The Scottish Conspiracy Against American Liberty: The Case of South Carolina

Did a Scottish conspiracy to crush colonial liberty provoke the American Revolution? Nonsense, you will likely say. But evidence from the 1760s and 1770s shows that colonial anger at the actions of the British government was paralleled by a rise of anti-Scottish sentiment. Some colonial leaders, who called themselves Whigs, claimed that Scots dominated the government in London and were conspiring to undermine the people's liberties, to enslave them in fact. Whigs, who later called  themselves Patriots, used the term "enslave" freely, despite the fact that many of them were themselves slaveowners. "Liberty or Slavery" was a common Whig motto.   

The Scottish conspiracy theory, like so many things political in the colonies, originated in British politics. In the early 1760s, disgruntled English Whig politicians claimed that George III’s former Scottish tutor, John  Stuart, Earl of Bute was the gray eminence behind the alleged conspiracy. 

George selected Bute as his Prime Minister in 1762, two years after he became king. English Whig politicians concocted the conspiracy theory while Bute was in office. He didn't last long in the job. King George discharged him in 1763. Yet Whigs continued to accuse Bute of plotting behind the scenes to “enslave” the English people. They accused him of influencing policy through an affair with the king's mother. 

Bute's critics portrayed him as a boot. The "Boot" became a common and convenient symbol of tyranny in Britain and its empire. American Whigs used it during the Stamp Act Crisis in 1765 and right up to the beginning of the revolution in 1775. 

The Scottish conspiracy theory gained additional traction in America in the early 1770s as a result of a judicial decision in London. The judge who made the decision happened to be a Scot, Lord Mansfield. He was educated in England, trained in law, and became one of the top English judges, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench. In the widely reported Somerset Case in 1772, Mansfield ruled that slavery had no basis in English law, in either precedent or statute. 

The Somerset decision sent shock waves through the colonies, especially the southern colonies, where the wealth of the elite relied on enslaved African labor. Nowhere was the Somerset ruling more resented than in South Carolina, where enslaved Africans made up a majority of the population. Many planters feared Parliament might extend Mansfield's ruling to the entire empire. The fear had little basis in reality. Mansfield's ruling was narrow and applied only to England. 

Abolition of slavery in the British empire occurred, of course, but not for more than sixty years. In the 1770s, the anti-slavery movement in Britain was still in its infancy. Parliament was filled with MPs and Lords who derived much of their income from the slave trade and colonial plantations. Abolitionism was beginning to have some impact on the British  consciousness, but it did not have enough influence on Parliament to achieve abolition of the slave trade, let alone slavery itself. The sugar planters of the West Indies seem to have understood this, because they did not use it as a reason to defy the home government. 

Slave owning colonists in the American colonies, especially in South Carolina, did not understand the reality of British politics. Or they pretended not to. They panicked at the news of the Somerset decision. Their fear that it might be applied to the colonies led them to embrace a solution that aligned them with northern activists challenging Parliament’s power to tax the colonies. 

The solution had already been articulated by Charleston merchant Christopher Gadsden. Since the late 1750s Gadsden had been arguing that Parliament had no right to legislate for the colonies on any domestic matters. In the northern colonies the rallying cry of those opposing British policies was "No Taxation without Representation.” That cry was adopted in the South as well, but it was not the main issue that united southerners against Britain. The central issue in South Carolina, although never articulated directly, was “No Representation, No Slavery.” The political elite decided that the best way to protect its domestic institutions (read: chattel slavery) was for South Carolina to control its own destiny. That decision was a crucial step in the unification of the thirteen colonies into what became the United States. 

By the early 1770s, antislavery views in the northern colonies were gaining adherents. Some of the men who would sign the Declaration of Independence in July 1776 had previously denounced human bondage. But in the interests of colonial unity, northern antislavery figures muted their criticisms and accommodated southern opinion. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin had both condemned slavery, but in 1775 they argued that slavery, like taxation, was a domestic issue for Americans to deal with. The British Parliament had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of the colonies. They must be sovereign, and they must unite to achieve sovereignty. The issue of slavery would have to wait until that was accomplished. 

