I

Francis Hutcheson has been described as ‘probably the most influential and respected moral philosopher in America in the eighteenth century’.Footnote ¹ Matriculating at the College of Glasgow just three years after the Act of Union, the man lauded by some scholars as ‘the father of the Scottish Enlightenment’ rebelled against the Augustinian pedantry of Reformed scholasticism in Scottish higher education.Footnote ² In his early works, Hutcheson questioned the pessimistic dualism that associated communal sociability with individual egoism, and public benevolence with the earthly benefits accrued to an individual within a community. He suggested that the mind innately perceived the morality of external actions, just as it reacted to natural or artistic beauty in a predictably positive manner or to ugliness with predictable negativity.Footnote ³ His common basis for ethical discernment was less temporary than Augustinian ‘illumination’ and certainly less reliant on individual regeneration and the reception of epistemic grace.Footnote ⁴ Hutcheson's ‘sociability’ was natural to human beings ‘both in the minimal sense that we need to live in society with others, and in the sense that we seek society for its own sake, because of the immediate delight we take in all that sociality requires’.Footnote ⁵

Hutcheson's insights were central to the reception of moral sense reasoning in America, and have dominated historical accounts of the link between Patriot ideology and Scottish philosophy. Much scholarship has followed Caroline Robbins's succinct analysis, made over fifty years ago: ‘For an explicit statement, thirty years before Lexington, of “when it is that colonies may turn independent”, one must turn to the work of Francis Hutcheson, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy.’Footnote ⁶ Hutcheson's writings were studied at Harvard from the time of their first publication in 1725 and came to govern discussions of moral philosophy at other American institutions of higher education.Footnote ⁷ During the 1740s, even at the staunchly Presbyterian College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) developing tensions between ‘Old Light’ and ‘New Light’ theologians were often expressed in opposition to or support for Hutcheson's ‘aesthetic’ moral reasoning.Footnote ⁸ His influence on a subsequent generation of Scottish philosophers produced theories with substantial authority at a growing number of American Presbyterian academies and through the many private tutors who took up positions in the colonies.Footnote ⁹ By the 1770s Scottish moral philosophy allowed influential American leaders to articulate their innate ‘sense’ that Britain's ugly rule had violated her relationship with those who did not have representation in Westminster.

This review will test Robbins's claim in the light of more recent scholarship: have historians correctly described the debt that American political theory owed to ‘enlightened’ Scottish thought during the eighteenth century? It will begin by questioning scholarly attempts to amalgamate various forms of Scottish philosophy in the context of eighteenth-century America, but will show that their association cannot (and should not) be altogether denied. Suggesting potential new directions for the study of Scottish Enlightenment ethical theories on the western side of the Atlantic, the review then examines scholarship on a separate and neglected Scottish influence in American thought: an evangelical notion of religious authority that had developed in opposition to moral sense reasoning, and which was not opposed to wider incorporation in multi-denominational political unions. Recent developments in the historiography of Anglo-Scottish integration ought to influence the study of colonial and revolutionary America. Revivalist Presbyterian supporters of the Act of Union incorporated Scotland's previous national covenant, embodied in the religious standard of the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith, in order to champion the salvation of populations beyond Britain's new borders. Were threats to religious and political autonomy in America also threats to the contractual legacy of the Westminster Confession and its subsequent reassertion as a condition of evangelical Scottish support for British union? Does this proposition counter what we know of the influence of Scottish moral sense reasoning in American revolutionary ideology, given that this influence was distinct from certain Calvinistic standards associated with the Westminster Confession? The remaining part of the review will suggest how and why historians ought to incorporate moral sense philosophy and Presbyterian evangelicalism in the same narrative: the ethical and intellectual basis for American independence from Britain owed much to their tense counterpoise, rather than to singular and starkly binary contributions to colonial ideology.

II

Our understanding of Francis Hutcheson's influence in America risks privileging his earliest publications over his far less cheery later writing. Scholars have claimed that after he assumed Glasgow's ‘Chair in Moral Philosophy’ from 1729 (and until he died in 1746) Hutcheson became conservative in his intellectual and theological outlook, perhaps out of expediency rather than true belief. According to James Moore, he reflected ‘the pedagogic tradition in which [he] taught, which included the Reformed or Presbyterian scholastic doctrine that all moral actions should be motivated or inspired by reverence for or veneration of the Deity’ – contrary to his earlier claim in section vi of his Illustrations.Footnote ¹⁰ New scholarship has questioned Hutcheson's debt to Shaftesbury's aesthetic analogy between artistic and ethical discernment, which in fact ‘did not escape [his] censure of Epicurean egoism’.Footnote ¹¹ Even in his Inquiry, Hutcheson at one point argued that there were clear signs of ‘providence’ in the way benevolence naturally varied in strength.Footnote ¹² Greater ambiguity and ambivalence has also been identified in Hutcheson's famous analysis of innate morality in pre-Christian communities.Footnote ¹³

