Notes
Foreword to the Reissue
When in December 1773 William Mylne, Scottish architect, builder, and master mason, arrived in Charleston in the colony of South Carolina, he was embarking on a challenging and unanticipated experience. Scots had been arriving in the colonies in significant numbers for more than half a century before Mylne set foot in Charleston. They had been encouraged to leave their homeland as part of the effort to secure colonial settlement, against the French and the Spanish and, of course, the Native population. Scottish Highland troops had been recruited in the 1730s to hold the southern frontier against the Spanish, and an exodus of Highland Scots at around the same time had established a flourishing settlement in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina.
Many Scots had done well in the colonies, particularly in the tobacco trade. By the end of the seventeenth century Scots were prominent as planters, factors, and traders. Indeed, by the time Mylne arrived in Carolina, Scots dominated the tobacco trade, and the exponential rise of the city of Glasgow was partly due to its success. Ironically, Mylne regretted a lack of Scottish-produced snuff in Carolina (Edinburgh, his home city, had many snuff mills) as he attempted to produce his own from local tobacco.
Mylne’s career as an architect and builder was under way at a promising time for Edinburgh. Its medieval center was notoriously cramped, overcrowded, and insalubrious on its rocky spine—there was an urgent need for expansion. A New Town had been planned with a consequent demand for ambitious building work. Although, as documented by frequent newspaper reports, events and developments on the other side of the Atlantic held much interest in Scotland, it is unlikely that Mylne would have contemplated making his future in the colonies if he had not been forced by circumstance. We do not know how much he himself knew of those colonies and how Scots had fared, but it is clear that, bankrupt by disaster in his home city, he hoped that crossing the Atlantic would offer a means of restoring his fortunes. What is intriguing is that he did not think of using his skills and experience to contribute to the rapid expansion of American cities. He wanted to try his hand as a planter, and he wanted a period of solitude. It is not clear if he was aware that James Oglethorpe, first governor of the colony of Georgia, originally envisaged the colony as a place of refuge for debtors, although that intention did not materialize.
Mylne’s planting aspirations eventually took him west to Augusta and on to Stephen’s Creek, close to the Savannah River. He was helped along the way by fellow Scots. At times others resented what they felt to be Scottish “clannishness” which they saw as giving Scots an unfair advantage. Mylne’s long-term aim was to acquire sufficient land to grow cash crops—corn, tobacco, indigo—with a workforce of three enslaved people and a servant girl brought from home. He had no reservations about either slavery or indentured labor and assumed that managing a plantation required both. The short-term reality was rather different from these aspirations. He occupied a rough cabin and struggled to supply himself with basic needs. Early frost destroyed his crops. For long periods his only company was his dog and his horse. His letters are contradictory, at the same time professing contentment with his basic, solitary existence and requesting from his sister in Scotland items that would make life more comfortable—tools, “half a dozen of good shirts” (41), sheets, and towels. He complains of inflated American prices, but he also prides himself on his ability to adjust. Like so many settlers, he had to learn basic survival skills and to hunt and forage to keep himself alive.
Mylne’s letters describe his life in some detail and provide a valuable insight into the experience of a man whose early expectations were very different from the realities of pioneering in the colonies. He was a man escaping from and, to an extent, atoning for financial ruin, for which he accepts a degree of blame. A suggestion lurks in the tone of his letters that he sees hard work and solitude as a kind of self-correction. He was hoping for a new life in a new environment, but he did not have the means or the opportunities of those of his countrymen who were in a position to make fortunes. But neither was he one of the thousands who left Scotland with almost nothing, from economic necessity, or because they were forced from their homes. The colonies, and later the new republic of the United States of America, offered the potential to remake lives, and for Mylne that was the attraction, underpinned by a desire to seek anonymity. He did not want to be identified as the man responsible for a calamitous building project. He wanted to escape the small world of professional Edinburgh and disappear into American wilderness, although Scottish connectivity in Georgia remained important to him.
Mylne’s arrival in South Carolina and Georgia coincided with growing tension in the colonies as resentment against British tax impositions grew. At the same time Indigenous nations resisted the colonists’ attempts to expand westward as earlier agreements and borders were ignored. Once the frontier was secured against rival Europeans, it was the Indigenous peoples, in Georgia predominantly Cherokees and Creeks, who were seen as barriers to further settlement. By the 1770s there was a history of brutal attacks, authorized and otherwise, on the Native townships and reciprocal attacks on white settlements.
Mylne does not dwell on these troubles, though in a letter of September 1774 he writes, “We are to have peace here. A number of Indians have gone to settle matters with the Governor at Savannah” (53). He goes on to say that as there are no troops in the area, the Indians could easily have driven out the white population. By this time Mylne is realizing that his experiment has failed. At the end of that year he leaves Stephen’s Creek.
As he makes his way on horseback north and east, to Wilmington, North Carolina (an area where many Scots settled), through Virginia and Maryland to Philadelphia and on to New Jersey, he sees everywhere preparations for war. In a letter to his sister of January 1775 he writes, “All the Americans seem obstinate not to make any concessions to England, in every place where I have been they talk of fighting to the last man for their liberties and properties” (56). He worries at the possibility of “a general Indian war & a civil one” (56) erupting simultaneously but at the same time believes that British government troops would easily deal with any insurrection. He gives us a glimpse of the febrile atmosphere in the months leading to the Declaration of Independence. Scots would fight on both sides when war came.
William Mylne’s American experience was not a success, but it perhaps better enabled him to return to Britain with the will to reestablish his career as a builder. Significantly, this did not happen in Scotland but in Ireland. He spent the rest of his life in Dublin, where he was responsible for the construction of major waterworks.
Ted Ruddock’s edition of William Mylne’s letters provides us with the context of Mylne’s sojourn and fills in the background of a resonant period in colonial history. The context is important, but the main value of the letters themselves is the detail they provide of an individual’s experiences and observations. Mylne was an outsider struggling to prove himself in unfamiliar and demanding surroundings. His is not the only account of Scottish settler experience, but its illumination of a specific time and place is revealing.
Mylne appears not to be sympathetic to the American bid for independence, but it was of great interest to many Scots, and Scottish newspapers and journals contained reports of developments. After independence, there was a surge of migration from Scotland to the United States. Although much of it was not by choice, a key attraction was the promise of political and religious freedom.
Since the publication in 1993 of Mylne’s letters there has been a growing interest in Scottish emigration to the United States and the impact of Scots and ideas originating in Scotland in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Mylne himself made little impact. His brief sojourn at Stephen’s Creek left little trace, although, as Ruddock outlines, he was on the margins of important developments in the extension of settlement in Georgia. Most of the descriptions of Scottish settler experience, in letters, journals, and published accounts, date from the postcolonial period. The National Library of Scotland holds a substantial collection of this material. The collection includes accounts of dire experiences of hardship and struggle and other accounts that extol the advantages of American opportunity, perhaps above all the chance of owning land, which in Scotland was beyond the imagination of the vast majority. Even for a professional man such as Mylne the ambition to purchase land would have been unrealistic in Scotland. Numerous guides for emigrants were published in the nineteenth century, as well as official British government information, and a growing body of published material draws on these sources.
Mylne’s letters illuminate a specific time and place in American colonial history. Alongside research on the experiences and contributions of Scots in the United States, it is interesting to look at the effects of American experiences and ideas on life in Scotland. Mylne’s later career was a success. We do not know how much this might be attributed to what he learned from his American sojourn, but it would be interesting to investigate and explore the subsequent lives of other Scottish sojourners and the consequences in their homeland of their American experiences.