Series 5 > Scotland and the Americas, c. 1650 - c. 1939

INTRODUCTION
15
towards the end of the nineteenth century, which is sometimes pejoratively
referred to in western North America as the era of the remittance man.
Many of these men returned home when they discovered that the harsh
reality of frontier life was very different from their expectations, but some
stayed and became legends in their own lifetimes.1
If entrepreneurial activity was a prominent characteristic of the Scots
overseas, equally significant was their military prowess, particularly among
the highland regiments whose distinguished reputations are rooted in the
two major American conflicts of the eighteenth century, the Seven Years’
War and the American War of Independence. Although familiar with
European theatres of war over many centuries, it was only after the Union
of the Parliaments that Scots, notably highlanders, began to enlist
significantly in the new regiments which were formed to protect and
extend Britain’s imperial interests, and only from mid century that military
service became the harbinger of emigration, through the allocation of
colonial land grants. Scottish soldiers were not involved exclusively in
North America. When after Culloden, leading gentry of the Stewarts of
Appin were forfeited, several of their number took up military service in
the New World. One of these men was Duncan Stewart of Ardshiel, who
settled in Connecticut in 1769, the same year in which he fell heir to the
chieftainship of the Stewarts of Appin. During the War of American
Independence, he sided with the Crown and was later appointed Collector
of Customs in Bermuda. One of his sons, William George Stewart, ventured
to Montevideo, where he married Mariana Agell y Blanco.William Stewart
was accompanied to the River Plate by his relative, Duncan Stewart of
Acharn, who wed Mariana’s sister. From these two marriages there emerged
the Stewart-Agell dynasty, many of whose members played a prominent
part in the early development of Uruguay and the Argentine.2
From as early as the 1650s Scottish settlers served in the colonial militia
forces of New England, South Carolina, and possibly Virginia, at a time
when population was often enumerated in terms of white men able to
bear arms.3 As the English government had not then assumed responsibility
for safeguarding its colonists, they had to shoulder the burden of that
1 See, below, 91, E6.
See, below, 94-5, FI; C.Valvo, Nobiliario delAntiguo Virreynato del Rio de la Plate [Peerage of
the Old Viceroyalty of the River Plate] (Buenos Aires, Libreria y Editorial ‘La FacultadV
Bernabe y Campania, 1939); extract adapted from vol. 4,287-9,‘Stewart’, and translated from
^ the original Spanish by Iain Stewart.
Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America;]. A. Rinn,‘Factors in Scottish emigration. A
study of Scottish participation in the indentured and transportation systems of the New
World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (University of Aberdeen, PhD thesis,
1979).