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NEHEMIAS (SCOTUS) AMERICANUS: ENLIGHTENMENT AND RELIGION BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND AMERICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2011

GIDEON MAILER
GIDEON MAILER*
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
*
St John's College, Cambridge, CB2 1TPgam27@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This review assesses scholarly attempts to synthesize various forms of Scottish philosophy in the context of eighteenth-century America. It suggests potential new directions for the study of Scottish Enlightenment ethical theories on the western side of the Atlantic, and then examines scholarship on a separate and neglected Scottish influence in American thought: an evangelical notion of religious authority that was not opposed to wider incorporation in multi-denominational political unions. The ideological basis for American independence owed much to a tense counterpoise between Scottish moral sense reasoning and Presbyterian evangelicalism, rather than to their singular and starkly binary contributions to colonial American ideology.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 241 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Christopher Grasso, Ned Landsman, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Scott Mandelbrote, Mary Beth Norton, Michael O'Brien, Fredrika Teute, Peter Thompson, Sylvana Tomaselli, Betty Wood, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the anonymous readers for the Historical Journal.

References

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9 Ned Landsman, From colonials to provincials: American thought and culture, 1680–1760 (Ithaca, NY, 1997), pp. 21–4.

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22 May uses the word ‘moderate’ to mean a measured stance that emphasized a compromise between religious and moral sense theories. See Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, NY, 1976), pp. 209, 346. On Oswald, see Richard B. Sher and M. A. Stewart, ‘Oswald, James (1703–1793)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (ODNB). On Beattie, see Roger J. Robinson, ‘Beattie, James (1735–1803)’, ODNB.

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24 Harris, ‘Bayle's question’, pp. 236–7. See, for example, Henry Home, Essays on the principles of morality and natural religion (Edinburgh, 1751), pp. 54–64.

25 Haakonssen, Natural law, p. 188; Knud Haakonssen, ed., Thomas Reid on practical ethics: lectures and papers on natural religion, self-government, natural jurisprudence and the law of nations (Edinburgh, 2007), p. l; Alexander Brodie, ‘Reid in context’, in Terence Cuneo and Rene Van Woudenberg, eds., The Cambridge companion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge, 2004), p. 31; Ronald Beanblossom, Thomas Reid's Inquiry and essays (New York, NY, 1983), p. xxxvi; Peter Kivy, The seventh sense: Francis Hutcheson and eighteenth-century British aesthetics (New York, NY, 2003), p. 158.

26 Harris, ‘Bayle's question’, p. 237.

27 See Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Politics, politeness and the Anglicisation of early eighteenth-century Scottish culture’, in R. A. Mason, ed., Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 17–34.

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30 See McIntosh, Church, pp. 155–60.

31 See Robbins, ‘“When it is”’, pp. 214–51; Norton, David Fate, ‘Francis Hutcheson in America’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 154, (1976), pp. 1547–68Google Scholar; Mark Valeri, Law and providence in Joseph Bellamy's New England: the origins of the new divinity in revolutionary America (New York, NY, 1994), pp. 44–50; Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment, p. 138.

32 John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding, ed. Maurice Cranston (London, 1965), pp. 52, 59, 486; Bruce Kuklick, A history of philosophy in America (New York, NY, 2003), pp. 9–15; Michael Winship, Seers of God: puritan providentialism in the Restoration and early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD, 1996), pp. 30–3.

33 James Fieser, ed., Early responses to Hume's moral, literary, and political writings, ii (Bristol, 2005), pp. 198–9; John Dunn, ‘From applied theology to social analysis: the break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and virtue: the shaping of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 119–35.

34 Michael P. Zuckert, ‘Natural rights and Protestant politics’, in Thomas S. Engeman and Michael P. Zuckert, eds., Protestantism and the American founding (Notre Dame, IN, 2004), pp. 23, 46, 58–65; Michael P. Zuckert, Natural rights and the new republicanism (Princeton, NJ, 1998), p. 83.

