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By Root 7450 0

as attested by the mounting number of advertisements for runaways published in the Gazette during the 1730s. One Hugh Agen, his master advised, “wears a light coloured blew Coat” and “is an Irish man” though he “pretends to be a Doctor and to let Blood.” Nevertheless, well before the middle of the eighteenth century the Irish, Protestant and Catholic, had become the most numerous and rapidly expanding element of the city’s working population. New York’s reputation as a market for Irish servants was indeed so well established by then that Dublin could boast two inns, both named the New York and Philadelphia Arms, where shipping agencies processed prospective immigrants for the voyage over.

(The New York Society Library)

Not to be confused with the Scots-Irish were immigrants from Scotland proper. Like Robert Livingston, handfuls of native Scots had found their way to New York in search of fame and fortune during the final decades of the seventeenth century. But after 1707, when the Act of Union with England opened a period of sweeping economic and social upheaval, immigration from Scotland accelerated. As in Ireland, enclosures and rack-renting displaced tens of thousands of cotters from their traditional holdings; the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715, and of a second rising in 1745, drove away thousands more, at least some of whom were banished prisoners of war. All told, more than twenty-five thousand Scots—perhaps as many as fifty thousand—found their way to America before the end of the colonial period. Most settled in the Carolinas, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, but there was always a regular trickle to New York, where “Presbyterians,” Scots as well as Scots-Irish, had become a force in the life of the city by the third decade of the century. In 1716, “att the desire of a few especially Scots people,” visiting minister James Anderson began preaching and was soon called to serve as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, conducted in the manner of the Church of Scotland. The erection of its first building, on the north side of Wall Street between Broadway and Nassau streets, offered clear evidence of how much the climate had changed since Cornbury’s persecution of the Rev. Francis Makemie, an Ulster Scot.

Though at first, as Anderson reported in 1717, his church’s supporters were “yet but few & none of the richest,” the expanding commercial ties between New York and Scotland (which after the Union of 1707 was allowed to trade directly with the American colonies) drew a number of well-to-do merchants and professionals. So did the appointment of a string of Scotsmen—Hunter, Burnet, and Montgomerie—to serve as governor of the colony. Indeed Hunter, a Scot well known in the coffeehouses of London and boon companion of such literary luminaries as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Jonathan Swift, prompted a miniature Scottish Enlightenment in the city. Described by one admiring colonist as “a gentleman of as refined a taste as any we have known or perhaps heard of in America,” Hunter gathered unto himself a small group of intellectuals united in the belief that fortune had set them down in a cultural wasteland. Together they discussed books, conducted experiments with pendulums and telescopes, and collaborated on an Italian translation of Addison’s play Cato. Hunter himself composed Latin odes and achieved a certain literary renown in 1714 with the publication of Androboros: A Biographical Farce in Three Acts, the first play written and printed in America.

Conspicuous in Hunter’s circle were the attorney James Alexander, the physician Cadwallader Golden, and the proprietor of Morrisania, Lewis Morris. Alexander, one of the Jacobites transported to America after the 1715 rising, had an aptitude for mathematics and engineering that immediately brought him to the governor’s attention; under Hunter’s aegis, he embarked on a long and illustrious public career (along the way training an entire generation of New York lawyers in his office). Golden, whom Hunter appointed surveyor-general of the province, possessed one