It is a tradition, rather than a fact, that we Americans—not of Canada—of the United States of America are an English people. The burden of popular and uncritical historiography is responsible for this notion. Because of the overpowering influence of law and language, and because our most direct relations, in war and in peace, have been with Great Britain, it is assumed that we are both an English people and an English nation.

The result has been confusion at home, prolonged misunderstanding in Europe, and injustice to those who have contributed generously their blood and energies to the making and the saving of the nation.

Without the initial and formative elements, now absorbed into our national composite, from the Dutch, Huguenot, German, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and Iroquois, the existence and history of the United States are, to the unprejudiced mind, inconceivable. In this chapter we propose to glance at the debt we owe to Scotland.

In point of time, in the unshackling of the human spirit, and in the attainment of mental and spiritual freedom, we have shown how Scotland led Europe; first in revolt against kings and prelates, and then in the initiative of the constructive principles of democracy. The spirit of Scottish history, of which Robert Burns’s poem, “A man’s a man for a’ that,” is the epitome, and the general education of the common people do in themselves alone show how different were and are the Scottish from the English people.

This early Scottish influence, conveyed through both theory and example, was especially potent with the founders of New England, the Puritans in Old England, and the Pilgrims who, in the Dutch Republic, received tremendous reinforcement.

In philosophy—which is greater than armies or navies—to no other land or people were the beginners of the American nation more indebted than to the Scotch. This may be said, not only in the departments of political and ecclesiastical science, but equally so in the domain of pure thought. The Scottish philosophy of realism and common sense dominated largely our infant colleges. It swayed the thinking and shaped the conduct of our public men in bar and pulpit. It was translated into action by the leaders of the Revolution.

So long as the Scots were able to hold their own against the tyrannical Stuart kings of England, and even while they were pouring by the tens of thousands into Ulster, making a new nation in northern Ireland,—the old land of the Scots,—there were but few emigrants, from Scotland direct, to the Atlantic Coast colonies. Even these were sporadic and mostly by way of Holland; but when the oppressive economic measures of Parliament ruined the Scotch-Irish industries, there began an emigration of people of Scottish birth or descent which numerically excelled any previous colonial accession to America.

Whereas, the emigration from England to New England, mostly between 1630 and 1650, had added but twenty thousand souls to the northeastern seacoast region, the Scotch-Irish migration, lasting fifty years, added fifty thousand hardy, intelligent, thrifty people who settled in the interior and on the frontiers. They not only served as a barrier against the savages, but they developed the soil of the valleys and built their towns on the highlands and the watersheds.

After the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty and the breaking-up of the old economic and social conditions in Scotland, there poured into America a flood of Scottish islanders, Lowlanders, and Highlanders from Scotland direct, numbering tens of thousands. From this multitude of the Scots and Scotch-Irish, scattering widely and settling mostly on the frontiers and developing virgin land, came forth, at the call of the Continental Congress, one third of the American army of freedom in the Revolution.

Throughout our history none have excelled these lovers of ordered freedom in safeguarding human rights and in illustrating loyalty to moral convictions and public duty. The number of able men of Scottish descent who have filled the highest offices of honor and trust in the learned professions, in pulpit, bar, bench, in chairs of science, or as governors, presidents, officers of the army and navy, and in every line of human achievement, is not excelled, if equalled, by those of any other stock in the American blend of nationalities.

Yet the total value of such an addition to the resources of manhood, for the making of the future American commonwealth, cannot be estimated in mathematics only. In education almost every classical school and colonial college in the South was established by these people. In character and abilities—trained and nourished by education, morals, and religion—the Scotch-Irish were excelled by no other people.

In our land—new birth of the ages—the names of the clans and of individuals who bear Caledonian names do not only call up scenes in Scotland’s history, but do forcibly emphasize our blessings of peace after long strife. One of the earliest Scottish stories I remember was of a Grant and a Macpherson, who met one day upon a log spanning a chasm. As neither would give way to the other, their dirks settled the controversy by subtracting two from the population of the Highlands. In our soldier days, it was delightful to see, under the same flag and battling for the same Union, two generals—the ever-victorious James Macpherson and “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Was it the Inverness-born Macpherson, or the Kentuckian MacClernand, who uttered the prophecy concerning the then closed Mississippi Valley, that “the men of the West would, with their swords, hew their way to the Gulf”? In any event, what would the North have done had all the men of Scottish descent been subtracted from the hosts under Grant? Indeed, what would American history and the reality of to-day be if all the Scotsmen who took part were eliminated from the story? Even in Civil War days it was largely the descendants of Scots who made the Union sentiment in East Tennessee and created West Virginia.

