In February 1761, the Board of Trade and Plantations considered a proposal to settle several thousand Ulster Scots in Nova Scotia, only recently emptied of most of its Acadian inhabitants. While the Seven Years’ War persisted in other theaters, in the American Northeast the French had seen their position slip away as Louisbourg, Quebec, and Montreal fell between the summer of 1758 and autumn of 1760. Eager to strengthen Britain's hold over the strategically important region, thus ensuring a strong northern flank, the Board of Trade prioritized settling Nova Scotia with loyal Protestant subjects. In October 1758 and January 1759, the Nova Scotia governor Charles Lawrence issued proclamations inviting New Englanders to avail themselves of generous land grants, inaugurating a migration of some seven thousand New Englanders known as the “planters.”Footnote 1 Following Lawrence's death late in 1760, the board instructed Nova Scotia's lieutenant-governor Jonathan Belcher in March 1761 that there was “nothing that requires more of your present care than the introduction of … new settlers.”Footnote 2 Their urgency was born of anxieties about the strength of Britain's grip over these lands and their French, Mi'kmaq, and Wulstukwiuk inhabitants.Footnote 3 Even with the planter migration underway, the board was eager for additional strategies to fill Nova Scotia with loyal subjects as quickly as possible.
As the Board of Trade later informed the king, a colonist named Alexander McNutt had come to them with a proposal to help settle Nova Scotia with Protestant Northern Irish families “which he shall introduce, entirely at his own expence.”Footnote 4 McNutt was ideally suited for the job. He was himself an Ulster Presbyterian, born in Londonderry, and had immigrated to Virginia around 1750. He had distinguished himself as a soldier in the Seven Years’ War and spent time in Halifax,Footnote 5 making him well positioned to gain the trust of Ulster Scots and to convince them of Nova Scotia's merits. Furthermore, he was a veteran impresario of settlement schemes in the colonies. In conjunction with Governor Lawrence's efforts to secure settlers from New England, he had already successfully engaged six hundred Scots-Irish people from Massachusetts and New Hampshire to settle in Nova Scotia.Footnote 6
The board responded with hearty enthusiasm, and McNutt proceeded to introduce between two and three hundred settlers from Ulster to Halifax. Yet the following year, when McNutt returned to the board with news of a successful initial venture and agreements with several thousand more interested parties in Ulster, the board radically changed its tune. Now citing concerns over the loss of faithful Protestant subjects in Ireland, the board determined that no further emigration from Ulster to Nova Scotia should be permitted. Disappointed in his aspirations and depleted in his finances, McNutt turned his attention to other settlement projects, his ambitious plan having resulted in the emigration of between four and five hundred Ulster Scots to Nova Scotia.Footnote 7 Though this number is by no means insignificant, by most measures the scheme was a failure; certainly McNutt thought of it in those terms.
This episode in the history of Ulster Scot migration has long resided in the shadow of American Scots-Irish immigration farther south.Footnote 8 When McNutt and his settlers have appeared in the scholarship on Ulster migration, they have generally been presented as victims of the British government's “ambivalence” about Ulster emigration.Footnote 9 According to this view, the Board of Trade's about-face regarding McNutt's scheme had everything to do with the scale of emigration: a few hundred good, stabilizing Protestant Irish subjects lost in service of peopling a young colony was one thing; several thousand was quite another.
This ambivalence argument, I suggest, fails to adequately explain the Board of Trade's changeable position on McNutt's Nova Scotia scheme. More than expressing merely a tension between two equally desirable but conflicting goals—peopling the American colonies with Northern Irish Protestants and protecting the Ascendancy by preventing their emigration—the board's change of mind reflected a changing political environment with implications for imperial policy. The board that approved McNutt's scheme strongly favored settling Nova Scotia quickly; the board that shut it down a year later was composed of several new members acting under new leadership that viewed settling Nova Scotia as a waste of precious funds. The case of McNutt demonstrates that long-standing assumptions about British ambivalence toward Ulster migration are inadequate to explain the government's shifting policies and that a far more decisive factor was the shift in imperial policy wrought by party politics during the early 1760s.