James Harris has convincingly reasserted the centrality of Hutcheson's critique of Reformed scholasticism to his later as well as his earlier works, even while Protestant religion was (albeit idiosyncratically) central to both.Footnote ¹⁴ There remained a necessary relationship between the painful and the pleasant sensory response in Hutcheson's ethical philosophy, which was neither increasingly dour and Calvinistic nor always unthinkingly positive and anthropocentric (as was the charge made by a later generation of evangelical Scots). Hutcheson was aware of the potential charge of solipsism associated with stoical thought: that the benevolent realization of a public community beyond the individual self also consciously evoked something ‘beautiful’ and therefore pleasing to the individual's gaze. Resisting the charge of indulgent egoism, he pointed out that the innate sensory response to moral deeds outside the mind was necessarily open to hurtful as well as positive stimuli.Footnote ¹⁵ Faith in the ‘future state’ outlined by scripture offered important – even vital – solace for those whose instinctive moral sense aroused tears rather than smiles; reassurance of a ‘providential scheme which promises redemption for undeserved suffering in a life to come’.Footnote ¹⁶ Protestant religion offered comfort to those distressed by the melancholy that could be associated with public sympathy, even if the inborn ethical response that aroused sadness was external to any subsequent knowledge of Christian revelation.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, while Hutcheson maintained the importance of Protestant belief, he did indeed differ from the central doctrine of the 1646 Westminster Confession Faith, whose ‘subordinate standard’ continued to emphasize the need for repentance, regeneration, and revival in order for moral reasoning to appear from divine illumination.Footnote ¹⁸ If we accept that there was a non-orthodox – even ‘enlightened’ – aspect to Hutcheson's work, the suggestion that his anthropocentric moral philosophy allowed American colonists to develop a sense of their own ethical judgement in relation to British misrule can resist the charge of imprecision.

A further interpretative problem, however, does still remain in Scottish-American intellectual history. In a crude but surprisingly useful classification, it is often claimed that historians lump, split, or synthesize the ideas of related authors.Footnote ¹⁹ Scholarly analysis of the reception of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in America risks lumping Hutcheson together with a later generation of thinkers, as well as overlooking differences within that more recent cohort. In the two decades after his death in 1746 a more binary distinction developed between ‘Popular’ and ‘Moderate’ factions of the Church of Scotland. Several influential members of the ‘Moderate party’ were also educators, writers, and theologians in Scotland's universities. They were associated by their evangelical opponents with Hutchesonian thought, despite Hutcheson's career having preceded the formation of their loosely defined faction, and his having avoided the controversy over ecclesiastical patronage that now bitterly divided the Kirk.Footnote ²⁰ As Richard Sher and David Allan have shown, our vision of Moderate philosophy should not be unduly influenced by evangelical critiques that often took the form of teleological caricature, bundling later Scottish theorists together with Hutcheson as little more than secular dilettantes.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, it is not clear whether some of the Scottish moral sense philosophers who had a leading impact in America can accurately be associated with the Moderate section of the Kirk and thereby receive its philosophical moniker. Consider the cases of James Beattie and James Oswald. Despite sharing fundamental tenets of moral sense reasoning, they both demonstrated personal distaste for the term ‘Moderate’ – particularly its institutional association with what Henry May, in his discussion of their contribution to America's ‘moderate’ and ‘didactic’ Enlightenment(s), describes as the ‘liberal’ wing of the Kirk.Footnote ²²

Notwithstanding these problems, and despite what we now know about the differences between (and the ambiguities within) the writings of various Scottish thinkers, it is still appropriate to highlight important similarities in their epistemic ideas over a relatively long historical period. We ought to follow Sher's more nuanced suggestion that members of Scotland's ‘Moderate literati’, such as Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and Hugh Blair, were at least partly influenced by Hutcheson's earlier reasoning: they modified ‘the Stoic conception of fate’ by concentrating ‘on being benevolent in thought and deed, leaving results, outcomes, and consequences in the capable hands of the deity’.Footnote ²³ They, along with a later generation of common sense philosophers such as Thomas Reid, ‘recognized that Hutcheson's lack of interest in the notion of duty [to a providence that distributed rewards and punishments] left his moral philosophy seriously incomplete’ but ‘were not prepared to follow the Orthodox in looking to the will of God for the source of the concept of moral obligation. A source of normativity, therefore, had to be found within the self.’Footnote ²⁴ Reid's apologetic ‘faculty psychology’ proposed that rational judgement was preceded by innate sensory perception, thereby allowing individuals to analyse the world outside the mind as evidence of a divine maker. As Knud Haakonssen and Alexander Brodie have shown, there remained a continuity between his ‘first principles’ of sensory moral discernment and those suggested by Moderate writers, and even Hutcheson.Footnote ²⁵

If a later generation of Scottish thinkers allied to the Moderate faction of the Kirk attempted to ‘supplement Hutchesonian moral theory with a central role for the concept of duty’ it becomes less problematic, and less academically crude, to suggest their engagement in a form of Scottish Enlightenment – even ‘Scottish Moderate’ – philosophy, with an attendant influence in America.Footnote ²⁶ Their correspondence may have been accurately perceived by American theologians and writers who spoke generally of ‘Scottish philosophy’. And even if we can discern that members of American churches and universities demonstrated a relative lack of subtlety in their use of associative indicators such as ‘Moderate’ or ‘Hutchesonian’, our use of these terms should still maintain an important role in historical narrative. If we attribute their meaning to American misunderstandings, or to the explicable simplification and conglomeration of ideas associated with the reception of complex but related philosophies, we will accurately depict the intellectual encounter between American and Scottish thinkers, even if it was based on partial misperception. The greatest danger of inaccuracy lies not in the use of these terms but in the meaning and importance they are given in relation to other modes of Scottish thought. In the discussion that follows it will remain open as to whether historians have correctly invoked the debt that American political theory owed to ‘enlightened’ Scottish philosophy during the second half of the eighteenth century; or whether this philosophy's influence has been over-emphasized at the expense of Presbyterian evangelicalism, whose contribution to American political theology rarely appears in the historiography of the revolutionary era.

