Lowland Scots to Pre-Revolutionary America.

There were two primary routes Scottish Lowlanders or their descendants would have taken to the American Colonies. The migration route of the Scots-Irish, the most numerous group of the Lowland emigrants, would have taken them through Ulster in the 17th century, their descendants immigrating to the American Colonies in the 18th century. A smaller group emigrated directly from the Lowlands.

Life in the Scottish Lowlands before 1600.

In 1600 Scotland was economically distressed, technologically backward and politically chaotic. It was still effectively feudal, a system little changed since its introduction by the Normans in the 12th century. Noblemen owned the land with the vast majority of the population living as their tenants. These tenants tilled the land, paid rent and served as soldiers when called upon by their lord to do so.

The overwhelming majority of Lowlanders tilled the soil. Methods were extremely primitive, even by the standards of Western European countries. The staple crops were grey oats and a poor grade of barley. Crop rotation was not yet in use. The steel plow was almost nonexistent so crude wooden plows were pulled by horses or oxen with the plow often tied to the tails of the draft animals. It took a team of men and women to accomplish this. Only the eastern Lowlands had fertile farmland. This, coincidentally, was also the route taken by the English invasions. The southwestern Lowlands (including Galloway, homeland of one MacMillan branch) were hillier with thin rocky soil, only suited to raising livestock. By our standards life was short (the average life expectancy at this time was said to be 35 years), primitive and brutish.

Even when war wasn't declared between England and Scotland, noblemen on both sides raided across the border. Cattle reiving and feuds combined with the frequent invasions of the English to create a chronically lawless, violent environment. Famine, poor harvests and the occasional visit by the Bubonic Plague (the latest of which was 1648) rounded out a picture of general misery difficult for those of us the 21st century to comprehend.

The hardship endemic to the Lowland peasant's life might sound intolerable to one of the 21st century, he'd have known no other, perceived as the way of the world. And with that came a social benefit as decribed by Sir Walter Scott:

Perhaps one ought to be actually a Scotchman to conceive how ardently, under all distinctions of rank and situation, they feel their mutual connexion with each other... there are, I believe, more associations common to the inhabitants of a rude and wild than of a well-cultivated and fertile country... the high and low are more interested in each others welfare; the feelings of kindred and relationship are more widely extended; and, in a word, the bonds of patriotic affection... have more influence on men's feelings and actions.

Transportation

In the 17th and 18th centuries prisoners-of-war and criminals were transported to become slave labor on Southern plantations as an alternative to imprisonment or execution. Most of the early Lowland immigrants to North America would have been among these unfortunates. Scots were also kidnapped and sold into forced servitude, illustrated by Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, fiction about a Lowland lad abducted to be sold into slavery the southern colonies. The combination of the effects of the Southern climate (to which Europeans were ill-suited), and maltreatment made this a virtual death sentence.

Covenanters

See Clan MacMillan Magazine, Issue 9, Nov. 2007 and Issue 10, May/June 2008 for articles titled "Covenanting MacMillans in Galloway".

Among those suffering fines, incarceration, transportation and even execution were Covenanters. The Covenanters derive their name from covenants (among these the "Solemn League and Covenant" in 1638) by which the adherents bound themselves to maintain the Presbyterian doctrine in the face of Crown pressure to conform to Episcopacy.

During the "Covenanting times" records have numerous Galloway MacMillans signing petitions against the forced acceptance of Episcopacy, imprisoned even executed for their faith. Galloway McMillans were involved in a rising in November of 1666 during which a small army of Covenanters marched on Edinburgh and were defeated at the Battle of Rullion Green. Eight of the survivors were executed including James and Alexander M'Millan, as recorded on a churchyard monument where they were buried. A thousand Covenanters were transported to Perth Amboy, New Jersey in 1685, having refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown, M'Millans among them.