A Proposal and a Voyage, February 1761–February 1762
McNutt's settlement scheme began auspiciously with the enthusiastic support of the Board of Trade. His formula appealed to the board because, at least in theory, it did not involve the government in any expense: McNutt would allow emigrants to become indebted to him for their passage and initial maintenance until they could become self-sufficient. They would receive land grants directly from the government—a significant selling point for families whose fortunes in Ulster often rested in the hands of arbitrary, miserly landlords. McNutt would recoup his expenditure once the settlers were established and able to repay him with interest, but his primary payoff would come in the form of land: one hundred acres for every five hundred people he settled.Footnote 10 McNutt also sought favorable terms for his countrymen; he begged “leave to assure Protestant Dissenters that the Sacrimental test will not be exerted in the settlements of Nova Scotia with respect to their taking upon them the offices of militia, magistracy, &ca.”—enhancing the colony's appeal to a community of dissenters who did not enjoy fully equal rights in Ireland.Footnote 11 He also pushed for cheap rents and reasonable expectations for land clearing and cultivation.Footnote 12
The board could hardly have been more encouraging. In their representation to the recently acceded King George III, they could find “no reason” why McNutt's proposals “may not with propriety be adopted.” They deemed the “degree of recompence” he requested to be “not unreasonable,” and they suggested that “in cases of this sort, no species of reward can be so fit to be granted as that which being contrived to depend on the performance of the undertaking, will be more or less considerable in exact proportion to the benefit which the publick will derive from it.”Footnote 13 McNutt's terms were attractive precisely because they would incentivize him to settle as many families as he could, thus advancing the board's desired end of speedily populating a strategically important region.
With the board's warm reception of his proposal, and eager to spend what remained of the season recruiting potential emigrants, McNutt departed for Londonderry at once, without waiting for further official endorsement. In April 1761, he began running an advertisement in the Belfast News-Letter extolling the great advantages awaiting intrepid Northern Irish families:
Whereas the Province of Nova Scotia, the ancient right of Britain, is now settling, which will be a grand outlet and relief for all such industrious farmers and useful mechanicks as may find themselves under difficulties in the mother country … Colonel Alexander McNutt, a native at the north of Ireland, but who hath resided for many years in North America, and is intimately acquainted with the said province … is now arrived here, with a view to procure settlers, and invites all such of his countrymen who it may suit to embrace the present opportunity of removing to this fertile country.Footnote 14
The terms McNutt advertised were remarkably generous in comparison with what emigrants could expect elsewhere in the American colonies. Heads of household would receive two hundred acres and fifty acres for each child and servant, all rent-free for ten years, after which they would owe a modest quit rent to the king of one shilling per annum per fifty acres. Not only was this less than the advertisement's readers were used to paying in Ulster but the terms were also significantly more generous than those that they could expect in Pennsylvania.Footnote 15 The advertisement also assured readers that “civil and religious liberties” would be “fully secured.”Footnote 16 McNutt had a salesman's knack for creating a sense of urgency; near the end of June he recommended to readers of the Belfast News-Letter that families who needed more time to settle their affairs should send one representative “to take possession of the lands forthwith, and prepare matters for the more easy accommodation of the rest of their families, as the lands are very fast settling by people coming from the neighbouring provinces.”Footnote 17 McNutt's hired ship, the Jupiter, sailed in early July, and due to demand, a second ship, the Hopewell, sailed from Londonderry in mid-August with McNutt on board.Footnote 18
McNutt and the Ulster Scots with him received a warm reception in Halifax. The Nova Scotia Council minutes of 10 October 1761 recorded that McNutt attended their meeting, having arrived the previous day, and promised “to bring over Ten Thousand persons to settle in the Province” the following spring. The council “assured” him “that the said Settlers should have all possible encouragement from the government.”Footnote 19 Lieutenant-Governor Jonathan Belcher, son of the politician of the same name who had served over thirty years as colonial governor in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, reported to the Board of Trade in early November that “the spirit for extending the settlements will be greatly increased by the example of Capt. McNutt, who arrived here the last month, with upwards of two hundred persons from Londonderry, and other parts of North of Ireland, imported for his intended settlements, upon the terms approved by your Lordships, & designed for His Majesty's confirmation and orders, which I have not yet had the honor to receive.” Belcher enclosed a memorial from the Londonderry merchants from whom McNutt had chartered his two ships, Arthur Vance and William Caldwell, announcing “their intention to assist Mr McNutt in the transportation of several thousand persons without expence to the government the next spring.”Footnote 20 In addition to the three hundred or so who had just arrived, they assured Belcher, there were “a great number more who have sold part of their effects and are selling the remainder in order to go to said province next spring.”Footnote 21
Belcher found much in the new settlers to applaud: “Tho not of substance and capable of stock,” they had great “recommendations for industry and sobriety.” And for McNutt himself, Belcher had only effusive praise: “The zeal & resolution of Mr McNutt,” he assured the lords of trade, “cannot be sufficiently commended, and both he and his settlers express a perfect satisfaction in the care of government for their assistance.” He gave McNutt's ambitious plan for settling Nova Scotia with thousands more Ulster Scots his hearty approval and expressed his opinion that “the service would be very considerable to the province if his example might be followed.”Footnote 22
