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A Nova Scotia Scheme and the Imperial Politics of Ulster Emigration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

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Abstract

Early in 1761, a land promoter of Ulster origin named Alexander McNutt brought before the British Board of Trade a proposal to settle several thousand Ulster Scots in Nova Scotia. The board enthusiastically approved, but when McNutt returned the following year with promising news, the board forbade him from continuing the scheme, citing fears of losing Protestants in Ireland. This episode has generally been explained as evidence of the British government's ambivalence about Ulster emigration. However, rather than expressing merely a tension between two equally desirable but conflicting goals—peopling the American colonies with Irish Protestants and protecting the Ascendancy by preventing their emigration—the board's change of mind reflected the changing political environment. The board that approved McNutt's scheme strongly favored settling Nova Scotia quickly; the board that shut it down a year later included new members who viewed settling Nova Scotia as a waste of precious funds. The case of Alexander McNutt demonstrates the profound ramifications of party politics for Ulster migration during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. It further affirms that studies of Ulster migration must be imperial in scope.

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Original Manuscript
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 519 - 542
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2019 

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References

1 The estimate of seven thousand is given by, among others, Elizabeth Mancke, for the period 1760–65. Mancke, Elizabeth, The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830 (New York, 2005), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The National Archive (hereafter TNA), CO 218/6, fol. 18v, Board of Trade to Belcher, 3 March 1761.

3 John G. Reid makes a powerful case for the significance of Indigenous resistance to British hegemony as a motivating factor for rapid settlement in “Pax Britannica or Pax Indigena? Planter Nova Scotia (1760–1782) and Competing Strategies of Pacification,” Canadian Historical Review 85, no. 4 (December 2004): 669–92. He contends that, “far from accomplishing a pacification of Nova Scotia under British rule, the events of the 1750s and early 1760s—the expulsion of the Acadians, the British military victories of 1758–1760, and the treaties of 1760–1—set the stage for a ten-year era during which Aboriginal and British pacification strategies competed” (673). See also John G. Reid, “Imperial-Aboriginal Friendship in Eighteenth-Century Mi'kma'ki / Wulstukwik,” in The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era, ed. Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan (Toronto, 2012), 75–104; and Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763 (Toronto, 2017).

4 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 32v, Board of Trade to King, 5 March 1761.

5 Dickson, R. J., Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775 (London, 1966), 136Google Scholar.

6 Campbell, Carol and Smith, James F., Necessaries and Sufficiencies: Planter Society in Londonderry, Onslow and Truro Townships (Sydney, NS, 2011), 3Google Scholar. On the background of the settlers in Truro, one of McNutt's townships, and the significance of the ethno-religious homogeneity of its settlers, see Campbell, Carol, “A Scots-Irish Plantation in Nova Scotia: Truro, 1760–1775,” in Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800, ed. Conrad, Margaret (Fredericton, 1991), 153–64Google Scholar.

7 McNutt's estimates are somewhat higher than those of the colonial government, who had no incentive to exaggerate and whose numbers are therefore more likely to be accurate. According to a committee report of the Council of Nova Scotia in 1766, McNutt was responsible for the transportation of about 250 Northern Irish in 1761, about 150 in 1762, and a further 50 (“chiefly belonging to Families before introduced and settled by Colonel McNutt”) in 1765. TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 325r, 326r, 328v, Committee of Nova Scotia Council report on Alexander McNutt.

