Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND TO THE JOURNEYS

Six letters written by William Mylne* during a journey to the British colonies in America in 1773–75 form the core of this book. Mylne was an architect and master mason in the city of Edinburgh* and heir to a family tradition nearly three centuries old. About 1481 John Mylne received a grant of the office of “master mason” to King James III of Scotland. Alexander, Thomas, John II, John III, John IV, and finally Robert Mylne (1633–1710)* all held similar appointments to successive kings and queens of Scotland before the office was abolished at the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. During the years 1671–79 Robert was responsible for the rebuilding, under the architect Sir William Bruce,* of Holyrood Palace, the official residence in Scotland of the British monarchs. William Mylne was a paternal great-grandson of this Robert Mylne. William Mylne’s grandfather and father were both prominent masons in Edinburgh at the time when the title “master mason” was ceasing to be synonymous with “architect.” Like other masons, William’s father, Thomas, wished to provide his two sons with the opportunity to become architects in the new sense of professional designer of buildings and to do so sent them abroad to study. William traveled in France and Italy from 1754 to 1758, and his elder brother, Robert (1733–1811),* joined him at the end of 1754 in Paris and remained in Rome until 1759.

On his return to Edinburgh, William set himself up in business as a mason and general builder, but he was also willing, as an architect, to provide designs for buildings whether or not he contracted to build them. He obtained a reasonable quantity of both types of work in Edinburgh and elsewhere in southern Scotland. Robert returned from the Continent with much greater éclat, having won the annual architectural competition of the Academy of Saint Luke at Rome in 1758. He paused in London* in the summer of 1759 to submit a design for the new Blackfriars Bridge* and in February 1760 was appointed its “surveyor,” with responsibility for design and for direction of the various contractors as agent for the City of London. He thereupon established his practice as an architect in London; he was soon recognized as a leading member of the profession, obtained important commissions, and became financially successful. The family’s traditional mantle of mason and builder in Scotland fell on William.

On several occasions in the next ten years when Robert was approached by clients in Scotland he introduced William to them as architect or as building contractor. He was also able to provide loans or financial guarantees to assist his brother. This ability, with his own success and his status of firstborn (surviving) son, gave him authority in the family that he seems to have overused and that was resented, at least by William and his sister Anne.*

When William returned from Europe, a spirit of enterprise was alive in Scotland, and Edinburgh, the capital, was set to grow. The city would have to break out of its very crowded site on a steep-sided ridge that stretched eastward from the high Castle Rock to Holyrood Palace, with High Street running downhill and connecting the two along the gently sloping spine of the ridge. The town council had already bought land on a parallel but wider ridge to the north, which was separated from the old town by the Nor’ Loch, an expanse of shallow and dirty water lying in the hollow between the two. A fine extension of the city could be built on the northern ridge with a bridge across the Nor’ Loch to connect it to the old town. Just a year after William’s return he was asked by George Drummond,* the current lord provost of Edinburgh and prime mover of the extension, to design a new “north passage” to the old town, which presumably meant a bridge across the Loch. But the project was not pursued, and for some years William had to be content with simpler work, though he became recognized as one of Edinburgh’s leading builders. In 1765 the bridge proposal was revived, and William won a contract to build it to his own design in an agreed period of four years. It became known as the North Bridge.* Building the bridge gave William more publicity, and other work came his way, though not in floods, perhaps because he was never a man of great ambition. In 1767 a plan was agreed for Edinburgh’s “New Town” north of the bridge, and a spate of new building began, and continued for several decades.