III

It is often suggested that Scots who proposed moral sense theories were partially motivated by a desire to mitigate their loss of parliamentary sovereignty; that they clung to the happy claim that political representation was not the sole guarantor of social coherence, given man's pre-rational aesthetic ‘sense’ of benevolence.Footnote ²⁷ John Clive and Bernard Bailyn famously proposed that before the revolutionary era the American colonies offered a similar political context for philosophical reasoning: Scotland and America were both ‘cultural provinces’ within the British empire.Footnote ²⁸ Colonial American theologians and educators used moral sense philosophy to justify America's ‘provincial’ connection to London, just as it had been employed to validate Scotland's diminished political authority within the new British state.Footnote ²⁹ It is not surprising that the concept of ‘shared provincialism’ is reserved for the period before the Stamp Act crisis. Many in the Moderate faction of the Church of Scotland became staunchly opposed to American independence, unlike their evangelical counterparts.Footnote ³⁰ How, then, could the ideas of Hutcheson, and related theories proposed by the next generation of Moderate churchmen and writers, provide American revolutionaries with a philosophical justification for their independence from Britain? A large body of historiography has sought to explain this specific paradox without jettisoning the notion of America's provincial similarity with Scotland during the colonial period. Scholars have shown that moral sense theories assumed a political connotation in America during the 1760s and 1770s in so far as they were used to justify separation from Britain rather than incorporation into its union. A common aesthetic sensibility aroused in American theologians an innate and uncontrollable ‘sense’ of that which Britain's ugly rule had violated.Footnote ³¹

Scottish theories of common sensibility complemented a synthesis that Patriots often constructed between Protestant religion and Lockean contractual theory, despite the latter's perceived emphasis on rational rather than sensory discernment. Both systems of thought coincided with a growing anxiety among theologians in America and Scotland that developing interpretations of Locke's ‘sensationalism’ threatened the notion of innate ideas and weakened the apologetic model that could be derived from his own contractual writings.Footnote ³² The belief that there remained a common understanding of revealed morals in relation to temporal human events risked being undermined by the Humean conclusion that individual perception of these events was based on a capricious feeling of ‘approbation’, determined by the individual's directly sentient response to their arousing object. Scottish moral sense theorists offered a useful rejoinder: a pre-rational and universal sensory response allowed the mind to trust its own common ethical perception of the world outside its bounds. This then permitted it to reason in favour of social contract, and biblical morality.Footnote ³³ As Michael Zuckert has shown, many American clergymen claimed that individual reason sanctioned the devolution of some personal interests to a wider body of law, which safeguarded more fundamental ‘natural rights’ – including the freedom of religious conscience. In a common apologetic argument, this conscience enabled Americans to understand the eminent reasonableness of revelation and to subsume their passions according to its moral tenets. It also allowed their common recognition that British corruption had violated the imperial contract that colonists had once enjoyed, particularly in relation to their freedom of worship.Footnote ³⁴ Scottish moral sense reasoning suggested an innate sensory mode of ethical discernment, and allowed Americans to trust their secondary rational response to British misrule. If puritan covenant became Lockean contract during the American revolutionary era, then the ‘ideational’ – even sceptical – aspect of Lockean epistemology had to be suppressed: enter the Scottish philosophy of Hutcheson, Kames, Blair, and Reid.Footnote ³⁵

The apologetic synthesis outlined above has been applied more specifically to the commercial and economic context of revolutionary ideology. ‘Lockean liberal’ interpretations of America's founding have demonstrated relatively little antagonism with Scottish Enlightenment commercial theories despite their potentially contradictory theoretical – even moral – grounding. As Tim Breen has shown, notions of common taste within a consumer economy formed bonds among colonies rather than simply between America and Britain, making colonists rationally aware of their ‘liberal’ property rights in relation to British misrule.Footnote ³⁶ The Scottish vision of commercial coherence derived from less cognitive forms of discernment: humanity's fourth and most advanced stage of development was predicated on pre-rational sensory perceptions that allowed common sociability and permitted the advancement of mutually beneficial trade networks.Footnote ³⁷ Yet scholars have used a similar argument to Breen in order to frame the relative ascendancy of Scottish Enlightenment commercial ideas in the move to an independent American republic.Footnote ³⁸ If greater proximity to Anglo-Scottish commercialism made colonial Americans more conscious of their own socioeconomic development, then they would be more likely to absorb theories conceived by thinkers such as Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames, William Robertson, and John Millar, which related to stadial progress within advanced forms of political union.Footnote ³⁹ This progress, some colonial Americans came to believe, might apply to their own development separate from a British union that increasingly tried to put obstacles in its way. As Drew McCoy has demonstrated, after American independence was achieved, some sought to delay or counteract the ‘corruption’ that might emanate from America's fourth stage of commercial humanity, and its focus on individual property rights. At the same time, others argued that commercial philosophy should continue to be incorporated into American political culture, using Scottish ‘stadial’ theories to bolster their arguments.Footnote ⁴⁰