8 McNutt's Ulster settlers have been similarly eclipsed in the scholarship on mid-eighteenth-century Nova Scotia by the much larger “planter movement” of New England families, who also migrated during the early 1760s. Because he was heavily involved in the planter migration, McNutt himself features in the large body of scholarship on planters that has developed under the auspices of the Acadia University's Planter Studies Centre and its associated conferences and publications. The planters have overshadowed other migrants to Nova Scotia, including McNutt's Ulster settlers, due in large part to a long-standing scholarly preoccupation with explaining why Nova Scotia did not join the American Revolution. Significant in establishing this historiographical paradigm are Brebner, John Bartlet, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years (1937; repr. New York, 1970)Google Scholar, and several works by George A. Rawlyk, including George A. Rawlyk, Revolution Rejected, 1775–1776 (Scarborough, 1968); Stewart, Gordon T. and Rawlyk, George A., A People Highly Favoured of God: The Nova Scotia Yankees and the American Revolution (Hamden, 1972)Google Scholar; Rawlyk, George A., Nova Scotia's Massachusetts: A Study of Massachusetts-Nova Scotia Relations 1630 to 1784 (Montreal, 1973)Google Scholar; and, Rawlyk, George A., ed., The Atlantic Provinces and the Problems of Confederation (St. John's, 1979)Google Scholar. Since the late 1980s, the Planter Studies publications have explored many facets of the planter experience and are particularly rich in socio-economic and material-cultural analysis. They have retained the focus on planters, although they have welcomed scholarship on the diversity of people living in colonial Nova Scotia after the 1750s. The five Planter Studies edited volumes, all published by Acadiensis Press, include three edited by Margaret Conrad: They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada (Fredericton,1988); Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 (Fredericton, 1991); and Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 (Fredericton,1995); one edited by Margaret Conrad and Barry Moody, Planter Links: Community and Culture in Colonial Nova Scotia (Fredericton, 2001); and a fifth edited by T. Stephen Henderson and Wendy G. Robicheau, The Nova Scotia Planters in the Atlantic World, 1759–1830 (Fredericton, 2012). For an assessment of the legacy of the Planter Studies edited volumes and the historiographical directions in which they point, see Elizabeth Mancke, “Idiosyncratic Localism, Provincial Moderation, and Imperial Loyalty: Planter Studies and the History of 18th-Century Nova Scotia,” Acadiensis 42, no. 1 (2013): 169–81.

9 R. J. Dickson's Ulster Emigration to Colonial America contains the most thorough treatment of McNutt and his activities in Ulster and Nova Scotia. Dickson views the failure of the scheme as the result of McNutt's “failure to anticipate the attitude of the English authorities and his failure to understand the real nature of Irish emigration of the time.” That attitude, in Dickson's account, was that “the settlement of Nova Scotia was a cause worthy of support but not if it was to be accomplished by draining away the mainstay of the protestant interest in Ireland.” Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 150. For a distinctly unsympathetic account of McNutt, see Brebner, Neutral Yankees, 37–41. Other treatments of McNutt are found in Ells, M., “Clearing the Decks for the Loyalists,” C. H. A. (1933): 43–58Google Scholar; W. O. Raymond, “Col. Alexander McNutt and the Pre-Loyalist Settlements of Nova Scotia,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (1911), sect. 2, 23–115; and Bell, Winthrop Pickard, The “Foreign Protestants” and the Settlement of Nova Scotia (Toronto, 1961)Google Scholar, especially 111–15, 122n, 122–23n. More recently, Campbell and Smith have provided a rich microhistory of Londonderry, Onslow, and Truro, the townships where McNutt's migrants, from both Ulster and New England, settled, in Necessaries and Sufficiencies, especially 32–45; and Lennox discusses McNutt's role in “a period of transition in Nova Scotia during which imperial fictions gave way to colonial settlements.” Lennox, Homelands and Empires, 250.

10 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 32r, Board of Trade to King, 5 March 1761.

11 TNA, CO 217/18, fol. 106r, McNutt to Board of Trade, read 24 February 1761.

12 Previous royal instructions for settlers to Nova Scotia had required the grantee to clear all his land within thirty years. McNutt convinced the board that “these conditions … operate[d], not to promote, but to discourage the further settlement of the Province: a settler being unwilling to take lands on terms, which it is not only difficult, but contrary to his interest to fulfill.” He recommended more favorable terms in their place. TNA, CO 218/6, 30v–31r, Board of Trade to King, 5 March 1761.

13 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 32r–v, Board of Trade to King, 5 March 1761.