To salve their consciences, many American Whigs predicted that slavery would be abolished after independence was achieved. That was safely in the future. In 1775, colonists north and south proclaimed that the British government was determined to enslave them, while also threatening the institution of slavery. And the architects of this policy were Bute, Mansfield, and other villains, including ones implanted in the heart of the colonies. The cartoon of 1775 below, Virtual Representation, illustrates the colonial Whig view. The man in tartan pants with the gun is Lord Bute. Next to him is Lord Mansfield in his judicial robes. The gun is pointed at colonists. Britannia, at far right is coming to the rescue, but is about to fall into a pit, presumably dug by the Scots. On the far left are two French Canadians, a soldier and a monk, who are supporting Bute and Mansfield. Why? In 1774, Parliament had passed the Quebec Act giving French Canadian Catholics freedom of religion. Many American colonists viewed this with alarm. They believed it was part of the British strategy to subdue the thirteen colonies, in this case by enlisting French Canadians to fight them. 

In retrospect the view that Bute, Mansfield, and other Scots in Britain and the colonies were engaged in a conspiracy to eliminate American liberty and abolish American slavery -- a disconnect and an oxymoron -- seems preposterous. To many people in the colonies, however, the Scottish conspiracy theory seemed plausible. It was politically useful to American Whigs and they had the claims of English Whigs to support it. 

British Whigs were the political descendants of the parliamentary faction that had opposed royal absolutism in the turbulent seventeenth century. The monarchs in question belonged to the House of Stuart. The Stuarts were a Scottish dynasty. They had ruled Scotland for centuries before James VI & I became king of England on the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. 

American colonists claimed to be defending liberties secured by the seventeenth century struggles against the heirs of James I: Charles I, Charles II, and James II. In the wake of the conflicts, many people in Britain and its colonies associated the Scottish name Stuart with authoritarianism. Lord Bute's given name, John Stuart, surely did little to help his chances of political success.

By the time of the American Revolution, Stuart monarchs no longer ruled Britain and had not for sixty years. Their immediate successors, the Hanoverian kings George I and II, had favored Whig politicians during their reigns, from 1714 to1760, a period often called The Whig Supremacy. The rival Tory Party all but disappeared. 

Things changed when George III ascended the throne in 1760, aged nineteen. He believed that Whig oligarchs had gained too much power and had corrupted British politics. He was eager to reduce their influence and end the successful but hugely expensive war with France and Spain. His current Whig ministers wanted to continue the war. George removed several of them from his government. Among them was the popular William Pitt, who had led Britain to victory in the Seven Years War (French and Indian War in American history). 

Pitt had become a hero in the colonies as well, as the names of numerous towns and streets in the USA attest, from Pittsburgh to Pittsboro to Pittsfield. Charleston, South Carolina named a street after him (I lived on it) and erected a statue of him in gratitude for his efforts to abolish the Stamp Act of 1765. The statue originally stood at the intersection of Broad and Meeting Streets. It is now located in the Charleston County Judicial Center. It is missing his outstretched arm. Ironically, a British cannonball knocked it off during their siege of the city in 1780. 

English Whig claims of “Scots tyranny” merged with growing colonial resentment of Scottish influence and economic competition in British America. Ever since the Act of Union, Scots had been free to settle and trade in England and its colonies. Thousands took advantage of the opportunity and migrated to greener pastures. Scottish merchants and traders descended on London and every corner of the empire. 

Many people in England resented this invasion by their former enemies. English writers and cartoonists portrayed Scots as lean and hungry, a plague of locusts eager to feast on the land of milk and honey. The poet Charles Churchill described Scotland as a land where half-starved spiders fed on half-starved flies. In his dictionary, lexicographer Samuel Johnson defined oats as a grain which in England is fed to horses and in Scotland is fed to the people. Scots were uncouth, uncivilized, impoverished -- and historically traitorous. The last is a reference to the Jacobite Rebellions which were designed to restore the Catholic Stuart monarchs to the throne of Britain. The rebellions broke out in Scotland, and Highland clans provided most of the Jacobite soldiery. The last of the revolts penetrated into central England before being crushed in 1746. Most adults in England could remember the panic and fear it generated, and they told their children.    