35 See Frank Balog, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment and the liberal political tradition’, in Allan Bloom, ed., Confronting the constitution (Washington, DC, 1990), pp. 191–208; Thomas Pangle, The spirit of modern republicanism: the moral vision of the American founders and the philosophy of Locke (Chicago, IL, 1988), pp. 37–8. Richard Sher claims it is ‘high time to replace the fruitless dichotomy between Lockean liberalism and Scottish moralism with a more nuanced approach’. See Sher and Smitten, eds., Scotland and America, p. 26.

36 Breen, Timothy H., ‘An empire of goods: the Anglicization of colonial America’, Journal of British Studies, 4, (1986), pp. 67–99Google Scholar.

37 Christopher Berry, Social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 93–9, 12–150; John Pocock, ‘Cambridge paradigms and Scotch philosophers: a study of the relations between the civic humanist and the civil jurisprudential interpretation of eighteenth-century social thought’, in Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and virtue, pp. 235–52; Knud Haakonssen, ‘Natural jurisprudence in the Scottish Enlightenment: summary of an interpretation’, in Neil MacCormick and Zenon Bankowski, eds., Enlightenment, rights and revolution: essays in legal and social philosophy (Aberdeen, 1989), p. 36.

38 See Soltow, J. H., ‘Scottish traders in Virginia, 1750–1775’, Economic History Review, 12, (1959–60), pp. 83–98Google Scholar; Devine, Tom M., ‘An eighteenth-century business elite: Glasgow's West India merchants, 1750–1783’, Scottish Historical Review, 57, (1978), pp. 40–63Google Scholar.

39 See Lord Kames, Historical law-tracts (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1758), i, p. 92; Haakonssen, Natural law, pp. 155–6; Berry, Social theory, pp. 93–9, 109, 151, 184; Bernard Aspinwall, ‘William Robertson and America’, in Tom Devine and John R. Young, eds., Eighteenth-century Scotland: new perspectives (East Linton, 1999), pp. 152–75; Jeffrey Smitten, ‘Moderatism and history: William Robertson's unfinished history of British America’, in Sher and Smitten, eds., Scotland and America, pp. 163–80.

40 Drew McCoy, The elusive republic: political economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), pp. 18–21; Forrest McDonald, Novus ordo seclorum: intellectual origins of the constitution (Lawrence, KS, 1985), pp. 132–5.

41 Lunberg, David and May, Henry F., ‘The enlightened reader in America’, American Quarterly, 2, (1976), p. 269Google Scholar. See also Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the book: Scottish authors and their publishers in eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, IL, 2006), pp. 503–56.

42 May, Enlightenment, pp. 327–32.

43 Theodore D. Bozeman, Protestants in an age of science: the Baconian ideal and Antebellum American religious thought (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977), pp. 6–12; May, Enlightenment, p. xvi.

44 See ibid., p. 12; Donald Meyer, The democratic Enlightenment (New York, NY, 1976), p. 32; Winship, Seers of God, pp. 30–3.

45 David Shields, Civil tongues and polite letters in British America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), p. xviii.

46 James Beattie to Sylvester Douglas, 5 Jan. 1778, in The works of James Beattie, ed. Roger Robinson (10 vols., London, 1996), ii, p. 17.

47 See Warren Alan Guthrie, The development of rhetorical theory in America, 1635–1850 (Evanston, IL, 1940), pp. 383–8; David Daiches, ‘Style périodique and style coupé: Hugh Blair and the Scottish rhetoric of American independence’, in Sher and Smitten, eds., Scotland and America, pp. 209–26; Susan Manning, Fragments of union, pp. 51, 63, 191; Shields, Civil tongues, pp. xvii, 181; Terence Martin, The instructed vision: Scottish common sense philosophy and the origins of American fiction (Bloomington, IN, 1961).

48 Andrew Hook, Scotland and America: a study of cultural relations, 1750–1835 (Glasgow, 1975), p. 82; David Daiches, ‘John Witherspoon, James Wilson and the influence of Scottish rhetoric on America’, in J. Dwyer and R. B. Sher, eds., Sociability and society in eighteenth-century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 170–1.