14 Belfast News-Letter, 21 April 1761. For the scope and significance of the Belfast News-Letter in this period, see Bankhurst, Benjamin, Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750–1764 (New York, 2013), 31–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For its use as a source for Ulster emigration data and for information about the experience of the migrants themselves, see Royle, Stephen A. and Laoire, Caitríona Ní, “‘Dare the Boist'rous Main’: The Role of the Belfast News Letter in the Process of Emigration from Ulster to North America, 1760–1800,” Canadian Geographer 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 56–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Belfast News-Letter, 21 April 1761. See also Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 139. On rents in Ulster, see Peter Roebuck, “Rent Movement, Proprietorial Incomes, and Agricultural Development, 1730–1830,” in Plantation to Partition: Essays in Ulster History in Honour of J. L. McCracken, ed. Peter Roebuck (Belfast, 1981), 82–101. On rents in Pennsylvania, see Munger, Donna Bingham, Pennsylvania Land Records: A History and Guide for Research (Wilmington, 1991)Google Scholar. Rents and other terms varied widely, but it would not have been unusual to expect one-and-a-half times or even twice the quit rent McNutt advertised in the mid-Atlantic colonies, and the release for the first ten years was exceptional. See Bond, Beverly W., The Quit-Rent System in the American Colonies (New Haven, 1919)Google Scholar, especially 17, 80, 371–72.

16 Belfast News-Letter, 21 April 1761.

17 Belfast News-Letter, 26 June 1761.

18 Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 142; Belfast News-Letter, 28 July 1761; Belfast News-Letter, 14 August 1761.

19 Council Minutes, 10 October 1761, Nova Scotia Archives (hereafter NSA), Halifax, Nova Scotia, RG 1, vol. 188, 282.

20 TNA, CO 217/18, fol. 202r–v, Belcher to Board of Trade, 3 November 1761. On the nature of the business relationship between McNutt and Vance and Caldwell, see Campbell and Smith, Necessaries and Sufficiencies, 34.

21 TNA, CO 217/18, fol. 214r, Vance and Caldwell to Board of Trade, 28 August 1761.

22 TNA, CO 217/18, fol. 203r, Belcher to Board of Trade, 3 November 1761.

23 See Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 143.

24 TNA, CO 217/18, fols. 297r–298v, McNutt to Board of Trade, 16 March 1762.

25 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 79v, Board of Trade to King, 8 April 1762.

26 Ibid., fol. 78r–v.

27 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 79r–v, Board of Trade to King, 8 April 1762.

28 TNA, CO 217/18, fol. 305v, William Sharpe, clerk to the Privy Council, to Board of Trade, 29 April 1762.

29 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 82r, Board of Trade to Lords of the Committee of Council for Plantation Affairs, 19 May 1762. This order does not appear to have reached Belcher. See Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 192–93.

30 Belfast News-Letter, 12 March 1762.

31 Belfast News-Letter, 29 June 1762.

32 Belfast News-Letter, 17 August 1762.

33 Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 146.

34 TNA, CO 217/19, fols. 130r–131v, Belcher to Nova Scotia Council, 16 April 1762.

35 Board of Trade to Belcher, 10 June 1762, NSA, RG 1, vol. 31, no. 7.

36 TNA, CO 217/19, fol. 73r, Belcher to Board of Trade, 7 September 1762.

37 TNA, CO 217/20, fol. 26r–v, Belcher to Board of Trade secretary John Pownall, 24 January 1763.

38 Council Minutes, 5 November 1762, NSA, RG 1, vol. 188, 363.

39 Report of Committee in Council, 10 November 1762, NSA, RG 1, vol. 188, 365.

40 TNA, CO 217/20, fol. 26v, Belcher to Pownall, 24 January 1763.

41 TNA, CO 217/20, fols. 23v, 24r, McNutt to Board of Trade, 23 March 1763.

42 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 95r–v, Board of Trade to King, 21 January 1763.

43 TNA, CO 217/20, fol. 24r, McNutt to Board of Trade, 23 March 1763. See TNA, CO 217/18 fols. 106r–107v, McNutt to Board of Trade, read 24 February 1761; TNA, CO 217/18, fols. 214r–215v, Vance and Caldwell to Board of Trade, 28 August 1761.

44 The board explicitly approved of McNutt's plan to settle his grants “by the introduction of Colonists from the Northern parts of Ireland” in March 1761. TNA, CO 218/16, fol. 30r, Board of Trade to King, 5 March 1761. See also Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 145.

45 Dickson, Ulster Emigration, appendix E, 283–84. See also Wokeck, Marianne S., Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park, 1999), 167–220Google Scholar.

