For a few weeks in early 1777, James Aitken, known as John the Painter, was famous throughout the British Isles. Only twenty-four years old, Aitken was briefly ranked among the wickedest of Britain's enemies, a traitor and incendiary who had burned down a good part of Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, and who had also tried to burn the port of Bristol. In fact, Aitken had plotted to destroy the entire network of dockyards on which Britain's naval power rested, thereby thwarting the empire's ability to crush the ongoing North American rebellion. Conniving with agents of the Continental Congress in Paris, he had brought the revolutionary war to Britain. Yet Aitken was not a product of the colonies themselves; he had been born and raised in Edinburgh. On the eve of his hanging, Aitken explained to the man taking down his life story that he was “brought up in the persuasion of a protestant dissenter.”Footnote ¹ This fact was not merely incidental to Aitken's involvement in the colonial cause—instead it points to the eighteenth-century imperial transformations that linked Scotland and North America within a wider British world, and to a transatlantic dissenting tradition that arose in response to those transformations.

Historians have long foregrounded a genteel version of colonial republican ideology, one that was suited to both the “country” Whig aristocrats of the eighteenth century and their colonial counterparts, the disaffected would-be oligarchs of the American plantations.Footnote ² But centering that story risks marginalizing other transatlantic threads, and other networks of transmission, that helped underpin the coming revolution. This article highlights one such alternative, one that emerged from the economic dislocations of eighteenth-century Scotland. Against the many boosters who flourished in the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment, Scottish dissenting thought sought to resist the impact of commercial capital operating in arm with the British state. It emphasized the dignity and Christian virtue of the common people. Such ideas mobilized political activity all over the empire, especially among the growing class of landless urban laborers. They were crucial to the rise of revolutionary politics, including to the crowd actions that helped turn opposition discourse into organized resistance. Far from simply originating in the North American colonies, these ideas and strategies were thoroughly transatlantic, and even as the revolution unfolded, they continued to evolve in an Atlantic context.Footnote ³

Eighteenth-century Scotland was in some ways the jewel of the British imperial system—the very model of modern, commercial development from which a new breed of historian and political economist derived their theories of human progress. Following the Acts of Union in 1707, which dissolved the independent Scottish state along with barriers to cross-border trade and investment, entrepreneurial capital had flowed from the south to integrate and reorganize economic life in both urban and rural Scotland. In the lowland countryside especially, efficiency was the watchword, as both rents and agricultural productivity rose through the century. Profits for some went hand in hand with intensified market pressures on tenants and laborers, leading to increasing out-migration. After 1745 and the defeat of the last Jacobite uprising, political reprisals and “clearances” in the highlands helped spread capitalist agriculture north and west, pushing a new wave of migrants from the land while transforming the lives of those who stayed. Scotland's economic miracle thus helped drive demographic growth in Britain's American colonies and supply manpower to its armies, in greater proportion than England itself.Footnote ⁴

Scottish merchants also played an outsized role in some colonial economies. Newly free from the exclusions of the Navigation Acts, after 1707 Scottish commercial houses built a dominant position in the tobacco trade of the Chesapeake backcountry. By extending credit to smaller producers ignored by their major London rivals, Scottish factors were integral to the westward extension of slave-based tobacco cultivation in Virginia. Aberdeen became a major center of the transatlantic tobacco trade, accumulating profits that flowed back into investment both in Scotland and the colonies.Footnote ⁵ The factors themselves, of course, became unpopular whenever credit tightened and debts had to be called in. They earned a lasting reputation for avarice that Virginia's revolutionary orators would sometimes later deploy against the Scots in general and, by further extension, Britain and its empire.Footnote ⁶ Meanwhile, Scottish cities flourished through much of the century as flows of capital and commerce concentrated wealth among the urban elite. This was the era of Scotland's cultural and intellectual apotheosis. For those who benefited, it brought a particular and new-found sense of confidence. Scotland's experience within the empire might show the way for the future of commercial society itself.