During America's early national era, discussions of Scottish commercial philosophy centred on the prevention of social and political disintegration. With Britain's ugly rule removed, the influence of moral sense reasoning more generally could return to its traditional routes, which favoured gradual social improvement rather than revolutionary upheaval. David Lundberg and Henry May highlight ‘a sharp growth in the popularity of the Scots’ during the years 1777–90, especially Beattie, Blair, Ferguson, Kames, Reid, and Smith. The category of ‘Scottish Common Sense’ is reserved for all but Ferguson.Footnote ⁴¹ Elite Americans approved of Scottish philosophy because it allowed their suggestion that what was ‘commonly’ perceived as stable ought to remain that way. It buoyed their opposition ‘both to skepticism and revolution, but tried to save from what it saw as the debacle of the Enlightenment the intelligible universe, clear and certain moral judgments, and progress’.Footnote ⁴² According to Dwight Bozeman, ‘Scottish Common Sense and Baconian’ thought aided Protestant apologetics in the early republic. Mental perception of the cause and effect of an object outside the mind was popularly connected with ‘the real empirical lineaments of the thing itself’ to prevent the more unsettling conclusion of the ‘European Enlightenment’: France's slide from secular revolution to social upheaval.Footnote ⁴³ As Michael Winship has shown, similar philosophical reasoning had already developed in late puritan New England, in response to the disconcerting assertions of early English and French Enlightenment thought.Footnote ⁴⁴ With an added Scottish impetus, post-revolutionary Americans could argue once again that God made the world work according to cosmic synchronization, and gave humans an innate sense of its harmony.

The language that elite Americans used to outline their harmonious theories still posed a problem in relation to their newfound independence: the ‘Grub Street incivility’ of revolutionary debate menaced America's young nation with linguistic unorthodoxy, and inelegant expression.Footnote ⁴⁵ Enlightened Scots had long maintained a similar anxiety regarding their own language and expression within the wider British union. As late as 1778, James Beattie wrote of his ardent wish to emulate ‘an English author of learning [who] is the master, not the slave, of his language’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Common sense theories allowed men like Beattie to cultivate a sense of linguistic style that was based on aesthetic norms which they claimed to hold in common with English authors. Educated Americans maintained Beattie's fear of linguistic provincialism even after their own political independence. Historians continue to claim that, in partial response to such a fear, the popularity of Scottish rhetoricians on the western side of the Atlantic increased markedly after 1776. According to George Guthrie, Yale formally adopted Hugh Blair's lectures in 1785, and Harvard followed suit in 1788. His work was the dominant rhetorical text in America up to the civil war, with George Campbell's similarly orientated Philosophy of rhetoric a close rival.Footnote ⁴⁷ According to Andrew Hook the popularity of these texts promoted a ‘genteel tradition’ in American letters whose aesthetic standard ‘impeded the development of a native American literary idiom’.Footnote ⁴⁸

The refined practice of Moderate aesthetics contributed to the developing political identity of Federalism. Stephen Conrad associates the growing influence of an ‘ideology of politeness’ in the early American republic with its intellectual cousin: a theory of common sociability that was codified by Scottish elites who had been keen to develop a new civic language after their incorporation into British union.Footnote ⁴⁹ Having been integrated into a new union of American states, men like James Wilson, one of the six original justices appointed by George Washington to the Supreme Court, also avoided the descriptive link between individual ‘interests’ and specifically political forms of representation. Of course, the Federalist connection between political disinterestedness and common sociability developed in the context of a system of patronage that was highly politicized. Scottish theories provided a good fit for those who wished to legitimize their social stratification without drawing attention to the debt they owed to political connection: the moral sense of the educated Federalist leader was able to look out for the welfare of others beyond the political chamber and beyond his own social order, despite his continued debt to both. David Shields highlights the importance of style and belles-lettres in the development of American ‘politeness’: attendance to outward form fore-grounded the possibility of a common aesthetic (and by extension moral) sense. Yet although sense was common, its norms (being aesthetic) were best articulated by elites with enough education to understand their human art.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such an account of sensibility can be distinguished from the ‘radical public sphere’ associated with Michael Warner's study of the democratic – even revolutionary – dissemination of political ideas through circulating pamphlets.Footnote ⁵¹

Thomas Jefferson's intellectual milieu has provided scholars with evidence of both the revolutionary and didactically conservative influence of Scottish moral sense philosophy in America. According to Gary Wills's controversial thesis, the Scottish Enlightenment provided a ‘communitarian’ alternative to classical republican and liberal individualistic reasoning and was highly influential in the political philosophy of America's founding.Footnote ⁵² Jefferson's Declaration of Independence followed his reading of Thomas Reid with ‘Hutcheson in charge’ – his ‘self-evident truths’ were based on a communitarian sense of what was sociable and therefore ‘beautiful’. Hutcheson's ‘benevolence’ rather than Locke's ‘self-interest’ was, for Wills, Jefferson's chief motivator: the ‘pursuit of happiness’ rather than the pursuit and protection of ‘property’.Footnote ⁵³ Significant problems with this thesis were immediately identified by scholars: the link between Hutcheson, Reid, and the ‘Sage of Monticello’ was too proscriptive, assumed too much philosophical knowledge on Jefferson's part, and overlooked what remained (albeit crudely) ‘Lockean’ in his political philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nonetheless, Jeffry Morrison continues to associate Hutcheson with John Witherspoon, a former Scot and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, whose ‘conclusions in moral anthropology’ were ‘identical to those drawn by American colleagues like Jefferson’. The story of Scottish moral sense philosophy in America, often told through Jefferson, is too deeply entrenched to have been upended by the arrival of Witherspoon, a Scottish evangelical who had previously opposed its fundamental aspects.Footnote ⁵⁵ Once the aberration of British corruption had been removed, social stability could return to the western side of the Atlantic, according to the elite appropriation of a common aesthetic sensibility.