Scotland’s increasing prosperity was founded on improvements in agriculture and on growing external trade fed internally by increasing manufactures; but to individual Scotsmen these developments brought poverty or depression as often as wealth, and many decided to seek their fortunes abroad. The stimuli for this emigration ranged from high ambition to sheer desperation. While the growth of empire required agents of government and soldiers to serve overseas, and the empire and its trade opened the way for merchants, artisans, and farmers, and also doctors, lawyers, and other professionals to establish their homes and profitable businesses abroad, the social and economic changes in Scotland itself following the “Forty-Five,”* especially in the highlands and islands, brought new depths of poverty to peasant farmers and a first real experience of it to their immediate superiors, the “tacks-men,” the first tenants of the land, which they sublet in smaller lots to the peasants. Both were losing their traditional way of life under the impact of “improved” agriculture, which usually involved a reduction of manpower and increase in rents. Their relationship with the landlords was becoming strictly commercial, instead of the former loyalty that had bound them to chief and clan, both for society and mutual protection. A further unsettling influence were the often glowing recommendations of life in America from kinsmen who had already settled there. A steady outflow of Scots had been occurring since the early years of the century; it accelerated after the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763; and in the early 1770s, from the highlands and islands in particular, it became a flood. Many tacksmen were accompanied in emigration by their tenants, and the numbers departing are believed to have reached 1200 in the year 1770 from all the highlands and islands, 870 in 1771 from the islands of Skye* and Islay* only, and more than 1300 from all districts in 1773.

During this frenzy of departures from Scottish ports, William Mylne also left Edinburgh for America, but he left furtively and alone. He went first to London, took lodgings at an undisclosed address and booked a passage on a ship that sailed regularly with cargo to Charleston,* South Carolina.

From there he soon moved to the backcountry at the boundary of the neighboring province of Georgia, where a new phase of white settlement was beginning, with almost all the new settlers coming not from Britain but from the other colonies, especially North and South Carolina. The desire of the governor of Georgia, Sir James Wright,* to extend the settled area of Georgia westward, increasing the white population and the colony’s agricultural production, and placing more settled land between the older plantations near the coast and the Indian tribes’ hunting grounds, had coincided neatly with a need to help the tribes out of heavy debts to white traders. By a treaty with the Creek* and Cherokee* nations he had relieved them of the debts in exchange for about two million acres of their traditional lands. The traders’ accounts were to be settled by the government out of the money paid by new settlers for their grants of land.

William traveled in these “Ceded Lands”* with the holders of the largest grants, but all the agreements soon broke down with the onset of the American Revolution. William had arrived at Charleston on a ship full, or more than half full, of tea; and in the month of his arrival Boston’s Sons of Liberty* held their famous Tea Party,* tipping the cargoes of three tea ships into Boston* Harbor to show their determination not to be taxed by the British Parliament, in which they had no representation. The Tea Party moved the British government and its thirteen American colonies a long step nearer to the bitter conflict that ended with the colonies’ victory and independence ten years later.

The earlier attempts of the London government to raise revenue in the colonies had met with firm and effective resistance, resulting in 1766 in the repeal of the Stamp Act and in 1770 the rescinding of virtually all the Townshend duties (the tea tax being a notable exception) imposed in 1767.

The King and his prime minister, Lord North,* had two aims in maintaining the tax on tea. One was to ease the financial problems of the East India Company.* Although ostensibly a private company engaged in trade with countries in the East, the East India Company fulfilled all the functions of government in the British possessions and dependencies in Asia and the Pacific. In return both government and Parliament had been happy to give the company a monopoly of trade to the East; but by 1773 it was asking for financial assistance to maintain its trading and quasi-governmental functions, while continuing to pay dividends to its shareholders, who included many of the richest and most influential men in Great Britain.

One of various devices proposed for improving the company’s trading balance was a change in the way of selling East India tea in the colonies. Hitherto it had been shipped from the East and landed in London, where a duty was paid; it was then auctioned to merchants who shipped it again to American ports, where a further duty of threepence per pound was levied for the British government. Although some tea reached the colonies thus and the contentious threepence was paid, cheaper tea in much larger quantity was bought by the colonists from Dutch and Danish smugglers. The East India Company thought that by shipping its tea directly to the colonies it could sell it below the price of smuggled tea and so greatly increase its sales.