49 Conrad, Stephen, ‘The rhetorical constitution of “civic society” at the founding: one lawyer's anxious vision’, Indiana Law Journal, 72, (1997), pp. 335–81Google Scholar; idem, ‘Polite foundation: citizenship and commonsense in James Wilson's republican theory’, in Philip Kurland, ed., Supreme Court review, 1984 (Chicago, IL, 1985), pp. 359–88.

50 Shields, Civil tongues, p. xvii; Meyer, Democratic Enlightenment, pp. 182–5; May, Enlightenment, pp. 327–32.

51 Michael Warner, The letters of the republic (London, 1990).

52 Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY, 1978), pp. 205, 211.

53 Ibid., pp. 205, 211.

54 Hamowy, Ronald, ‘Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: a critique of Garry Wills’, Inventing America', William and Mary Quarterly, 36, (1979), pp. 503–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Diggins, The lost soul of American politics: virtue, self interest, and the foundation of liberalism (Chicago, IL, 1984), pp. 33–4; Schmitt, Gary, ‘Sentimental journey: Garry Wills and the American founding’, Political Science Review, 12, (1982), pp. 99–128Google Scholar.

55 Jeffry Morrison, John Witherspoon and the founding of the American republic (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), pp. xv, 51, 127–8. For the influence of Lord Kames on Jefferson see Jean Yarbrough, American virtues: Thomas Jefferson and the character of a free people (Lawrence, KS, 1998), pp. xvii, 3, 22–3, 29–34, 36, 46; Allen Jayne, Jefferson's declaration of independence: origins, philosophy, and theology (Lexington, KY, 1998), pp. 44, 62–7; Morton White, The philosophy of the American revolution (New York, NY, 1978), pp. 61–127.

56 Ned Landsman, ‘The provinces and the empire: Scotland, the American colonies and the development of British provincial identity’, in Lawrence Stone, ed., An imperial state at war: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), p. 259.

57 Kidd, Colin, ‘Subscription, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Moderate interpretation of history’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 55, (2004), pp. 503CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 517.

58 See Nebelsick, Harold P., ‘Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda’, Reformed Liturgy and Music, 18, (1984), pp. 59–63Google Scholar. On disdain for Scotland's ‘gothic’ past, see Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's past: Scottish Whig historians and the creation of an Anglo-British identity, 1689–1830 (Cambridge, 1993).

59 Christopher Grasso, A speaking aristocracy: transforming public discourse in eighteenth-century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), pp. 134–5.

60 Allan, ‘Protestantism’, pp. 190–1.

61 See Jack P. Greene, Negotiated authorities: essays in colonial political and constitutional history (Charlottesville, VA), pp. 189–213.

62 Shields, Civil tongues, p. 196.

63 Landsman, ‘John Witherspoon and the problem of provincial identity in Scottish evangelical culture’, in Sher and Smitten, eds., Scotland and America, pp. 29–45.

64 Kidd, Colin, ‘Conditional Britons: the Scots Covenanting tradition and the eighteenth-century British State’, English Historical Review, 117, (2002), p. 1148CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Finlay, ‘Keeping the Covenant: Scottish national identity’, in Devine and Young, eds., Eighteenth-century Scotland, pp. 122–34; Patrick, Derek, ‘The Kirk, parliament, and the union, 1706–1707’, Scottish Historical Review, 87, (2008), pp. 94–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allan Macinnes, Union and empire: the making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 286, 302, 322; Stephen, J., ‘The Kirk and the union, 1706–1707: a reappraisal’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 31, (2001), pp. 68–96Google Scholar.