Scottish Enlightenment thought has long been understood as a major influence on patriot ideology in the North American colonies, as well as on early national intellectual culture in the United States.Footnote ⁷ The so-called Scottish common-sense philosophy, developed by Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, while each held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, pushed back against Enlightenment skepticism, such as that of fellow Scotsman David Hume, by insisting on ordinary people's innate capacity to access basic moral truths, and the significance of shared, conventional wisdom. In such thought lay the roots of the “self-evident” truths in the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, Smith and fellow political economist Adam Ferguson, among others, pursued a conjectural history of human civilization that put commerce at the forefront of modern progress. Rebutting those who saw the rise of trade and finance primarily as sources of vice, they championed both the productive and the civilizing power of a commercial society that tied its members together by invisible economic bonds. Just as had happened in eighteenth-century Scotland, reducing barriers to trade would improve lives in the aggregate and propel human flourishing to new heights.Footnote ⁸

Yet the economic and social dislocations of eighteenth-century Scotland created losers as well as winners, and they inspired jeremiads as well as paeans to contemporary progress. In some ways, the common-sense philosophy that emphasized collectively held moral intuitions pulled against the optimistic celebration of the century's dramatic change. For many, and especially those who had lost more than they gained, it was counterintuitive to argue that the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of wealth through trade was more socially beneficial than the old-fashioned virtues of humility and temperance. Indeed, it was clear to some that the modern, commercial order was creating extreme inequalities of power. If that tendency was left unchecked, they worried, it could lead to a new kind of tyranny.

This critique was expressed most effectively from the pulpits of certain Church of Scotland ministers. Without a legislative assembly of its own since 1707, there were few other avenues for the emergence of opposition leaders—men who could represent and channel the feelings of ordinary Scots. Crucially, unlike the Church of England that was ruled by Crown-appointed bishops, the established Church of Scotland still retained its fundamentally presbyterian structure. Local elders held sway over the appointment of church ministers, having fought off seventeenth-century English attempts to impose an episcopalian model. In the eighteenth century, the defense of such arrangements pitted some churches against the rising class of landlords who sought to exert their own sway over the choice of ministers. While some in the Church, so-called “moderates,” sought to help Christianity conform with modern times and more commercial inclinations, they were fiercely opposed by a “popular party” that championed a more rigorous, evangelical, and orthodox piety.Footnote ⁹ Although it existed inside an established church, it was undoubtedly this internal opposition movement that James Aitken was referring to when he recalled his upbringing “in the persuasion of a protestant dissenter.”Footnote ¹⁰

Perhaps the most important leader of the popular party was John Witherspoon. The son of a minister in East Lothian, he served congregations in Ayrshire and Paisley in the western lowlands, near Glasgow—the region most closely connected with transatlantic trade. Witherspoon first came to widespread attention as a fiery antagonist to the moderate clergy in 1753, when he published a cutting satire on their policies and attitudes. Moderates preached only on “social duties,” wrote the young Witherspoon, and cared more for “the present life” than heaven. What was more, he went on, they bore an “implacable hatred” for the “the elders and the common people.”Footnote ¹¹ Witherspoon's commitment to the moral and religious capacities of ordinary worshippers was consonant with the common-sense philosophy of the Glasgow school, even if his outright antagonism toward the rich and powerful was not. By the 1760s, his hard-driving, evangelical style had attracted the attention of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). Witherspoon left Scotland for the colonies in 1768. Eight years later, as a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress, he signed the Declaration of Independence.Footnote ¹²

After Witherspoon's departure, leadership of the Church's popular party fell to his long-term friend and ally John Erskine, the minister at Edinburgh's Greyfriars Church. It was Erskine whose preaching James Aitken would have heard as a young pupil at the city's charity school, Heriot's Hospital. Like Witherspoon, Erskine was committed to an evangelical and presbyterian conception of Christianity that was deeply aligned with the progress of freedom around the world. For all their conservatism, both men were cosmopolitans in the sense that they recognized no inherent hierarchy between mother country and colony. “Shall I go to war against my American brethren?” Erskine asked in 1769, the year after Witherspoon's emigration, as the imperial crisis continued to escalate. His answer, of course, was no. As early as 1760, Erskine had exchanged critical commentary on British politics with correspondents in the colonies.Footnote ¹³ In a sermon, republished in 1776, he denied Parliament's right to tax or legislate for the Americans, unrepresented as they were. He hoped war could be avoided, yet warned British leaders not to rely on superior military strength to forestall colonial resistance. “A people thus roughly enraged,” he observed, “will soon find themselves a method.”Footnote ¹⁴