Thus, the historical depiction of Scottish philosophy in America, in both its revolutionary and didactic manifestation, has not entirely transcended ‘the substantially static conception of provinciality offered by Bailyn and Clive’ – particularly its suggestion that British misrule violated the common ethical sense held by provincial Americans.Footnote ⁵⁶ Present scholarship neglects the potential influence in America of a ‘historical sociology’ of Reformed religion, which some Moderate theologians had developed as a slightly more nuanced response to Scotland's loss of political sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the decades after Hutcheson's death they suggested that union with England had positively ‘subverted’ Scotland's ‘gothic past’ by allowing a new reforming impulse within its church – an impulse that remained in the spirit of God's Word, and Calvin's works.Footnote ⁵⁸ Rather than evoking America's debt to its colonial history, whose provincial context had furnished the reception of Scottish moral philosophy, future historical research ought to investigate the degree to which American revolutionary identity was influenced by Moderate critiques of Scotland's pre-union religious culture. America's most famous divine, Jonathan Edwards, became increasingly uncomfortable with the notion that John Winthrop heralded a uniquely American religious blessing during the seventeenth century. Such exceptionalism conflicted with the universal mission of his Protestant vision during the 1740s.Footnote ⁵⁹ After Edwards – and after American independence – were New England puritans ever cast by theologians and historical writers as akin to gothic Scots, and unlike new Americans; a people seen (however inaccurately) as having been obsessed with their inward nationality, and fearful of union with other peoples, denominations, and states? Or were Americans during and after the revolutionary era simply ‘Jeffersonian’ in their reading of Scottish philosophy, always extracting its polite, deistic, and anthropocentric norms separate from their potential critique of America's earlier colonial era?

‘Static’ accounts of Scotland and America's shared provincialism before 1760 neglect a further aspect of Scottish historiography: its emphasis on the continued ‘political’ context of Moderate intellectual culture, despite the more well-known production of ‘disinterested’ and depoliticized philosophical and rhetorical theories. Seminal work by Ian Clark and Richard Sher on the association between Moderate clergymen and the Hanoverian state has shown that these ministers often ‘successfully advanced the local political interests of the London government.’ In light of this research, and if ‘as [Linda] Colley suggests, political life across Britain was powerfully influenced by Protestantism, then the close relationship between the church of Scotland and Hanoverian political culture takes on a rather different significance’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This significance might well translate to the eighteenth-century American context. Jack Greene constantly emphasized the ‘rise of the colonial assembly’ as part of the politicized local context(s) of eighteenth-century America. Representation was not needed in Westminster for an emphasis on local political patronage to develop in many colonies.Footnote ⁶¹ Were American writers and educators, many of whom were associated with local political elites, ever aware of the model provided by Edinburgh's ‘Moderate literati’? After Dr Thomas Dale, a medical botanist, arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1732, his startlingly rapid elevation to civic employments had been enabled by one talent that few in the colony possessed to a supreme degree: Dale was a master of words, an expert reader as well as writer. Mastery over texts was one of the warrants to rule in the eyes of the ruling oligarchy.Footnote ⁶²

Was the political patronage that Dale received in exchange for the literary glow he emanated part of a wider social phenomenon, influenced by Scotland's religious and educational establishments? Either side of the revolutionary era, did Americans such as Dale approve of the links that some Scots cultivated between literary and philosophical output and political patronage? These questions offer avenues for new research.

IV

The assessments above centre on Scottish moral sense reasoning after the Act of Union and its contribution to America's coming act of disunion. Most neglect what Ned Landsman has termed ‘the problem of provincial identity in Scottish evangelical culture’ – an identity that often developed in conflict with common and moral sense philosophy.Footnote ⁶³ More work is needed on the alternative evangelical Presbyterian response to Scotland's loss of political autonomy in 1707 and the model it may have provided for Americans during the colonial and revolutionary eras. Scholars have suggested that conditional Presbyterian support for the Act of Union incorporated Scotland's previous ‘national’ covenant while also championing the salvation of those beyond Britain's new borders, within which the Kirk had been incorporated. Presbyterian endorsement of political incorporation hinged on the retention of the Kirk's independence and its continued ability to promote the Westminster Confession of Faith.Footnote ⁶⁴ As John Robertson, Alan Macinnes, and others have pointed out, the Westminster Confession had been drawn up at a time when many religious Scots encompassed their conception of nationhood within a global religious community, whose ‘federal’ superstructure conformed to the political institutions that had first shaped Calvinism in German, Swiss, and Dutch polities. By the eighteenth century, a continued ethno-religious notion of Scottish nationhood did not rule out a separate and over-encompassing allegiance to a wider political union, such as Britain, or to the extended American components of its new imperial union.Footnote ⁶⁵ Did threats to religious and political autonomy in America ever evoke the contractual legacy of the 1646 Westminster Confession, and its subsequent reassertion as a condition of evangelical Scottish support for British union after 1707?Footnote ⁶⁶

