Another large emigration from Ulster came in five ships to Boston, August 4, 1718, under the leadership of Rev. William Boyd, consisting of about 700 people. They were permitted by Governor Shute to select a township site of 12 miles square at any place on the frontiers. A few of these settled at Portland, Me., Wicasset. and Worcester and Haverhill, Mass., but the greater number finally at Londonderry, N. H. In 1723-24 they built a parsonage and a church for their minister. Rev. James MacGregor. In six years they had four schools and within nine years Londonderry paid one-fifteenth of the State tax. Previous to the Revolution, ten distinct settlements were made by colonists from Londonderry. N. H., all of which became towns of influence and importance. Two townships in Vermont, one in Pennsylvania and two in Nova Scotia were settled from the same source at the same time. Notable among the descendants of these colonists were Matthew Thornton, Henry Knox, Gen. en. John Stark, Hugh McCulloch, Horace Greeley, Gen. George B. McClellan, Charles Foster, Salmon P. Chase, and Asa Gray. A number of Scottish Colonists from earlier emigrations to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey settled a township (now Stirling) in Wind-ham County. Conn. From them were descended Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Andrew Dickson White, former Ambassador to Germany. So desperate had matters become in Scotland at the beginning of the ninth decade of the seventeenth century that a number of nobles and gentlemen determined to settle in New Jersey and in the Carolinas. One of these colonies was founded in New Jersey in 1682 under the management of James Drummond, Earl of Perth, John Drummond, Robert Barclay the Quaker, author of the celebrated Apology for the People called Quakers, David and John Barclay, his brothers, Robert Gordon, Gawen Lawrie, and George Willocks. In 1684 Gawen Lawrie was appointed deputy governor of the province, and fixed his residence at Elizabeth. In the same year Perth (so named in honour of James Drummond, Earl of Perth, one of the principal proprietors; now Perth Amboy) was made the capital of the new Scottish settlement. During the following century a constant stream of emigration both from Scotland and from Ulster came to the colony. Gawen Lawrie was succeeded as governor of the province by Lord Neill Campbell, who with a number of others had been exiled from Scotland for participation in the Earl of Argyll’s uprising in 1685. One of the prime encouragers of the Scottish colonization of New Jersey was George Scot of Pitlochrie, a son of the celebrated Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, author of the well-known work bearing the alliterative title The Staggering State of Scottish Statesmen. George Scot had been repeatedly fined and imprisoned by the Privy Council of Scotland for attending "conventicles," and in the hope of obtaining freedom of worship in the new world he proposed to emigrate "to the plantations." To encourage others to do likewise he said "there are several people in this kingdom (i.e., Scotland) who, upon account of their not going that length in conformity required of them by the law, do live very uneasy, who, beside the other agreeable accommodations of that place may there freely enjoy their own principles without hazard or trouble." In 1685 he published at Edinburgh a work called The Model of the Government of the Province of East New Jersey, in America; and Encouragement for such as design to be concerned there. This work is extremely rare (ten copies only are known to be in existence), but the work has been reprinted by the New Jersey Historical Society (1846) as an appendix to the first volume of its Collections. In recognition of his services in writing this book, Scot received from the proprietors of East New Jersey a grant dated 28th July, 1685, of five hundred acres of land in the province. A few days later he sailed from Leith with nearly two hundred others, including his wife and family, and his wife’s cousin, Archibald Riddell, one of the obnoxious Presbyterian preachers. During the voyage a malignant fever broke out among the passengers and nearly half on board perished, including Scot and his wife. A son and daughter survived. The latter married in 1686 John Johnstone, an Edinburgh druggist, who had been one of her fellow-passengers on the voyage. To him the proprietors issued (January 13, 1686-7) a confirmation of the grant made a year before to his father-in-law, and their descendants occupied a good position in the colony. Many of their descendants left America as loyalists at the Revolution, but some of them are still living in New Jersey. Walter Ker, of Dalserf, Lanarkshire, banished in 1685, settled in Freehold and was active in organizing the Presbyterian Church there, one of the oldest in New Jersey. The Scottish settlers who came over at this period occupied most of the northern counties of the state and a number went south and southwest, mainly around Princeton, and, says Samuel Smith, the first historian of the Province, "There were very soon four towns in the Province, viz., Elizabeth, Newark, Middletown, and Shrewsbury: and these with the country round were in a few years plentifully inhabited by the accession of the Scotch, of whom there came a great many." These Scots, says Douglas Campbell, largely gave "character to this sturdy little state, not the least of their achievements being the building up, if not the nominal founding, of Princeton College, which has contributed so largely to the scholarship of America’’ (The Puritan, v. 2, p. 484). In 1682 a company of noblemen and gentlemen in Scotland entered into bonds with each other for making a settlement in South Carolina. The royal encouragement and protection was given to the scheme and the constitution of the colony was altered to secure to these Scots greater immunity from oppression. The place of settlement was Port Royal. The colonists consisted mainly of Presbyterians banished for attending conventicles, as clandestine religious gatherings were called, and, says Wodrow, for not owing the king’s supremacy, declining to call the engagement of Bothwell Brig a rebellion, and refusing to renounce the Covenants. The names of some of these emigrants, whose descendants exist to the present day, were James McClintock, John Buchanan, William Inglis, Gavin Black, Adam Allan, John Gait, Thomas Marshall, William Smith, Robert Urie, Thomas Bryee, John Syme, John Alexander, John Marshall, Matthew Machen, John Paton, John Gibson, John Young, Arthur Cunningham, George Smith, and George Dowart. The colony was further increased by the small remnant of the ill-fated expedition to Darien. Of the seven vessels which left the Isthmus to return to Scotland only two reached home in safety. One, the largest ship of all, called the Rising Sun, made the coast of Florida under a fierce gale. They succeeded in making their way from there to Charleston, under a jury mast. Here the Rev. Archibald Stobo was waited upon by a deputation from the Church in Charleston and invited to preach in the town while the ship should be refitted. He accepted the invitation and left the ship with his wife and about a dozen others, and went ashore. The following day, the Rising Sun, while lying off the bar, was overwhelmed in a hurricane and all on board, believed to have numbered one hundred and twelve, were drowned. One of the most noted of the descendants of Rev. Archibald Stobo is Hon. Theodore Roosevelt. In the following year (1683) the colony was augmented by a number of Scottish colonists from Ulster under the leadership of one Ferguson, but little is known
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 05:03:57 +0000
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