Union and the Enlightenment

The Renaissance that much of the rest of Europe enjoyed was absent Scotland outside of the universities. However, the Scottish Lowlands saw a dramatic transformation from a functionally medieval state in 1600 to a modern (by contemporary terms) country in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Three events were central to this transformation. First the union of the Crowns, James VI of Scotland would became James I of England in 1603. In 1707 the "Acts of Union" united the parliaments of England and Scotland. The Scottish Enlightenment followed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A backward, subsistence, agrarian economy evolved into a contemporary economy leading the world with innovation in culture, philosophy and the sciences during the last half of the 18th and early 19th centuries, but these advancements also led to wat is known as the Lowland Clearances.

Lowland Clearances

The Lowland Clearances bore some similarities to the Highlands Clearances. Lowland cottars (cottage-dwelling tenant farmers) were forced from the land as were, in the Highlands, dispossessed clansmen and later, crofters. Cottages were emptied and small villages razed to make way for more efficient agricultural methods and profitable crops. Rather than wholesale evictions (sometimes at bayonet point) as in the case of the Highlanders, Lowlanders were displaced by dramatically increased rents. Some adopted the new agricultural methods of the new consolidated farms. Others moved to urban centres which were beginning to be transformed by the Industrial Revolution or to "planned villages" where they might be employed more profitably in the weaving, fishing or other trades.

In contrast to the Highland Clearances, Lowland emigration was characterized as a trickle, not the emigration surges experienced by the Highlands and the Ulster Scots. While it is believed a larger proportion of the Lowland population was displaced than that of the Highlands, the Lowland Clearances lacked the "glamorization" (as one historian stated it) of the Highland Clearances and therefore didn't get the same coverage.

The Lowland Clearances also impacted a much wider swath of the populace both in terms of class and vocation. Scotland had five universities in the 18th century which produced far more graduates than Scotland could employ. Doctors, merchants and other middle-class professionals were forced to emigrate to find employment in their respective occupations. The Baltic states, North America and later Australia and New Zealand were the most common destinations.

Merchants and servants of the Crown

Many Scots on both sides of the Atlantic benefitted from these political and economic developments. Some Scots had so prospered commercially from the new empire that they were roundly despised by the competing English descendants in the southern and middle colonies. These Scots benefitted from political connections within the British government. Lowlanders insinuated themselves into the mercantile elite of the Middle and Southern colonies dominating the tobacco trade of Virginia and indigo trade of South Carolina. Many newly arrived Lowland artisans and tradesmen settled in Charleston, South Carolina.

Thomas Jefferson was evidently one of these disgruntled English descendants, inserting a clause in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence disparagingly referring to "Scotch mercenaries", a phrase later removed by colleagues.

Scots occupied a disproportionately large number of offices in the new empire's government and the officer corps of the British Army. The latter was to find Scotland more fertile ground than England and Wales for recruiting during the American Revolution, many English seeing the Patriots as their brethren. The loyalties of England were as divided as those of the American Colonies.

Loyalist tendencies during the American Revolution

Sympathies during the American Revolution were far more nuanced than the impression given by textbooks, divided on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary motive for most colonists was self-interest, not ideology. The benefits or detriments of Crown rule played out differently by region, religion, ethnicity and vocation. As noted above, many Scots, at home and abroad, had benefited from the policies of and employment by the British Empire. Another factor influencing immigrant sympathies was their time in the colonies. As a gross generality, the more recently they had arrived, the more likely their sympathies would be loyalist. Many of the Lowland emigrants were recent arrivals.

Coastal Lowland merchants tended toward Loyalism as their trade was primarily with Britain and, in the case of the indigo merchants, was subsidized by the Crown. Administrators and merchants interacting with the Native American tribes were Loyalists as most tribes were allied with Britain during the American Revolution. Many Lowland Scots fought alongside the Indians on the frontier and were referred to disparagingly as "white Indians" by the Patriot frontiersmen.

A large proportion of these Loyalists would flee the fighting during the war and lingering Patriot hostility thereafter, immigrating to Canada, Florida, the Caribbean colonies and the British Isles. Contrary to the prevailing loyalties of most other Lowland immigrants, the descendants of the New Jersey Covenanters were firmly on the Patriot side.