Scots like Witherspoon and Erskine were enmeshed in transatlantic networks of migration, trade, ideas, and politics. Benjamin Rush, for example, came from Philadelphia to study medicine in Edinburgh—he helped persuade John Witherspoon to take the Princeton job—before returning to the colonies in 1769. A few years later, Rush was instrumental in supporting the writing career of Thomas Paine, newly arrived from London. Another graduate of Edinburgh's medical school, the Virginian Arthur Lee, played a highly active role in London politics during the decade leading up to American independence. He wrote prolifically for the newspapers under the nom-de-plume Junius Americanus, frequently drawing parallels between oppression in the colonies and in Britain itself. Once “arbitrary rule” had been established in North America, Lee warned in one 1770 essay, “it would speedily traverse the ocean, and finally fix itself in England.”Footnote ¹⁵ These men were not simply transmitting American ideas to Britain. They were helping to construct a transatlantic opposition discourse. That discourse, moreover, was rooted not only in the elite-oriented English commonwealth tradition, but also in dissenting (or “popular”) Christianity.

Dissenters in England, too, were among the most vocal supporters of a broader reform movement that encompassed colonial as well as domestic politics. Unlike the popular clergy in Scotland, their dissenting English counterparts suffered a series of formal exclusions, based on their refusal to submit to Church of England orthodoxy: for example, they could not serve as officers in the armed forces, argue as barristers in court, or be elected to Parliament. Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century, Protestant dissenters had constructed an array of institutions that supported a flourishing intellectual and political culture. Scholars have long recognized the highly visible role played by dissenting preachers and writers in developing an extra-parliamentary opposition culture that was capable of attracting support from the respectable, commercial classes as well as the disenfranchised, laboring poor.Footnote ¹⁶ When James Aitken—or, perhaps, his Winchester-based editor—described his upbringing as that of a “protestant dissenter,” it was to this well-known milieu that his readers were being directed. To the conservative establishment, indeed, his acts of violent sabotage were simply a material equivalent to dissenters’ long-term campaign of spiritual and intellectual insubordination.

Take Joseph Priestley, the dissenting preacher and natural philosopher, whose 1768 work, Essays on the First Principles of Government, had codified the tradition's commitment to a principle of political equality. “The most perfect political liberty,” Priestley had written, exists “in countries where every member of the society enjoys an equal power … of directing the strength and sentiments of the whole community.” “Men” had an “unalienable” right to restore such equality in their own governments.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1774, with the imperial crisis near to breaking point, Priestley engaged directly with the topic in An Address to Protestant Dissenters of All Denominations, arguing that “if any realm or country be taxed by another, the people so taxed have no proper liberty left, but are in a state of as absolute despotism as any of which we read in history.” At the same time, though, he came close to a council of despair about the corrupt state of Britain's own politics. “The diseases of our constitution are too many to yield to any remedy,” he argued, while the executive could buy off legislators’ independence with money and offices. Thus, he argued, both Americans and Britons had just cause to “assert their natural rights, and seize the invaluable blessings of freedom.”Footnote ¹⁸

Similar sentiments, drawing conclusions about both the British and American situation from the same egalitarian political principles, were expressed repeatedly by Priestley's fellow dissenters, as well as by some—like John Cartwright—who belonged to the Church of England. The most voluminous as well as the most radical contribution to such discourse, though, came from the dissenting schoolteacher, James Burgh. Born and raised in Strathearn in the Scottish lowlands, Burgh was the son of a Church of Scotland minister. Leaving for England in the 1740s, he eventually settled in the suburban London village of Newington Green, where a substantial dissenting community had existed since the seventeenth century. In 1771, Burgh retired from teaching at his private academy and devoted himself to writing a multi-volume treatise, Political Disquisitions. Published in 1774 and 1775, Burgh's work rehearsed familiar arguments about the failures of Parliament to properly represent the people, and therefore its incompatibility with true liberty. “We know full well,” he wrote, “that it is but a very small part of the people of England whose votes fill the house of representatives.” The British, as much as the American colonists, were “an enslaved people.” Freedom would have to be restored by extraordinary means.Footnote ¹⁹