[English Anti-Scottish Cartoons: Sawney in the Boghouse and London: A Flight of Scotsman] 

In America, Scots flocked to South Carolina and Georgia in particular, lured by the prospect of quick riches. They became merchants, planters, doctors, and shopkeepers. The Crown also appointed Scots to many colonial offices, a trend that accelerated after the defeat of the last Jacobite Rebellion in 1746 and the accession of George III in 1760. From the perspective of the British government improving opportunities for Scots in the empire was a means of keeping them loyal. Americans were not the only ones struggling to achieve unity in the late eighteenth century. We tend to forget that Great Britain was also a new country, not much older than the United States. “British” was a new and fragile national identity. 

Many Charleston creoles resented the new Scottish ascendancy in trade and government. They accused Scots of favoring one another and benefiting unfairly from British colonial and trade policies. Merchant Christopher Gadsden was one of the most vocal critics of the Scottish invasion. In 1767 Gadsden built a huge wharf in Charleston, one of the largest in any American port. During its construction of his wharf, Gadsden remarked that he was going to "fill the foundation with imported Scotchmen, who are fit for nothing better." The statement reflected Gadsden’s disdain for Scots, in particular Scottish merchants, who he viewed as the undeserving beneficiaries of British trade policies. 

About the same time, Gadsden was developing the area near Boundary Street. He called it Middlesex and named one of the streets after John Wilkes, Whig MP for the county of Middlesex. Gadsden admired Wilkes for his spirited defense of English liberties, which took an anti-Scottish slant. He became famed for his attacks on Lord Bute in his journal The North Briton. Wilkes became a hero to many colonists in the 1760s, despite notoriously rakish behavior and obscenity charges stemming from his satirical poem, An Essay on Woman. 

Gadsden’s hostility toward Scots may have initially developed as a result of his service as a militia officer during the Cherokee War of 1760. At the request of South Carolina, the British government sent a Highland regiment to help quell the Cherokee uprising. Gadsden was angered that the government gave command of the campaigns to Scottish officers. Gadsden believed that a South Carolinian should have been in command. 

Peter Timothy, printer of the South Carolina Gazette, was another prominent Whig who resented the success of recent Scots arrivals. His animosity was directed in particular against a rival Scottish printer, Robert Wells, who had arrived in the early 1750s. Wells printed and imported books, and established a flourishing bookstore. In the late 1750s, he started a rival newspaper. Timothy resented the competition, and claimed that Wells benefited from an unfair advantage. Interestingly, Wells supported the protests against the Stamp Act in 1765, but later became a staunch defender of the British government. He also became known for his belligerent Scottishness. He used to dress his son William Charles in a tartan jacket and Scottish bonnet to demonstrate his national pride. Poor William suffered harassment from other young boys of the town as a result. Robert was also the object of Whig harassment. In 1775, he left for Britain, declaring he could not live under the "Lilliputian" regime in South Carolina. 

When Timothy complained that Wells benefited from an unfair advantage, one of the persons he blamed was another Scot, who like Bute, also happened to to be named John Stuart. He had come to Charleston from Scotland in 1748. After mixed success as a merchant, including some slave trading, he married Sarah Fenwick, daughter of a wealthy planting family. He became a planter and built the house that still bears his name, the Colonel John Stuart House on the western end of Tradd Street. 

During the Cherokee War of 1760 Stuart served in the South Carolina militia. He developed a good relationship with some of the people he was fighting, including Cherokee headman Attakullakulla, the Little Carpenter. In 1762, the British government, eager to prevent war, appointed him as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern Department. In that capacity he tried to keep the peace between the backcountry settlers and the southern Indian nations. 