A Second Meeting and a Different Reception, March 1762
McNutt now returned to England, where he was summoned to appear before the Board of Trade in mid-March 1762, about a year after his first meeting with them.Footnote 23 Anticipating a warm reception, heightened by Belcher's positive report, he came prepared with a fresh memorial, announcing that he had “contracted with several thousand Irish families to transport them to Nova Scotia” at immense expense to himself. He expressed his hope that the board would continue to aid him “in an undertaking so laudable and which has been so much the object of your Lordships.” His long list of requests aimed at turning Nova Scotia into a productive, commercially integrated colony as quickly as possible. He asked for land “to carry on the Pot Ash manufacture,” permission to build “roads and other publick works” between Halifax and the new townships, royal assurance (since it had not yet arrived) of his land grants so that he might parcel land out to the settlers, and a “charter to erect a city” on a harbor that he deemed well suited for “carrying on the fishery.”Footnote 24
Initially enthusiastic about a scheme that promised to fill Nova Scotia with Protestant subjects at no cost to the government, the board now took a very different stance. In their report to the king following McNutt's second appearance before them, the lords of trade questioned the prudence “for government to permit or at least to encourage any further migration from Ireland of great numbers of the most loyal and usefull subjects your majesty has in that kingdom.”Footnote 25 McNutt, they now asserted, had been too successful. A committee appointed by the settlers to view the reserved tracts had “made a very favourable report of those lands, and of the many advantages attending settlements in that country.” All the settlers had “expressed their great satisfaction in the conduct of Mr McNutt,” prompting him to return “immediately” “in order to prosecute his plan, having,” as he had informed the board, contracted with Londonderry merchants Vance and Caldwell for 10,000 tons of shipping, “in order to carry over this year 7 or 8,000 persons from that kingdom to Nova Scotia,” as well as for “500 bushels of Hemp seed, with a view to encourage the production of the valuable material of manufacture in that province.”Footnote 26 Yet rather than causes for celebration, these promising initial accomplishments were enumerated as reasons for concern, and they prefaced a reversal of the board's stance on the McNutt scheme.
The lords of trade now averred that “however reasonable and politick” McNutt's plan might appear, “if it should extend itself to a larger number than Mr McNutt has already engaged for … it appears to be a proposition of a different kind, and comprehends other considerations than merely that of the local advantages and benefits that will arise from it to the Province of Nova Scotia.” Noting the “eager disposition which appears in the inhabitants of the North of Ireland to emigrate into the American Colonies,” they expressed concern that “many thousands have gone over from the North of Ireland” and would continue to do so “unless measures [be] taken to restrain them.”Footnote 27 In April, the government did precisely that: an order came down from the lords of the Committee of Council for Plantation Affairs to the lords of trade to instruct Lieutenant-Governor Belcher “not to grant Lands to, or permit any of His Majestys subjects from Ireland to become settlers” in Nova Scotia, unless they had been in the colonies for at least five years.Footnote 28 The lords of trade responded with a draft of the order in which they emphasized that “the migration from Ireland of such great numbers of our subjects, must be attended with dangerous consequences” to Ireland.Footnote 29
Having erroneously assumed that his second discourse with the board would be as positive as the first, if not more so, McNutt had not waited to begin recruitment for the 1762 season. His first Belfast News-Letter advertisement for the year appeared in mid-March, about the time that he was making his second appearance at Whitehall. This second round of newspaper recruitment featured the fear-quelling evidence of an eyewitness account from a trustworthy source: neighbors who had traveled with McNutt the previous year. The letter, dated 16 November 1761, Halifax, offered the convincing word of the sixteen signatories—the same men who made up the committee that surveyed the reserved lands in Nova Scotia—that “the said lands are equal in goodness, and fully answer the description given by” McNutt in his original advertisement the previous year. They certified that the land was “capable of producing wheat, rye, barley, oats, pease, hemp, flax, potatoes, turnips, and all sorts of garden stuff, which grow here with the greatest luxurience.” Knowing their audience, they took care to contrast Nova Scotia positively with Pennsylvania. “As some of us have been in the province of Pensylvania [sic],” they asserted, “the soil of this country is much richer, and bears every thing larger and in greater abundance than that of Pensylvania [sic].” And the reserved lands were “situated on bays and navigable rivers, so that every farmer may have vessels come close to his dwelling, for the selling; and transporting his produce,” whereas the lands available in Pennsylvania were at least two hundred miles inland, meaning that “carrying the produce to market there costs as much as the several species of grain are worth at market.” Finally, they certified that they “found all the inhabitants ready to assist, and promote us in our undertaking” and that they were treated with “goodness and humanity.”Footnote 30 The notice offered persuasive arguments for the advantages of Nova Scotia over the mid-Atlantic backcountry alternative; it quelled natural suspicions that the generous terms might be fraudulent or the descriptions of lands inflated; and it gave assurance that new settlers could expect support from both an established community of their fellow Ulster Scots and an enthusiastic colonial government.