Such arguments reached their highest pitch, and saw a peak of public resonance, in the spring of 1776. While Paine's Common Sense galvanized readers in the colonies, and Congress moved toward declaring independence, it was the work of another dissenter—the Welshman Richard Price—that shaped the British discourse of the moment. Price was a Newington Green neighbor of Burgh's, and a long-standing friend of Priestley's, who had published previously on demographics, probability, and public finance as well as on ethics. His 1776 Observations on Civil Liberty maintained the rather abstract style of the natural philosopher. Yet the pamphlet caused a sensation by restating the argument that both Americans and ordinary Britons had been deprived of their liberty. All that remained of the vaunted British constitution, Price declared, was “a power, lodged in a few, to choose at certain periods a body of masters for themselves and for the rest of the community.” The struggle with the American colonies, now already a conflict of force, would help decide the future of freedom on both sides of the ocean. While Price held back from calling openly for British defeat, his meaning was clear enough. The revolution in North America should be seized as “an opportunity.”Footnote ²⁰

Price's pamphlet was successful in Britain, selling as many as 60,000 copies. Its reach was no doubt increased by the fact that pro-government writers were employed to answer it directly, therefore drawing more attention than it might otherwise have garnered.Footnote ²¹ Some writers, indeed, tried to make this wide readership a point of attack. As one noted derisively, “There is not an apprentice, a drayman, a porter, or shoe-black in town, who does not quote you for all the extravagant nonsense they utter.”Footnote ²² Price had said nothing particularly original. But with British forces even then engaged in an armed struggle in the colonies, simply putting the case so plainly at that moment made it sensational. For James Aitken, the young Scotsman who found himself back in London just as Price's Observations came to market, it was an intellectual and political turning-point. In his confession a year later, “Dr. Price's tract” was cited as an inspiration, “of which I have always entertained the highest opinion.”Footnote ²³ A copy of the pamphlet was found among a bundle of possessions stashed during his sabotage campaign.

Not long after Price published his pamphlet, John Wilkes brought a motion before Parliament, begging leave “to bring in a Bill for the just and equal representation of the people of England.”Footnote ²⁴ Neither philosopher nor moralist, Wilkes had been an icon of political opposition since the early 1760s, when he rallied Londoners against the Earl of Bute's short-lived cider tax and scarcely longer-lasting ministry. Among the causes he represented were freedom of the press, public access to parliamentary debates, and the liberty of the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin may have thought him vulgar and self-interested, but Arthur Lee, the Virginian, was one of his most stalwart supporters. By the mid-1770s, having served a term as Lord Mayor of London, Wilkes was at the high-point of his influence—a thorn in the establishment's side.Footnote ²⁵ Citing both James Burgh and Richard Price by name, his motion called, effectively, for universal manhood suffrage. He would give “the meanest mechanic, the poorest peasant and day-laborer” an equal share in lawmaking.Footnote ²⁶ It was defeated overwhelmingly, of course. But that just underlined the problem. Parliament did not truly represent the people. If it did, Wilkes said, there would have been no war with the colonies.

In 1780, three years after James Aitken was hanged outside the gates of Portsmouth dockyard, protestant dissent and parliamentary reform once more combined with the American cause to terrify Britain's beleaguered establishment. It is not often remembered that the anti-Catholic demonstrations and incendiary attacks that sparked five days of rioting in London that summer had been preceded by similar incidents in Scotland. Nor is the connection always made between the opposition to partial Catholic emancipation led by Lord George Gordon's Protestant Association and the simultaneous activities of the reformist Association movement—a movement inspired by the likes of James Burgh, Richard Price, and John Wilkes.Footnote ²⁷ Those who rioted that summer, and had come close to bringing down the British government, were animated by the same broad politics of opposition that had linked the pulpits of Scotland's popular ministers, the public meetings of Philadelphia artisans, and the draymen, porters, shoe-blacks, and other laborers of English towns during the decades since the mid-1760s. It was a transatlantic British tradition of liberty with which the United States’ new national elite would soon have to grapple, too.