46 My use of the terms “Patriot Whig” and “neo-Tory” follows and contributes to a growing scholarship on British imperial party politics in the eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has overturned an earlier historiographical approach that, following Namier, L. B., The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2 vols. (London, 1929)Google Scholar, treated political division within the Whig party as little more than personal power struggles dressed up as ideological difference. See, for example, Foord, Archibal S., His Majesty's Opposition, 1714–1830 (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar; Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977)Google Scholar. Critics of this approach have reinterpreted eighteenth-century political machinations as expressions of genuine ideological disagreement, particularly over imperial policy. See Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; Rogers, Nicholas, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar. Recently, several accounts have explored political fault lines running through rather than between colonies and metropole, tracing the development of political ideologies that were truly imperial in scope. Amy Watson elucidates the origins of the Patriot Party in the 1710s and 1720s and explains its purchase from Scotland to New York to Georgia in “Patriot Empire: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1716–1748” (PhD. diss., Yale University, 2018). Justin du Rivage, in Revolution against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence (New Haven, 2017), employs the terms “authoritarian reformers,” “establishment Whigs,” and “radical Whigs” to distinguish political groupings in the period of imperial crisis. And Steve Pincus describes the transatlantic nature of Patriot opposition in the years leading up to the American Revolution in The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (New Haven, 2016). The contrasting treatments of McNutt's schemes by the Board of Trade in themselves lend support to the respective conceptualizations of Patriot Whig and neo-Tory ideological approaches to empire in the crucial period of the 1760s.

47 For the implications of these contrasting positions for imperial policy in the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, see Pincus, Heart of the Declaration, and du Rivage, Revolution against Empire. On the implications of the political changes of the later eighteenth century for Irish trade, see Bartlett, Thomas, “Ireland, Empire, and Union, 1690–1801,” in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kenny, Kevin (New York, 2004), 61–89Google Scholar, at 72–82.

48 The Board of Trade between 14 January 1760 and 21 March 1761, during whose tenure McNutt made his initial, successful proposal, consisted of the Earl of Halifax, as first lord of trade, and Andrew Stone, Thomas Pelham, William Gerard Hamilton, William Sloper, Soame Jenyns, Edward Eliot, and Edward Bacon. The board that shut down the Nova Scotia settlement scheme a year later included Jenyns, Eliot, and Bacon, as well as new members John Yorke, Sir Edmund Thomas, George Rice, and John Roberts, with Samuel Sandys as the new first lord.

49 Sir Namier, Lewis, “Eliot, Edward (1727–1804), of Port Eliot, Cornw.,” in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754–1790, 3 vols., ed. Namier, L. and Brooke, J. (London, 1964)Google Scholar, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/eliot-edward-1727-1804#footnote12_t2ccwe4; Sedgwick, Romney R., “Bacon, Edward (?1712–86), of Earlham, nr. Norwich,” in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–1754, 2 vols., ed. Sedgwick, R. (London, 1970)Google Scholar, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1715-1754/member/bacon-edward-1712-86; J. A. Cannon, “Jenyns, Soame (1704–87), of Bottisham, Cambs.,” in Namier and Brooke, History of Parliament, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/jenyns-soame-1704-87; Soame Jenyns, The Objections to the Taxation of our American Colonies, by the Legislature of Great Britain, Briefly Consider'd, 2nd ed. (London, 1765). See also Jenyns's articulation of a neo-Tory political economy in Jenyns, Soame, Thoughts on the Causes and Consequences of the Present High Price of Provisions, 2nd ed. (London, 1767)Google Scholar.

50 Rice's appointment in March 1761 seems to have been a power play by Bute against Newcastle. Rice's father-in-law, Lord Talbot, noted that “the offer springs spontaneously from Lord Bute, entirely unsolicited by me or unhinted by the Duke of Newcastle who will be much hurt that a man should be placed in office without his assistance that he has known from an infant.” Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, vol. 6 (London, 1914), 48–49, quoted in Mary M. Drummond, “Rice, George (?1724–79), of Newton Castle, Carm.,” Namier and Brooke, History of Parliament, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/rice-george-1724-79#footnote3_8qis6ab. On Sir Edmund Thomas's appointment, see the entry by A. N. Newman in Namier and Brooke, History of Parliament, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/thomas-sir-edmund-1712-67.