65 John Robertson, ‘Empire and union: two concepts of the early modern European political order’, in Union for empire: political thought and the British union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 36; Macinnes, Union, pp. 137–71. On seventeenth-century precedents see Colin Kidd, British identities before nationalism: ethnicity and nationhood in the Atlantic world, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 128–32; John Young, ‘The Scottish parliament and European diplomacy, 1641–1647: the Palatine, the Dutch Republic and Sweden’, in S. Murdoch, ed., Scotland and the Thirty Years' War, 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 81–7; R. A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the origins of Anglo-British imperialism’, in R. Mason, ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish political thought and the union of 1603 (Cambridge, 1994).

66 Jonathan Clark briefly mentions the covenanting legacy in The language of liberty, 1660–1832: political discourse and social dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 329–31.

67 On New British History's influence on American studies, see Armitage, David, ‘Greater Britain: a useful category of historical analysis?’, American Historical Review, 104, (1999), pp. 427–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Canny, Nicholas, ‘Writing Atlantic history; or, reconfiguring the history of colonial British America’, Journal of American History, 86, (1999), pp. 1093–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eliga H. Gould, The persistence of empire: British political culture in the age of the American revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999).

68 Sacvan Bercovitch, The puritan origins of the American self (New Haven, CT, 1975), pp. 170, 173; Bercovitch, Sacvan, ‘Nehemias Americanus: Cotton Mather and the concept of the representative American’, Early American Literature, 8, (1973), pp. 220–38Google Scholar.

69 Ibid. See also Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI, 1978), pp. 3–31.

70 For the sermon of this title see The sermons of Jonathan Edwards: a reader, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (New Haven, CT, 1999), p. 55.

71 Mark Noll, America's God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, NY, 2006), pp. 38–43; Philip Gura, Jonathan Edwards: America's evangelical (New York, NY, 2005), p. 91.

72 On Covenant theology and proto-revolutionary inter-colonial identity see James H. Hutson, Religion and the founding of the American republic (Washington, DC, 1998), pp. 3–49, 53–4; John West, Politics of revelation and reason: religion and civic life in the new nation (Lawrence, KS, 1996), pp. 1–11; Patricia Bonomi, Under the cope of heaven: religion, society, and politics in colonial America (New York, NY, 1986), pp. 187–209; Perry Miller, ‘The moral and psychological roots of American resistance’, in Jack P. Greene, ed., The reinterpretation of the American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, NY, 1968), p. 259; Gordon Wood, The creation of the American republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969), pp. 114–18.

73 Stephen Foster, The long argument: English puritanism and the shaping of New England culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991); Winship, Michael, ‘Were there any puritans in New England?’, New England Quarterly, 74, (2001), pp. 118–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Winship, Seers of God, pp. 30–3; May, Enlightenment, p. 12; Meyer, Democratic Enlightenment, p. 32.

75 Noll, Mark, ‘The American Revolution and Protestant evangelicalism’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23, (1993), pp. 615–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 See Noll, America's God, pp. 447–51; idem, ‘The contingencies of Christian republicanism: an alternative account of Protestantism and the American founding’, in Engeman and Zuckert, eds., Protestantism and the American founding, p. 243; Noll, ‘The Reformed politics of the American Revolution’, in One nation under God? Christian faith and political action in America (San Francisco, CA, 1988); Jack Greene, ‘The concept of virtue in late colonial British America’, in Richard Matthews, ed., Virtue, corruption, and self-interest: political values in the eighteenth century (Bethlehem, PA, 1994), pp. 35–42.

77 Alan Heimert, Religion and the American mind, from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1966), pp. ix, viii; Goff, Philip, ‘Revivals and revolution: historiographic turns since Alan Heimert's Religion and the American mind’, Church History, 67, (1998), pp. 695–721CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Noll has notably analysed Scottish-Presbyterian piety in Princeton and the republic, 1768–1822: the search for a Christian Enlightenment in the era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton, NJ, 1989) and America's God, pp. 124–30. More recently he has focused on the political inheritance of English republicanism to various forms of Reformed Christianity in America (including Presbyterian revivalism).

79 Keith Griffin, Revolution and religion: American revolutionary war and the Reformed clergy (New York, NY, 1994), pp. 4–18, 73, 84.