The long discipline of the Scotsmen, resulting in the gifts and graces of Highlander, Lowlander, and Ulsterman, helped grandly on American soil to make the great Republic possible. As we have seen, the tens of thousands of Scots, emigrating beyond the Atlantic, located themselves largely along the line and at the post of danger—among the mountains they loved, on the frontier and the great American highlands, the Appalachian chain, from Maine to Alabama. In the infant days of our nation, when the vital struggle was between savagery and civilization, the Scottish-American frontiersman, alert, brave, tenacious, was the man for the era. He would never say “die” nor give up, while life remained in him. His record, both with the Continentals, in the War of Independence, and in the Union army during the conflict between the States, is a shining one. In the Confederate forces, from 1861 to 1865, the one body of men, selected by that best judge of humanity, Professor N. S. Shaler, of Harvard, as embodying the finer human qualities that shine brightest in adversity, was a regiment composed almost wholly of descendants of men of Scottish stock.

Even to hear casually some of these Scottish names, so interesting to us in history, sets ringing the bells of memory, as when Joseph Henry, at Albany, first sent a thrill through miles of wire to make sound—which Morse, without electrical research or profound knowledge, turned into writing, and thus won the world’s glory. Even the commonplace names of neighbors, as our Scottish hosts in Dundee, Invergowrie, or Newport-on-Tay mentioned them offhand, set our imagination on the dance or to rambling to the ends of the earth.

At home, too, do we not meet at school, in business, at garden parties, or in church, girls and boys, friends and acquaintances, or do we not hear of or see eminent men and women who bear these their ancestral names most modestly? Immediately, a carillon of associations, usually sweet, with “auld lang syne” sounds, fills the secret chambers of memory. “Cochrane” may bring up a rosy face and the laughing eyes of a pretty Vassar girl; “Macfarland” limns in imagination a schoolmate or army comrade; “Cameron” pictures a fellow of infinite wit; “MacIntosh” suggests eloquence in the pulpit. Others recall the halls of Congress, or the seats of executives, or the council board, business experiences, or clerical scenes, or pageants. It has the sensation almost of a shower bath, or crash towel friction, to see in court or pulpit, at clinic, or amid scenes of gentleness, people who bear ancestral names of once slashing swordsmen, or fellows of old famous for lifting cattle, or for defying the king’s writ, of whom we have read often in poetry and romance. How the centuries soften sharp outlines in the enchantment of distance!

It is invidious, if not mildly dangerous, to single out names. Yet with one we close our sketch of “Bonnie Scotland,” choosing for praise the dead, with no living line of descendants. Hepburn, for example, instead of being associated in our minds with dirks and poison, caste squabbles, or pitched battles,—after which “the turf looked red,”—calls up the mild face of a saintly soul who illustrated the Scripture promise of long life because of lips that refrained from speaking guile and of hands that ever healed. Who that is at home in Scottish history but has not infrequently run across the name of Hepburn—which reproduces in its vocables, not only a Scottish streamlet, but a line of mighty men? Who, also, that knows the story of the making of modern Japan but has heard of the beloved physician of Yokohama, known among the native-born as Kun-shi—the sage, super-man, gentleman by eminence, who spent his life in unselfish devotion to his fellow men, as a Christian healer, scholar, lexicographer, and philanthropist. In the midst of fame and fortune won by medical practice in the metropolitan city of New York, James Curtis Hepburn turned his back on these, to uplift in body and spirit the people of Japan, when just opened from hermitage to modern life. In the days of sailing ships and at the seaport where the selvages of two civilizations met, I saw him, day by day for years, with his healing touch dispensing medicine and cheer. He lived to make the dictionary which bridged the linguistic gulf between Orient and Occident, to translate the Eternal Word, to raise up hundreds of effective physicians, and, at ninety, to be honored by His Imperial Majesty the Mikado with a decoration, and to live, in serene old age, a benediction to his neighbors, until within five years of a century. In him I saw America honored and the nobler Scotland incarnated.

THE END