51 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 79v, Board of Trade to King, 8 April 1762.

52 TNA, CO 218/6, fols. 19v–20r, Board of Trade to Belcher, 3 March 1761.

53 TNA, CO 217/18, fols. 214r–215v, Arthur Vance and William Caldwell to Belcher, 28 August 1761.

54 The chief surveyor in Nova Scotia reminded the board of repeated failures to raise hemp in the hot southern colonies and of the “more moderate” and rainy climate in Nova Scotia, where there was “great reason to hope this useful material [would] succeed.” He insisted that “the inhabitants lately arrived from Ireland are of opinion that the natural soil of this country is sufficiently rich to produce it in great quantities without manure.” TNA, CO 217/18, fol. 262v, Chief Surveyor to Board of Trade, 9 January 1762.

55 TNA, CO 217/20, fol. 26r–v, Belcher to Pownall, 24 January 1763.

56 Quoted in Thomas, P. D. G., British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis (Oxford, 1975), 34Google Scholar.

57 Board of Trade to Wilmot, 22 November 1763, NSA, RG 1, vol. 31, no. 24.

58 Board of Trade to Wilmot, 20 March 1764, NSA, RG 1, vol. 31, no. 29.

59 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 136r, Board of Trade to King, 13 February 1764.

60 TNA, CO 217/22, fol. 6r, 7r–v, Michael Francklin to the Earl of Shelburne in response to an inquiry from the Board of Trade, 21 November 1766.

61 For example, TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 107r–v, Pownall to Charles Jenkinson, Secretary to the Lords of the Treasury, 10 June 1763, and fol. 109r, Pownall to the Lords of the Treasury, 14 July 1763. On Ulster migration to South Carolina during this period, see MacMaster, Richard K., “From Ulster to the Carolinas: John Torrans, John Greg, John Poaug, and Bounty Emigration, 1761–1768,” in The Irish in the Atlantic World, ed. Gleeson, David T. (Columbia, 2010), 251–74Google Scholar.

62 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 105r, Instruction, Board of Trade to Henry Ellis or Montagu Wilmot, 27 April 1763.

63 TNA, CO 217/43, Application for Lands by Alexander McNutt, 1 May 1765; TNA, CO 217/44, fols. 27r–28v, Return of State of the Late Grants of Townships; TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 158r–165r, Memorial, McNutt to Board of Trade, 17 April 1766; TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 186r–187v, Heads of Proposals, McNutt to Board of Trade, read 29 April 1766. See Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 148; Bell, “Foreign Protestants,” 115.

64 TNA, CO 217/21, fol. 327r–v, Nova Scotia Council Committee Report on McNutt, 30 August 1766.

65 TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 197r–v, 198v, Wilmot to Board of Trade, 24 June 1764.

66 TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 169r–170v, Wilmot to Board of Trade, 30 April 1765. Regarding Wilmot's reference to diverting attention away from manufactures, Brebner rightly observes that “it would be hard to invent a prospectus more solicitous of every prejudice of British colonial policy.” It must be emphasized, however, that this was true of the prejudices of the neo-Tory-dominated Board of Trade whose instructions had most recently reached Nova Scotia—and not of the British government in general. British colonial policy encompassed more than one set of prejudices. Brebner, Neutral Yankees, 97.

67 TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 158r–164v, McNutt to Board of Trade, 17 April 1766.

68 TNA, CO 218/6, fol. 251r–v, Board of Trade to King, 15 May 1766.

69 Board of Trade to Wilmot, 16 May 1766, NSA, RG 1, vol. 31, no. 55.

70 TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 299v–300r, Michael Francklin to Board of Trade, 2 September 1766. The Stamp Act went into effect 1 November 1765.

