Scotlands Mark on America | Page 6

schools, and within nine years Londonderry paid one-fifteenth of the state tax. Previous to the Revolution of 1776 ten distinct settlements were made by colonists from Londonderry, N.H., all of which became towns of influence and importance. Notable among the descendants of these colonists were Matthew Thornton, Henry Knox, Gen. John Stark, Hugh McCulloch, Horace Greeley, Gen. George B. McClellan, Salmon P. Chase, and Asa Gray. From 1771 to 1773 "the whole emigration from Ulster is estimated at 30,000 of whom 10,000 were weavers."
In 1706 the Rev. Cotton Mather put forth a plan to settle hardy Scots families on the frontiers of Maine and New Hampshire to protect the towns and churches there from the French and Indians, the Puritans evidently not being able to protect themselves. He says, "I write letters unto diverse persons of Honour both in Scotland and in England; to procure Settlements of Good Scotch Colonies, to the Northward of us. This may be a thing of great consequence;" and elsewhere he suggests that a Scottish colony might be of good service in getting possession of Nova Scotia. In 1735, twenty-seven families, and in 1753 a company of sixty adults and a number of children, collected in Scotland by General Samuel Waldo, were landed at George's River, Maine. In honor of the ancient capital of their native country, they named their settlement Stirling.
Another and an important cause of the early appearance of Scots in America was the wars between Scotland and England during the Commonwealth. Large numbers of Scottish prisoners taken at Dunbar (1650) and at Worcester (1651) were sold into service in the colonies, a shipload arriving in Boston Harbor in 1652 on the ship John and Sara. The means taken to ameliorate their condition led in 1657 to the foundation of the Scots Charitable Society of Boston--the earliest known Scottish society in America. Its foundation may be taken as evidence that there were already prosperous and influential Scots living in Boston at that time. A list of the passengers of the John and Sara is given in Suffolk Deed Records (bk. 1, pp. 5-6) and in Drake's The Founders of New England (Boston, 1860, pp. 74-76). These men, says Boulton, "worked out their terms of servitude at the Lynn iron works and elsewhere, and founded honorable families whose Scotch names appear upon our early records. No account exists of the Scotch prisoners that were sent to New England in Cromwell's time; at York in 1650 were the Maxwells, McIntires, and Grants. The Mackclothlans [i.e., Mac Lachlans], later known as the Claflins, gave a governor to Massachusetts and distinguished merchants to New York City."
The bitter persecution of Presbyterians during the periods of episcopal rule in the latter half of the seventeenth century also contributed largely to Scottish emigration to the new world. A Scottish merchant in Boston named Hugh Campbell, obtained permission from the authorities of the Bay State Colony in February 1679-80 to bring in a number of settlers from Scotland and to establish them in the Nepmug country in the vicinity of Springfield, Massachusetts.
So desperate had matters become in Scotland at the beginning of the eighth decade of the seventeenth century that a number of the nobility and gentry determined to settle in New Jersey and the Carolinas. One of these colonies was founded in New Jersey in 1682 under the management of James Drummond, Earl of Perth, John Drummond, Robert Barclay the Quaker Apologist, David and John Barclay, his brothers, Robert Gordon, Gawen Lawrie, and George Willocks. In 1684 Gawen Lawrie, who had been for several years previously residing in the colony, was appointed Deputy Governor of the province, and fixed his residence at Elizabeth. In the same year Perth (so named in honor of the Earl of Perth, one of the principal proprietors, now Perth Amboy) was made the capital of the new Scottish settlement. During the following century a constant stream of emigrants both from Scotland and from Ulster came to the colony. One of the principal encouragers of the Scottish colony in New Jersey was George Scot or Scott (d. 1685) of Pitlochrie, who had been repeatedly fined and imprisoned by the Privy Council of Scotland for attending "Conventicles," as clandestine religious gatherings were then called in Scotland, and in the hope of obtaining freedom of worship in the new world he proposed to emigrate "to the plantations." To encourage others to do the like he printed at Edinburgh (1685) a work, now very rare, called "The Model of the Government of the Province of East New Jersey, in America; and Encouragement for Such as Design to be concerned there." Scot received a grant of five hundred acres in recognition of his having written the work, and sailed in the Henry and Francis for America. A malignant fever broke