The neglected political aspect of covenanting evangelicalism after 1707 is surprising given the Atlantic turn in the history of colonial American political theology over the last few decades, which has been given a new impetus by the extra-English focus of ‘New British history’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Every student of colonial American history once knew that the ‘puritan origins of the American self’ were enshrined by Cotton Mather in his biography of John Winthrop. According to Sacvan Bercovitch, Mather's Nehemias Americanus depicted the first history of the ‘representative American’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Winthrop's 1630 sermon on A model of Christian charity had created a winning rhetorical formula: its listeners were united by their shared failure to live up to the ideals of Christian sociability. Mather's 1702 portrayal of Winthrop's dashed hopes acted as a literary ‘Jeremiad’ that haunted colonial Americans during the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ For a revivalist minister such as Jonathan Edwards, Winthrop's lament provided the right message for anxious colonists who were eager to bond as ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Acknowledging their fallible moral predicament would allow subjective individuals to receive the mutual and objective connection provided by divine grace, through salvation and rebirth.Footnote ⁷¹ These were the New England puritan origins of American revivalism; and even of pre-revolutionary inter-colonial communalism.Footnote ⁷² Yet we now know that by 1700 Mather and his circle were engaged in a ‘long argument’ that took place on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: as in England, ‘puritans’ in America were not sure what a ‘puritan’ really was. Their preference for monikers like ‘godly’ or ‘true Protestants’ demonstrated their connection to a worldwide reformed community.Footnote ⁷³ Recent scholarship has shown that the intellectual contours of New England puritanism were far from parochial: some American divines closely followed any continuity that developed between English Protestantism and the ‘English Enlightenment’.Footnote ⁷⁴

The Atlantic dimension in puritan studies, and in the historiography of American political theology more generally, remains orientated south of Hadrian's Wall. Mark Noll has suggested that by the mid-eighteenth century ‘evangelical’ opposition to enlightened apologetics ‘opened up possibilities for the migration of political language into religious speech, most obviously in New England’.Footnote ⁷⁵ English republican and ‘Harringtonian’ ideology combined with post-puritan revivalism to develop a ‘mode of persuasion that would redefine the norms of social order’ as a precursor to the political theology of the revolutionary era, which joined ‘classical republican themes of disinterested public service to late-puritan themes of God-orientated public duty’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Noll's work has added nuance to Alan Heimert's classic and controversial argument that establishment clergymen, not to mention supposedly pious political leaders, ‘were the most reluctant of rebels’ in comparison with America's true revolutionaries: the non-established evangelical preachers who were the heirs of the inter-colonial ‘Great Awakening’ a generation earlier.Footnote ⁷⁷ Despite Zuckert's appropriation of Lockean thought at the expense of Noll's greater emphasis on mid-seventeenth-century civic humanism, both ideological frameworks are united by their English political context, whose legacy governed their fusion with American Christianity during the following century.

Even support for the Patriot cause offered by Scottish communities living on the western side of the Atlantic is most often attributed by scholars to the fact that they were influenced by the political language(s) generated by English struggles over royal prerogative and inherited by American colonists.Footnote ⁷⁸ Keith Griffin's work on clergymen during the War of Independence highlighted the ‘Knoxian inheritance’ of many political and religious actors along the Atlantic Seaboard. Yet his analysis suggests that ‘the deciding factor which tipped their preaching towards support of revolution was an appropriation for the middle colonies of the New England [puritan] elect nation ideology’.Footnote ⁷⁹ It has been suggested that an Anglocentric viewpoint still governs New British history's ‘archipelagic’ study of Presbyterian evangelicalism, particularly its contribution to political debates in the decades before and after the Restoration era.Footnote ⁸⁰ We might add that the tendency to judge Scottish Calvinism using analytical tools provided by English puritanism has in the American context given way to near full erasure of its political legacy: puritan politics became American politics, even where evangelical Presbyterians were concerned.

It is not often acknowledged that the waxing and waning of Anglo-Scottish relations and the politicization of Scottish Presbyterianism during the seventeenth century had not gone unnoticed by New England divines. When tensions increased between Charles I and Scottish Presbyterian forces in 1638 Massachusetts theologians hoped that the ‘door for reform might swing open in England’ – that the uncompromising example of Scottish evangelicalism might re-energize England's puritan establishment. Their hope was further buoyed by the formulation of the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1646.Footnote ⁸¹ New England ministers were also aware of Scottish religious communities closer to home. Before the Restoration era several influential Presbyterians emigrated to New England, culminating in the formation of the Scots Charitable Society of Boston in 1657. The society's responsibility became distinctly politicized over the following decades: its autonomy in America contrasted with restrictions that had been imposed on its members by both royalists and parliamentarians.Footnote ⁸² As Clare Jackson has shown, alongside the ‘voluntary emigration’ to the American colonies of men and women with covenanting sympathies, their forced emigration was encouraged by elites such as the earl of Lauderdale who wanted rid of ‘that fanatick [Covenanter] partie’.Footnote ⁸³ The arrival of covenanting Scots in America during the 1660s contributed to an even more expansive understanding of Scottish evangelicalism, which was not necessarily shared by those of a royalist inclination whom they left behind.Footnote ⁸⁴ A relationship developed between political culture and Presbyterian communalism: local American legislative assemblies used their own customary rights to permit the formation of similar charitable societies and to provide a haven for other pious Scots.Footnote ⁸⁵