71 TNA, CO 217/21, fols. 300r–v, 301v, Francklin to Board of Trade, 2 September 1766.

72 TNA, CO 217/21, fol. 328v, Council Report on McNutt, 30 August 1766.

73 See Brebner, Neutral Yankees, 99–100.

74 For McNutt's activities during and after the American Revolutionary War, see Brebner, Neutral Yankees, 99–101; Stewart and Rawlyk, People Highly Favoured of God, 61; and Alexandra Montgomery, “Not Subject to the Scorn and Contumely of the Great: Alexander McNutt's Nova Scotia,” Au delà des frontières: La nouvelle histoire du Canada / Beyond Borders: The New Canadian History Blog, 30 April 2017, https://thenewcanadianhistory.com/2017/05/01/not-subject-to-the-scorn-and-contumely-of-the-great-alexander-mcnutts-nova-scotia/.

75 Alexander McNutt, Considerations on the Sovereignty, Independence, Trade and Fisheries of New-Ireland, Formerly Known by the Name of Nova-Scotia ([Philadelphia?, 1780?]), 11–12.

76 McNutt, Alexander, The Constitution and Frame of Government of the Free and Independent State and Commonwealth of New Ireland ([Philadelphia, 1780])Google Scholar.

77 As a bulwark, Nova Scotia indeed proved useful during the 1760s and 1770s. Grenville chose Halifax as the site of a new Vice-Admiralty Court, where cases involving evasion of the Navigation Acts were tried. Stewart and Rawlyk identify 1764 as the point by which “it seemed obvious in New England that Nova Scotia was being turned into a British power base in North America from which British officials could force their will on the other colonies.” Stewart and Rawlyk, People Highly Favoured of God, 8.

78 Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts, 222.

79 On the economic impact of the Acadian Expulsion, see Gwyn, Julian, Excessive Expectations: Maritime Commerce and the Economic Development of Nova Scotia, 1740–1870 (Montreal, 1998), 15–42Google Scholar.

80 See du Rivage, Revolution against Empire, 112.

81 Mancke, “Idiosyncratic Localism,” 177–78.

82 For a nuanced comparison of institutional structures of authority in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, and their implications for divergent paths in the revolutionary years, see Mancke, Fault Lines of Empire. Planters who had moved to Nova Scotia with the expectation that proprietors would control lands and that distribution would occur at the local level and with local oversight resisted when the council in Halifax increasingly exerted control over land grants. See also Stewart and Rawlyk, People Highly Favoured of God, 17.

83 See Stewart and Rawlyk, People Highly Favoured of God, 5–13.

84 John Reid suggests that New Englanders considering a move to Nova Scotia may have been inspired by the expectation of continuity, based on Governor Lawrence's promise. John Reid, “Change and Continuity in Nova Scotia, 1758–1775,” in Conrad, Making Adjustments, 45–59, at 47.

85 Quoted in Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts, 219.

86 On the decision to establish an assembly in Nova Scotia, see Mancke, Fault Lines of Empire, 11–12; “Establishment of the House of Assembly, 1758,” appendix C, in Report of the Board of Trustees of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia for the Year 1956 (Halifax, 1957), 15–71; and Thomas Hully, “The British Empire in the Atlantic: Nova Scotia, the Board of Trade, and the Evolution of Imperial Rule in the Mid-Eighteenth Century” (MA thesis, University of Ottawa, 2012), 104–5, 126–32. Halifax merchants, Jonathan Belcher, and the Board of Trade strongly advocated the establishment of an assembly beginning in 1755; the first meeting was not held until October 1758 due to foot-dragging by Governor Lawrence.

87 Mancke notes that “colonial officials in Halifax and the Board of Trade in Britain continued to modify, restrain, and eliminate local practices after Yankee settlers arrived in Nova Scotia,” particularly those practices involving distribution of land and self-government at the local level. Mancke, Fault Lines of Empire, 14. Specifically, in the 1760s, large-scale grantees like McNutt “relinquished original grants to the provincial government and these were reissued with the names of actual settlers listed and the removal of the names of grantees who did not settle.” The provincial government also exerted control over grants by appointing committees responsible for distributing undivided land in each township. Mancke, “Idiosyncratic Localism,” 176. Mancke elsewhere observes that by the time the government wrested the power to divide lands away from proprietors, “for over a year … settlers in many townships had organized themselves as self-governing proprietorships and took umbrage at the appointment of committees” to divide lands. Mancke, Fault Lines of Empire, 14.