80 John Coffey, ‘The problem of Scottish puritanism’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben, eds., Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 66–72.

81 Francis Bremer, ‘The puritan experiment in New England, 1630–1660’, in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim, eds., The Cambridge companion to puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), p. 137.

82 Ibid.

83 See Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1689: royalist politics, religion and ideas (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 154–5.

84 Ned Landsman, Scotland and its first American colony, 1683–1785 (Princeton, NJ, 1985), ch. 2.

85 On Scottish migration see Murdoch, Scotland and America, pp. 39–61; Landsman, Ned, ‘Nation, migration, and the province in the first British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800’, American Historical Review, 104, (1999), pp. 463–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Dobson, Scottish emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens, GA, 1994), pp. 41–2. On the link between political autonomy and Presbyterian evangelicalism in the Middle Colonies, see Landsman, First American colony, pp. 177–91.

86 Kidd, ‘Conditional Britons’, p. 1148; Finlay, ‘Keeping the Covenant’, pp. 122–34; Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, ‘The trials of the chosen peoples: recent interpretations of Protestantism and national identity in Britain and Ireland’, in Claydon and McBride, eds., Protestantism, p. 18; Colin Kidd, ‘Protestantism, constitutionalism and British identity under the later Stuarts’, in B. Bradshaw and P. Roberts, eds., British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 321–42; Allan, ‘Protestantism’.

87 See Landsman, First American colony, pp. 177–91; James H. Smylie, A brief history of the Presbyterians (Louiseville, KY, 1996), p. 39.

88 On the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and developing American conceptions of ‘natural rights’, see Richard S. Dunn, ‘The Glorious Revolution and America’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford history of the British Empire, i: The origins of empire (Oxford, 1998), pp. 445–66.

89 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy fairs: Scotland and the making of American revivalism (2nd edn, Grand Rapids, MI, 2001); Mark Noll et al., Evangelicalism: comparative studies of popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and beyond, 1700–1990 (New York, NY, 1994), pp. 3–6; Michael Crawford, Seasons of grace: colonial New England's revival tradition in its British context (New York, NY, 1991); Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the laity: Scots-Irish piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (New York, NY, 1988); O'Brien, Susan, ‘A trans-Atlantic community of saints: the Great Awakening and the first evangelical network, 1735–1755’, American Historical Review, 91, (1986), pp. 811–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Susan O'Brien, ‘Eighteenth-century publishing networks in the first years of transatlantic evangelicalism’, in Noll et al., Evangelicalism, pp. 38–57.

90 David Weir refers to the Scottish example in the period 1638–45 on only two pages in his study of the political theology of puritan New England Covenants. See David Weir, Early New England: a covenanted society (Grand Rapids, MI, 2005), pp. 146–7, 194.

91 John Fiske, The beginnings of New England or the puritan theocracy in its relations to civil and religious liberty (London, 1889), p. 152.

92 Susan Manning, The puritan provincial vision (Cambridge, 1990), p. 20.

93 Ibid., p. 21.

94 Landsman, From colonials, pp. 110–16; Joseph Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, religious tradition, and American culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), pp. 67–8; Crawford, Seasons of grace, pp. 228–31.

95 Richard Brown, Revolutionary politics in Massachusetts: the Boston committee of correspondence and the towns, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, MA, 1970), pp. 185, 191, 198.

96 See Gary Nash, The urban crucible: the northern seaports and the origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1986), pp. 229–30; Robert Gross, The minutemen and their world (New York, NY, 1976); William Prescott, ed., Patriots and taxpayers of colonial Westford, Massachusetts in 1774, self published.

97 Grasso, Christopher, ‘Review’, Journal of Religion, 76, (1996), p. 643CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Speaking aristocracy, ch. 1.

98 There are brief discussions of Scottish Presbyterianism and revolutionary political ideology in Miller, Revolutionary college, pp. 67, 79, 87, 101; Donald D'Elia, Benjamin Rush: philosopher of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA, 1974), pp. 20–51.

