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Scots and Scots Descendant in America
Part I - Scots in the Settlement and Development of The United States
Scottish Ideals in American Life


KNOX, under God, made the Scotch and Scotch-Irish.... . . . Observe well, the influence of this prophetic patriot was felt most at St. Andrews, through the long Strathclyde, in the districts of Ayr, Dumfries and Galloway. the Lothians and Renfrew. There exactly clustered the homes which thrilled to the herald voice of Patrick Hamilton; there were the homes which drank in the strong wine of Knox; there were the homes of tenacious memories and earnest fireside talk; there were the homes which sent forth once and again the calm, shrewd, iron-nerved patriots who spurned as devil’s lie the doctrine of ‘passive resistance’; and there—mark it well— were the homes that sent their best and bravest to fill and change Ulster; thence came in turn the Scotch-Irish of the Eaglewing; thence came the settlers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky; and the sons of these men blush not as they stand beside the children of the Mayflower or the children of the Bartholomew martyrs. I know whereof I affirm. My peculiar education and somewhat singular work planted me, American born, in the very heart of these old ancestral scenes; and from parishioners who held with deathless grip the very words of Pedan, Welsh, and Cameron, from hoary-headed witnesses in the Route of Antrim and on the hills of Down, have I often heard of the lads who went out to bleed at Valley Forge—to die as victors on King’s Mountain—and stand in the silent triumph of Yorktown. We have more to thank Knox for than is commonly told to-day.

"Here we reach our Welshes and Witherspoons, our Tennents and Taylors, our Calhouns and Clarks, our Cunninghams and Caldwells, our Pollocks, Polks, and Pattersons, our Scotts and Grays and Kennedys; our Reynoldses and Robinsous, our McCooks, McHenrys, McPhersons, and McDowells.

"But the man behind is Knox. Would you see his monument? Look around. Yes: To this, our own land, more than any other, I am convinced must we look for the fullest outcome and the yet all unspent force of this more than royal leader, this masterful and moulding soul, . . . Carlyle has said: ‘Scotch literature and thought, Scotch industry; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns. I find Knox and the Reformation at the heart’s core of every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that without Knox and the Reformation, they would not have been. Or what of Scotland?’ Yea, verily; no Knox, no Watt, no Burns, no Scotland, as we know and love and thank God for: And must we not say no men of the Covenant; no men of Antrim and Down, of Derry and Enniskillen; no men of the Cumberland valleys; no men of the Virginia hills; no men of the Ohio stretch, of the Georgian glades and the Tennessee Ridge; no rally at Scone; no thunders in St. Giles; no testimony from Philadelphian Synod; no Mecklenburg Declaration; no memorial from Hanover Presbytery; no Tennent stirring the Carolinas; no Craighead sowing the seeds of the coming Revolution; no Witherspoon pleading for the signing of our great charter; and no such declaration and constitution as are ours-—the great Tilghman himself being witness in these clear words, never by us to be let die: ‘The framers of the Constitution of the United States were greatly indebted to the standards of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in modelling that admirable document.’ " (Rev. John S. McIntosh, D.D., L.L.D.)


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