Reverend James Drummond MacGregor (1759–1830) had a remarkable yet unassuming influence on the religious, educational and social development of early British settlements in Nova Scotia. Reared in an Anti-Burgher, Secession-church family in the Scottish Highlands, “Jemmy” was educated at University of Glasgow under the tutelage of Enlightenment philosophers John Millar and Thomas Reid. Completing his theological training at the Associate Synod Theological Hall at Alloa with hopes of joining his father in ministry to his fellow Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, MacGregor would reluctantly submit to his synod's decision to send him across the ocean to establish a Christian mission in rural Pictou Township. While initially “thunderstruck” by their decision to send him into “exile”—cut off from his beloved Highlands and sent to a place so “barren, cold, and dreary” (34), never to be known as Jemmy again—he would, over time, consider it “the happiest thing that ever befell me that I was sent to America” (195). Besides embarking upon a forty-year pioneer mission that would establish him as the “father of Scottish Reformation Christianity” (xiii) in colonial Maritime Canada, MacGregor would lay the foundation for the educational, economic, and social development that would establish Pictou as an important center of nineteenth-century Nova Scotian religion, commerce, and education. And, as he had hoped, MacGregor would also find himself providing for the spiritual needs of Highlanders, yet, in this case, to the Gaelic-speaking immigrants who had settled in the region.

Other accounts have been written about James MacGregor's life and ministry, starting with a Memoir published in 1859 by his grandson, Reverend George Patterson, which draws heavily upon autobiographical writings of MacGregor himself, but in a hagiographic style typical of the period (Rev. George Patterson, Memoir of the Rev. James MacGregor, D.D. [Philadelphia: Joseph Wilson, 1859]). Subsequent histories of Nova Scotia go to the opposite pole, eclipsing MacGregor's foundational influence during the region's religious and social expansion by highlighting other important ministerial and civic leaders who were building upon MacGregor's achievements. Alan Wilson seeks to remedy this historical oversight in his biography, Highland Shepherd, which represents the first scholarly treatment of this multifaceted and compelling Scottish figure.

After a preface and historiographical introduction, the five short chapters in Part One focus on MacGregor's family background and education leading up to his transatlantic voyage and arrival in Nova Scotia, providing just enough contextual details of the Secession movement—the 1740 departure from the Kirk, followed by the 1747 Burgess Oath controversy leading to a division of the Seceders themselves—to inform the chapters that follow. In Part Two (aptly titled, “Adjusting”), Wilson describes the challenges and welcome comforts of getting established in his new homeland, utilizing vivid geographical imagery to help the reader sympathize not only with the social trials, religious tensions and intellectual frustrations that he faced, but also the isolated environs to which he had been sent. Part Three covers MacGregor's extensive travels throughout the North Shore—after grounding the Pictou Township as an ecclesiastical center and mission outpost—to minister to the spiritual needs of people in outlying areas. Whereas these chapters highlight MacGregor's solitary missionary efforts, Part Four shifts to the civic and ecclesiastical partnerships he developed after his successful recruitment of young Scottish clergy—through his persuasive “Letter of 1793”—to join him in the Nova Scotia mission. The chapters in Part Five cover a period of rapid immigration, economic development, and ecclesiastical expansion in the region—Pictou's population had grown from about 400 at MacGregor's arrival to 4000 by his death—focusing attention upon MacGregor's mediating role between various competing entities, and his foundational leadership in the 1817 establishment of the “Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia,” which eventually opened its own academy.

The MacGregor portrayed by Wilson is an intriguing combination of seeming contradictions: a conservative Presbyterian cleric with Glasgow Enlightenment ideals, a tireless evangelical missionary who was yet a social reformer, a strict separatist turned irenic ecumenist, and a scholar who was also a poet, entrepreneur and inventor. Perhaps one of MacGregor's most courageous and controversial initiatives was his publication in a Halifax newspaper, and later in a pamphlet, of the “Letter to a Minister” the “earliest published attack on the practice of slavery in British North America” (75). Wilson rightly devotes an entire chapter to the issue, explicating MacGregor's scriptural objections to slavery, obliquely directed at a neighboring clergyman (“A Letter to a Clergyman, Urging him to Set Free a Black Girl he Held in Slavery,” Rev. George Patterson, ed., A Few Remains of the Rev. James MacGregor, D.D. [Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1859; Halifax: John Howe, 1788]).

Alan Wilson has admirably researched and documented MacGregor's life and ministry, and readers who are uninitiated in the history or geography of Nova Scotia will be educated—if not occasionally weighed down—by the amount of detail Wilson provides. While the illustrations included in this biography are a welcome feature, the addition of a period map of Nova Scotia would have been a helpful visual resource for orienting the reader to MacGregor's extensive itinerant mission. Furthermore, in his attempt to elevate MacGregor's significance and correct the record of other historians, Wilson sometimes lapses into a repudiation of their exaggerated claims about other ministers in the story, which sometimes detracts from his narrative. Nevertheless, Wilson aptly demonstrates MacGregor's importance as a religious and civic leader in the development of the colonial Nova Scotia, and through his effective use of anecdotes, as well as his inclusion of humorous and though-provoking quotes, brings this fascinating figure to life.