99 Landsman, First American colony, ch. 1; idem, ‘Roots, routes, and rootedness: diversity, migration, and toleration in mid-Atlantic pluralism’, Early American Studies, 2 (2004), p. 299.

100 The loyalism of other Scottish communities in America has overshadowed pious traders who supported the Patriotic cause. See Landsman, ‘Provinces and the empire’, p. 265; Ned Landsman, ‘Presbyterians and provincial society: the evangelical Enlightenment in the West of Scotland, 1740–1775’, in Dwyer and Sher, eds., Sociability, pp. 194–209; Landsman, ‘The legacy of British union for the North American colonies’, in Union for Empire, pp. 297–318. On Presbyterian loyalism in the middle colonies see Tiedemann, Joseph, ‘Presbyterianism and the American Revolution in the middle colonies’, Church History, 74 (June 2005), pp. 339–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 Landsman, ‘Presbyterians’, pp. 194–5.

102 Landsman, ‘Legacy of British union’, pp. 297–318.

103 Landsman, ‘Provinces and the empire’, p. 265.

104 Kidd, Colin, ‘North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century patriotisms’, Historical Journal, 39, (1996), p. 377CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 See Sunter, Patronage, pp. 199–210; Sher, Church, pp. 213–61.

106 ‘Scottish colonial ventures were indebted to English models, but in pursuit of their Scottish investors’ and settlers' interests.' See Armitage, ‘Making the empire British’, p. 51.

107 Landsman, ‘Presbyterians’, pp. 194–209; Ned Landsman, ‘Liberty, piety and patronage: the social context of clerical calls in eighteenth-century Glasgow’, in Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher, eds., The Glasgow Enlightenment (East Linton, 1995), pp. 214–27.

108 See also McIntosh, Church, pp. 19–40, 142–66.

109 On reactions in Scotland, see McIntosh, Church, pp. 117–8, 128–31, 158–60; Robert Donovan, ‘Evangelical civic humanism in Glasgow: the American war sermons of William Thom’, in Hook and Sher, eds., Glasgow Enlightenment, pp. 227–45; Robert Donovan, ‘The Church of Scotland and the American Revolution’, in Sher and Smitten, eds., Scotland and America, p. 87.

110 See Fagerstrom, Dalphy, ‘Scottish opinion and the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 11, (1954), p. 268CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sher, Church, pp. 269–70.

111 See Mailer, Gideon, ‘Anglo-Scottish union and John Witherspoon's American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 67 (Oct. 2010), pp. 709–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the fears of New England clergymen see James Bell, A war of religion: dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution (Basingstoke, 2008).

112 Thom, ‘Achan's trespass’, in The works of William Thom (Glasgow, 1799), pp. 30, 42; Thom (1764) ‘Motives which have determined the University of Glasgow to desert the Blackfriar church’, in ibid., pp. 231–2; Thom, ‘From whence come wars’, in ibid., pp. 2–3, 15, 32; Thom, ‘The revolt of the ten tribes’, in ibid., p. 44.

113 Thom, ‘The revolt of the ten tribes’, p. 22.

114 Donovan, ‘Evangelical civic humanism’, pp. 227–45; idem, ‘The Church of Scotland and the American Revolution’, p. 7.

115 See Phillip Lawson, The imperial challenge: Quebec and Britain in the age of the American Revolution (Montreal, 1989), pp. 126–47; Robert Donovan, No popery and radicalism: opposition to Roman Catholic relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (New York, NY, 1987), pp. 72–3, 158–62, 239.

116 See John Erskine A narrative of the debate in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, May 25 1779 (Edinburgh, 1780), pp. iii–iv; James Murray, An impartial history of the present war in America (2 vols., London, 1778); Donovan, No popery, pp. 72–3, 158–62, 239; idem, ‘The military origins of the Roman Catholic relief programme of 1778’, Historical Journal, 28, (1986), pp. 79–102Google Scholar.

117 Landsman, ‘Witherspoon’, pp. 30, 37.