p. 75.

54 Ibid., p. 64.

55 Brown, , “Empire without Slaves,” p. 285Google Scholar.

56 Ibid., p. 300.

57 Ibid., pp. 279–80. The quotation is in note 13, p. 279.

58 On Gage's view of Indian policy, see Snapp, , Stuart, pp. 72–73Google Scholar.

59 Johnson, an Irishman who acted as a local magnate among both Indians and settlers of New York's Mohawk valley, apparently showed less enthusiasm for imperial regulation of the frontier than Stuart. He also seems to have realized more than Stuart that the real interests of the British and the Indians might well clash. See Snapp, , Stuart, p. 64Google Scholar.

60 Knox, , Extra Official, 2: 29Google Scholar.

61 John Stuart to Gen. Frederick Haldimand, Charles Town, Nov. 20, 1774, Haldimand Papers, British Library, Add. Mss, 21,672, vol. 2, fols. 278–79.

62 The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., ed. Dexter, Franklin Bowditch, 3 vols. (New York, 1901), 2: 185Google Scholar.

63 This sense was heightened during the war when British officers used Hessians, Indians, and slaves against them.

64 Marshall, , “Empire and Authority,” p. 116Google Scholar.

65 For summaries of change in the imperial ethos by the end of the eighteenth century, see Marshall, P. J., “Britain Without America—A Second Empire?,” in The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of Oxford History, pp. 590–93Google Scholar; Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in ibid., pp. 229–30; and Gould, , Persistence of Empire, p. 210Google Scholar.