It was partly at Stuart's instigation that the British government established the Proclamation Line in 1763, which declared the land of the Appalachians and beyond was to be reserved as Indian land. Stuart argued that shady land speculators and white settlers encroaching on Indian land constituted the main danger to peace. He made powerful enemies trying to prevent fraudulent land deals, including one in which planter William Henry Drayton tried to swindle the Catawba nation out of thousands of acres. 

In the spring of 1775, Drayton and his other enemies revenged themselves by charging that Stuart was conspiring with the British government to incite Indian attacks on the colonists. In fact, he was trying to prevent the southern Indian nations from going to war. This fabricated tale enraged many people in the city. Stuart had to flee Charleston with a liberty mob at his heels. He ended up in Florida, where he continued to advise the Indians. In 1776, he tried but failed to prevent a disastrous Cherokee attack on the settlers of the southern backcountry. He died ion Florida in 1779. 

Into this hornet's nest sailed another suspicious Scot, the last royal governor of South Carolina. Lord William Campbell was the 4th son of the Duke of Argyll, Scotland's most powerful aristocrat. In 1763, he had been stationed in Charleston as a navy captain, and had married the daughter of a local planter, Sarah Izard. The Campbells arrived in June 1775 aboard the ship Scorpion. Prior to their arrival, a rumor had spread that the ship was carrying 14,000 stand of arms to be distributed to Loyalists, slaves, and Indians. 

The rumor was baseless, but people were disposed to believe it. The Whigs "uncovered" another conspiracy around the time Campbell arrived. They arrested some "suspicious" slaves who, after "rigorous interrogation" confessed the existence of a plot for a slave revolt to help the British. The alleged organizer was a wealthy free black, Thomas Jeremiah. After a mockery of a trial, the tribunal of five white men found him guilty. He was hanged and his body burned a few days later. Campbell was appalled by the proceeding and attempted to pardon Jeremiah, only to find he was powerless. 

When the Whigs spread the news of Campbell's efforts to save the condemned man, a liberty mob surrounded his  house at 34 Meeting Street and threatened to drag him out into the street and force him to hang Jeremiah himself. Campbell fled Charleston to a British navy ship a few weeks later, bringing an official end to British rule in South Carolina. In fact, it had ended months before. 

Many Scots in the southern colonies became Loyalists once the revolution began. One of the most interesting and insightful explanations of Scottish loyalism was offered by Charles Webb of St. Paul’s Parish, a few miles southwest of Charleston. Webb was himself a Loyalist, but not a Scot. In July 1775, the parish committee reported him to a justice of the peace for “malicious expressions" against the Whigs, who he said were "greater rebels than ever the Scotch were.” This was an obvious reference to the Jacobite rebellions in Scotland. Webb pointed to a key reason why many Scots in America supported the British government: many of them or their families had suffered severe punishments after the crushing of the rebellions. He was not surprised, he said, that the Scots were “such loyal subjects, for a burnt child would dread the fire.” They had learned from experience the folly of fighting the British monarch. This was true, but Whig attacks on Scots in America also contributed to this result. 

Further Reading: 

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782. Columbia: University of South Carlina Press, 2008.

Robert G. Parkinson, Thirteen Clocks: How Racism United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, and the University of North Carolina Pres, Chapel Hill.

Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, Illinois: Source Books, 2005)

John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., Charleston, 1821.

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. Volumes dealing with the 1760s and 1770s.

Stanly Godbold, Jr., and Robert Woody, Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.

Daniel McDonough, Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots. Susquehanna University Press, 2000.

Kelcey Eldridge. A Forgotten Founder: The Life and Legacy of Christopher Gadsden (MA thesis). Clemson University, 2018.

Richard Walsh, Charleston's Sons of Liberty: A Study of the Artisans, 1763–1789. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959. 

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011, 2014. 

If you enjoyed this post and would like to become a follower of my blog, just click on the blue "FOLLOW" button on the right side of the first page. Below there you can also find my previous posts. Thanks!