By the Act of Union the political theology of Scottish revivalism on both sides of the Atlantic was no longer threatened by royal authority. The legitimacy of the Protestant Hanoverian line was central to the conditional support that pious Scots offered to Britain. Unsurprisingly for an ideology with covenanting heritage, Presbyterian evangelicalism developed a contractual understanding of Anglo-Scottish incorporation: any threat to the liberties it enjoyed, including the right to promote Presbyterian revivalism, would raise fundamental tensions with Britain's political and royal powers.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the decades after 1707 some American colonists – most notably Scottish immigrants in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York – were aware that the Kirk had negotiated its own authority within a new parliamentary, monarchical, and imperial union, two decades after the ‘glorious’ removal of James II.Footnote ⁸⁷ Hence it is not inconceivable that a threat to Presbyterian autonomy in America during the revolutionary era evoked the contractual legacy of the 1646 Westminster Confession, and its reassertion by conditional Scottish supporters of British union after 1707 – in addition to the more well known synthesis between Lockean contractualism and English dissenting religion.Footnote ⁸⁸

Despite the complementary relationship between Presbyterian religious autonomy and colonial American political culture, more specific accounts of Scottish-American piety between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries tend to follow the trend set by puritan Atlanticism. Some overlook the Presbyterian response to political unionism and its influence in America because they emphasize the outward orientation of Scottish evangelicalism: its perception of a trans-Atlantic community of regenerated individuals, whose ideological unity was Augustinian in its distance from earthly politics.Footnote ⁸⁹ Conversely, other scholars focus on the separate provincialism of Scottish and American evangelicalism at the expense of their Atlantic (or even a-temporal) orientation.Footnote ⁹⁰ John Fiske, ever the critic of America's puritan origins, wrote in 1889 that ‘the ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the seventeenth century cherished a theocratic ideal of society not unlike that which the colonists of New England aimed at realizing.’ Fiske highlighted their religious similarity to show their parochial separation; their dual inability to be influenced by any more liberal forms of social control outside their own respective communities.Footnote ⁹¹ Much more recently Susan Manning has suggested that, in the manner of the ‘Scottish covenanting movement’ of the mid-seventeenth century, American puritanism was ‘conceived originally as the radical spearhead of reformed religion’, only to be ‘forced to watch events in England during and following the Civil War by-pass its position and leave the new Zion stranded high and dry on its hill.’Footnote ⁹² Again this was an analogous but separate state of affairs; a shared religious response to provincial distance from Westminster, demonstrated by an anxious and inward turn: ‘in both Scotland and America a sense of provinciality manifested itself as a fear of assault from without and a corresponding disintegration of the personality from within.’Footnote ⁹³ Religious Scots and puritan Americans were united by their isolation, by their inability to empathize with each other given their provincial purview. With such parochialism in mind, scholars have been less inclined to note any further link between the political experience of Scottish evangelicalism prior to and during the debate over British integration, and subsequent developments in political theology on the other side of the Atlantic.

The contribution of Scottish revivalism to composite theories of political sovereignty in fact conformed to central tenets held by the archetypical ‘New England’ theologian, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards clearly understood and approved of the federal aspect of Scottish Presbyterianism, which he linked to political developments in the Atlantic world. After the Act of Union, he believed, the joint action of dissenting Scots and New Englanders might break down the barrier between Presbyterian and puritan, and between Britain and America.Footnote ⁹⁴ During the revolutionary era the political dimension of Presbyterian revivalism heralded a more overt American response, which even Edwards could not have envisioned. In the summer of 1774 a radical Boston committee invoked a ‘Solemn League and Covenant’. According to Richard Brown, they believed ‘the analogy would be understood by townspeople who had already begun to see themselves as reformers of a corrupted Britain.’Footnote ⁹⁵ In the 1640s Scottish evangelicalism had endeavored to unite Edinburgh and London against a popish monarch. In 1774 its pious precedent influenced those who sought to unite New England's political centre with its peripheries, against British corruption.Footnote ⁹⁶ During the 1770s and 1780s the ‘universally applied providential logic’ of many New England theologians often followed the injunction in Prov.14:34, that ‘Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people’ – rather than ‘elevating the status of America’ through the exclusivity of an explicitly puritan national covenanting heritage. The privilege afforded to puritan piety in revolutionary America is problematic because its isolation from other dissenting influences overlooks a central facet in its own outwardly orientated covenanting creed. According to some devout colonists, the ability of Americans to understand their nation's lack of elevation explained its blessed independence.Footnote ⁹⁷ In order to integrate Scottish evangelicalism into this interpretation of revolutionary political theology, the universal nature of its own covenanting heritage must also be stressed; despite – and precisely because of – its specific national origins outside England and New England.Footnote ⁹⁸

