Scotlands Mark on America | Page 2

Virginia. When the Supreme Court of the United States was first organized by Washington three of the four Associate Justices were of the same blood--one a Scot and two Ulster-Scots. When the first Chief Justice, John Jay, left the bench, his successor, John Rutledge, was an Ulster-Scot. Washington's first cabinet contained four members--two of them were Scotch and the third was an Ulster-Scot. Out of the fifty-six members who composed the Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence eleven were of Scottish descent. It was in response to the appeal of a Scot, John Witherspoon, that the Declaration was signed; it is preserved in the handwriting of an Ulster-Scot who was Secretary of the Congress; it was first publicly read to the people by an Ulster-Scot, and first printed by a third member of the same vigorous body of early settlers.
George Bancroft will hardly be accused of holding a brief for the Scot in American history but, with all his New England predilections, he frankly records this conclusion: "We shall find the first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain, came not from the Puritans of New England, or the Dutch of New York, or the planters of Virginia, but from Scotch-Irish Presbyterians." It was Patrick Henry, a Scot, who kindled the popular flame for independence. The foremost, the most irreconcilable, the most determined in pushing the quarrel to the last extremity, were those whom the bishops and Lord Donegal & Company had been pleased to drive out of Ulster.
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.
But it is perhaps in the intangible things that go to the making of national character that the Scottish contribution to the making of America has been most notable. In 1801, the population of the whole of Scotland was but little over a million and a half, and behind that there were at least eight centuries of national history. Behind that, too, were all the long generations of toil and strife in which the Scottish character was being molded into the forms that Scott and Burns made immortal. It is a character full of curious contrasts, with its strong predilection for theology and metaphysics on one side, and for poetry and romance on the other. 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. And so it has come about that side by side with tomes of Calvinistic divinity, there has been transmitted to Scotsmen an equally characteristic product of the mind of their race--a body of folksong, of ballad poetry, of legend and of story in that quaint and copious Doric speech which makes so direct an appeal to the hearts of men whether they are to the manner born or not. It is surely a paradox that a nation which, in the making, had the hardest kind of work to extract a scanty living from a stubborn soil, and still harder work to defend their independence, their liberties, their faith from foes of their own kindred, should be best known to the world for the romantic ideals they have cherished and the chivalrous follies for which their blood has been shed.
But, it is well to remember that long before the Reformers of the sixteenth century founded the parish school system of Scotland, the monasteries had their schools and so had the parish churches; there were high schools in the burghs and song schools of remarkable excellence. 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. If evidence were needed of the vigor of the Scottish race, it is readily forthcoming in the fact that for five hundred years the Land O'Cakes enriched the world with the surplus of her able