Parliament agreed to abolish the rule that tea must be landed and sold in London and the duty paid there. But Lord North refused to abolish the duty payable in American ports, attributing his decision to the King himself when he remarked “The King will have it so. The King means to try the question with America.” This was their second aim, and it backfired. Though North’s remark cannot have been widely known in the colonies at the time, “trying the question” was exactly what vigilant Americans saw as the purpose of the Tea Act*; and after the act was passed without even a vote at Westminster on May 10, 1773, a chorus of alarm arose in the late summer and fall at protest meetings in Boston and other colonial cities. In London at the same time the arrangements for shipping large quantities of tea went ahead, and William Mylne’s departure coincided exactly with their dispatch.

William Mylne’s reason for making the journey to America lies in the story of his building of the Edinburgh bridge. It was a large structure for its time, particularly high and therefore heavy on its foundations. William contracted in 1765 to build it for a fixed sum of £10,140, binding himself to put right any failure within its first ten years that was “applicable to the fault of the execution, or of the foundations.” His brother Robert and a family friend named Alexander Brown,* a merchant in Edinburgh, were his “cautioners” (or guarantors) in the contract. As William was building the bridge he discovered that it needed deeper and wider foundations than he had allowed for in the contract sum; and various parts of the side walls also had to be thickened. Although his profit would be reduced by these changes, he asked no extra payment and almost completed the bridge before the date agreed. Then disaster struck. At half-past eight o’clock on the evening of August 3, 1769, when members of the public were walking on the unfinished roadway of the bridge, a large section of the south approach suddenly crumbled. Masonry vaults inside it collapsed, one side wall fell outward, and the mass of earthfill over the vaults subsided, engulfing five people, whose bodies took many days to recover.

Of the immediate effect on William there is no record; of the subsequent investigations to establish the cause of failure and the arguments about responsibility and methods of repair, there is almost a surfeit. William was required to take down large parts of the bridge that had not failed, in order to ascertain by inspection whether they were safe, and then to rebuild them. He was only bound by contract to rebuild at his own expense those parts that were found to be wrongly built or inadequately founded, but he had to borrow a lot of money to pay for the work because much of the money that would become due to him was withheld, awaiting the consideration of the appointed arbiter, a senior judge named Lord Elliock.* William’s largest creditor was Robert, from whom he started borrowing immediately after the accident. By September 1772 this debt amounted to £1,671, and he had also borrowed from other members of his family and friends. The strain on him was long and undoubtedly severe. He became ill, though unfortunately the nature of this clearly recurrent sickness is not recorded. That his normal place of residence was a house in Halkerstone’s Wynd,* standing quite literally in the shadow of the south approach of the bridge, can only have deepened his depression. He eventually felt persecuted by the town council, as they demanded investigation by demolition of more and more parts of the bridge, and was deeply embarrassed by his debt to Robert, the proud brother on whom he had become so dependent.

In September 1772 the reconstruction was virtually finished and the arbiter recommended the council to make some payment to help William out of his debts. In answer they made him a loan of £1,000, but they then failed to finish metaling the road on the bridge, which was outside William’s contract, before the end of the year. In January 1773 public concern was aroused about yet another wall and the council called new inspectors and demanded another round of demolition and rebuilding. This time William failed to answer. He was absent from his house when the city chamberlain delivered an “instrument of protest” on March 26. He contested it in April with his own “instrument of protest” against the council and then fell silent until on May 2 he wrote the brief letter to his mother that opens our next chapter.

The settlement of accounts lay unattended for a long time; but work on the bridge was soon resumed under the council’s overseer John Wilson,* though slowly, it seems, for the bridge was not completed until August 1775. In all, the council’s extra costs were well over £7,000. Some part of this could only be justified as the cost of allaying fears and reassuring the public; and how much of the repair work done by William Mylne was unnecessary it is now impossible to judge.