88 Bannister, Jerry, “Planter Studies and Atlantic Scholarship: The New History of 18th-Century Nova Scotia,” in Nova Scotia Planters in the Atlantic World, 1759–1830, ed. Henderson, T. Stephen and Robicheau, Wendy G. (Fredericton, 2012), 21–35Google Scholar, at 24. Bannister asserts that “migration, settlement, and state formation were never purely domestic phenomena cut off from the imperial politics of race, religion, and war” (26). John Reid issued a similar call as early as 1991, in “Change and Continuity in Nova Scotia, 1758–1775”: “One of the lessons of the period from 1758 to 1775 is that geopolitical changes do make a difference and therefore that the preoccupations of the ‘imperial school’ should not be dismissed” (58).

89 See Pincus, Heart of the Declaration; du Rivage, Revolution against Empire.

90 Dickson, for example, claims that “rents, prices and wages formed a mighty triumvirate in determining the extent of north Irish emigration.” Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 13. James G. Leyburn insists that “the land question assuredly played a large part in driving Presbyterian Ulstermen to take the drastic step of removing to America.” In his account, the “final blow” leading to the first “exodus” in 1717 was “a succession of calamitous years for farmers”; the wave of 1725–1729 resulted from “conditions in Ulster” related to scarcity; famine beginning in 1740 was “certainly the principal occasion for the third large wave”; and the “fourth exodus” in 1754–55 was owing to “propaganda from America and calamitous drought in Ulster.” Leyburn, James G., The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962)Google Scholar, 162, 164, 171, 172.

91 For example, while Patrick Griffin acknowledges that “to be sure, economic hardship triggered the impulse to flee Ulster for a better life in America,” he suggests that “the economic picture of the migration story appears more complex than we had imagined,” and places the weight of his causal analysis on cultural identity. “The process of migration,” he argues, “stemmed from a moment of cultural ferment.” Griffin, Patrick, The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar, 66, 79, 66. On the range of Irish Protestant identities in the American colonies, see Miller, Kerby A., Ireland and Irish America (Dublin, 2008), especially 125–38Google Scholar.

92 For example, see Canny, Nicholas, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, 1988)Google Scholar; Powell, Martyn J., Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Bankhurst, Ulster Presbyterians, 138.

94 For a nuanced discussion of Scots-Irish immigrants’ undeniably prominent role in the American Revolution, and of their ensuing mythologization by the American public and scholars alike, see the introduction to and essays in Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Knoxville, 2012).

95 Bankhurst, Ulster Presbyterians, 6–7, 53. Kevin Kenny asks “to what extent [mass migration] can be explained in imperial terms” and notes that “the connection between Irish emigration and colonialism has not yet been explored in any sustained fashion.” Kevin Kenny, “Ireland and the British Empire: An Introduction,” in Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire, 1–25, at 15. Bankhurst's exploration of one facet of this connection—the self-imagination of mid-eighteenth-century Ulster Scots as participants in (rather than victims of) the British imperial project—suggests a promising avenue for future research. On this ambiguous status, see also Kevin Kenny, “The Irish in the Empire,” in Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire, 90–122, at 96–98.

96 TNA, CO 217/21, fol. 334r–v, Committee of Council Report on McNutt, 30 August 1766.

97 Lieutenant-Governor Mariot Arbuthnot to Lord Germain, 15 August 1776, PANS, RG 1, vol. 45, doc. 24. Quoted in Campbell, “Scots-Irish Plantation,” 163. Campbell records further evidence of the Truro inhabitants’ resistance to infringement on their institutions of local government and describes the town's exceptional and “unwavering support of the Revolution” (164).

98 See, for instance, Brebner, Neutral Yankees. A more ambivalent position is taken by Dickson, who notes that “one of the most striking features of McNutt's activities is not that he induced as many as five hundred people to emigrate to Nova Scotia but that the number was not greater.” Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 149.

99 Brebner, Neutral Yankees, 37; Bell, “Foreign Protestants,” 111; Bailyn, Bernard and DeWolfe, Barbara, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1988), 364Google Scholar. Campbell and Smith nuance this scholarly portrayal by noting that “surviving records suggest that many contemporaries valued his judgement.” Campbell and Smith, Necessaries and Sufficiencies, 43.

100 Belfast News-Letter, 3 June 1766.