Ned Landsman's pioneering study of the Scottish settlement of the short-lived proprietary colony of East Jersey has come closest to the suggestion that the political experience of Scottish revivalism offered an emulative model for various communities in the American colonies. The Kirk's continued independence, despite Scotland's political incorporation in Britain, was analogous to their own preserved autonomy within the wider union of the British empire.Footnote ⁹⁹ Many Scottish merchants who resided in the Middle Colonies became increasingly opposed to imperial centralization. During the 1760s and 1770s they supported proclamations that were made in Patriotic political assemblies. As Landsman has shown elsewhere, a good number hailed from the ‘evangelical constituency’ of western Scotland and saw no conflict between their yearning for religious revivalism and their promotion of commerce within American political forums.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The business of trade was not only the concern of Moderate theory and the result of the fourth and most sociable stage of commercial man. Traversing both sides of the Atlantic, Scottish merchants maintained their previous ethno-national identity in their commercial negotiations alongside their more universal support for Protestant evangelicalism.Footnote ¹⁰¹ They demonstrated ‘a conception of imperial union that was cultural, commercial, and confederal, based on ties of trade’.Footnote ¹⁰² Many ‘came to identify as a “liberal” point of view’ the ‘just regard for interests of all parties, provincial as well as metropolitan, which they contrasted with “confined” or “narrow” metropolitan views’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Even before the American crisis, the ease with which provincial support for British union could turn into grievance with its metropolitan centre was apparent. As Colin Kidd has pointed out, the debate of the 1730s and 1740s as to whether linen or woollen manufacture offered the best platform for Scottish development ‘provoked indignation from the wool camp which is oddly similar to the rhetoric of Anglo-Irish and American grievance: ‘Have we not the same privileges with them as British subjects? Have we not a right to establish manufacture?’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Scottish evangelicalism after 1707 developed a similar critique of England's ruling centre. Moderate clergymen received patronage from local lairds whose own prosperity and status was linked to their political representation in Westminster. Their parishes were less inclined to adopt the focus on evangelical revival that Popular party ministers promoted.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Extra-British trade, on the other hand, opened up new markets and new means of achieving personal autonomy.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This appealed to evangelical Scots who were frustrated by the Moderate response to Anglo-Scottish integration. Between 1740 and 1780, theologians linked potential trading prosperity in western Scotland to trans-national evangelicalism that included America.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The loss of Scotland's political authority might still enable the expansion of other autonomies within the British union, and its American components: the Kirk's special propensity to promote its revivalist message, and its pious constituents' special ability to expand their trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Thus, by the late 1770s, Patriot American arguments filtered back to Scotland's evangelical merchants and ministers. Members of the Moderate Kirk, they claimed, received patronage from a regime in London that had also tried to subjugate Americans with greater Anglican control, alongside greater commercial regulation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Kirk's Popular rather than Moderate faction came out publicly in support of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Seventy years earlier, revivalist Presbyterians had offered their commitment to a new British incorporation on the condition that they maintained their religious independence within its new imperial bounds. The revolutionary crisis demonstrated that Anglo-Scottish union had not met their religious proviso, or their diasporic commercial concerns.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 1778, the Scottish minister William Thom placed American Protestants in a wider history of suffering: their abandonment in the 1760s was akin to the war that a corrupt monarch such as Charles II, allied with Louis XIV, had waged against Dutch Calvinists.Footnote ¹¹² The Reformation and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had brought greater freedom as well as a purer faith, but the opportunity to harness Scottish evangelicalism within the new British union had been lost. Americans followed the same trajectory as the Dutch: both were allies of Scottish Presbyterianism, heavily involved in international trade, and eventually abandoned by Westminster.Footnote ¹¹³

As Robert Donovan has demonstrated, Scottish evangelical support for America also often provided a primary means of opposing Catholic relief domestically.Footnote ¹¹⁴ When Britain acquired Grenada in 1763, government concessions to Catholics there awoke complaints that surfaced again in the American war. The corruption of imperial governance was linked to the potential concessions Westminster politicians were rumoured to be offering Catholic regiments within the British archipelago, in favour for military service against colonists. These rumours developed in the wake of Lord North's support for Catholic relief in Canada and Britain's 1774 Quebec Acts, both of which curtailed the expansion of Protestant America beyond the Ohio Valley.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This supplied the connection between pro-American sentiment and domestic opposition to Catholic relief. According to William Thom, John Erskine, and James Murray, a swift move towards American independence was necessary to prevent Catholic powers gaining a foothold on the western side of the Atlantic. Their alliance with former American colonists, forced into such a coalition by their protracted military conflict with Britain, risked enabling the greater economic strength of Catholic Europe, and altering the continent's political balance. Moreover, greater funds would be available to those in Ireland and on the Scottish mainland who sought Catholic relief, or even insurgence.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The perceived urgency of American independence was understood geopolitically and confessionally.

It has been argued that evangelical Scots were able to transfer their allegiance to America because ‘it was [Presbyterian] orthodoxy itself that changed during the eighteenth century’ – having moved away from the ‘strictly national and sectarian conception’ of previous decades.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But if Scottish support for American revolutionary ideology is understood in the context of the ‘Westminster Confession of Faith’, and disappointment in its unrealized potential after 1707, then Calvinist orthodoxy does not need to have changed in order for their political allegiance to transfer to America. Some Scots grew disappointed in the role offered to Scottish evangelicalism in Britain and decided that a political confederation on the other side of the Atlantic provided a greater opportunity for its associated aims. They believed that Americans would accompany their victorious independence with the acknowledgement that they were as in need of regeneration as those who remained in Britain. American nationhood would not threaten the trans-national dimension of Scottish evangelicalism. Some pious Scots claimed that Americans were able to understand British ‘corruption’ because of their provincial distance from Westminster politics. This distance had allowed greater freedom for the revivalist message to be heard on the western side of the Atlantic – a message whose focus on a lack of common moral sense was very different to the Hutchesonian suggestion that political independence ought to follow Britain's negative arousal of the colonists' common and innate ethical judgement. These two very different Scottish systems of thought were both influential in eighteenth-century America, just as they remained in counterpoise in Scotland before, during, and even after the era of the American Revolution.