Would-be emigrants who responded to this tempting testimony by selling their assets in preparation must have been nervous when nothing more appeared in the paper for more than three months. They may have been even more disquieted when they scanned the Belfast News-Letter of 29 June to find the following abrupt notice: “Col. Alexander McNutt arrived here this day. As his stay will be short, any persons who incline to proceed with him to Nova Scotia must be speedy in their application, as the season is far advanced; and in proportion to their number, vessels will be appointed to take them on board at the most convenient ports.”Footnote 31 Inspiring even less confidence was the sailing notice that appeared 17 August, announcing the sailing from Londonderry a mere three days later.Footnote 32 We can surmise that McNutt, detained in London between March and June awaiting the slow turning of the wheels of government, came to Ireland with the knowledge that he had lost official sanction. The board's prohibition had come too late to stop him from following through with one more voyage from Londonderry, which carried to Nova Scotia himself and some 150 to 200 Ulster Scots, primarily those who had responded to his hastily placed March advertisement and relatives of those who had gone over the previous summer.Footnote 33
Passengers on this voyage met a very different reception in Halifax from those who had arrived the year before. Unbeknownst to McNutt, Belcher's initial enthusiasm had cooled during his absence. In the interim, the Board of Trade had repeatedly pressured Belcher to keep expenses to a minimum—to settle the colony by any means except those that required an outlay of funds. This injunction was unreasonable; Nova Scotia's harsh climate and short growing season made it unrealistic to expect new arrivals to support themselves through their first winter. Those prosperous enough to purchase supplies for a whole winter were the exception; such people had little incentive to risk a move to Nova Scotia. This conundrum was what soured Belcher on the McNutt scheme. He and the council had readily agreed to let McNutt borrow provisions from the provincial government and to supply some of the funds from their coffers for the first group of settlers in late 1761—a loan that McNutt had yet to begin to repay.
Feeling pressured by the board, and with McNutt in absentia, Belcher began to reframe the events of the past year so as to exonerate himself and to cast McNutt as a shiftless schemer. In April, while McNutt was waiting on the board in London, Belcher begged public funds for the settlers who had arrived the previous fall, who were still unable to support themselves.Footnote 34 In June, the board wrote Belcher a strongly worded letter expressing their fear that Parliament, in light of the colony's recent overspending, would be deeply reluctant to “acquiesce in providing for any further exceedings after such large sums have been already granted on that account.” Whereas the previous year's board had insisted that Belcher's top priority was to be “the introduction of … new settlers,” the board now admonished him that “nothing can more effectually conciliate the regard of Parliament to the future support of Nova Scotia … than a strict attention to economy.”Footnote 35 In September, Belcher wrote to the board to complain of the great “inconvenience” that had “ensued from Mr McNutt's measures for introducing settlers without previous notice to this government,” when a number of settlers McNutt had previously encouraged arrived from New England and “[seated] themselves” on lands that had been reserved by the previous Nova Scotia governor Charles Lawrence for disbanded soldiers.Footnote 36
Belcher was therefore distressed when, as he informed the Board of Trade, McNutt “very unexpectedly arrived in November … at the head of above two hundred persons embarked from Ireland.” Yet not wanting to turn away settlers, he received the Ulster Scots despite their “extreme poverty,” while complaining that McNutt had “involved the government by his two transportations hither in the expense of near five hundred pounds.”Footnote 37 Having secured for the poorest settlers winter provisions “in the cheapest species that could be procured,” Belcher asked the council to appoint a committee to consider “the expediency of importing settlers, who upon their arrival, become a burthen to the Province for their subsistence, being intirely unable to support themselves.”Footnote 38 The ensuing report concluded that, given the Board of Trade's tight purse strings and in the absence of a special fund for the purpose, such extensive aid to indigent immigrants was not sustainable, “especially when any such settlers shall arrive so late in the season as to render it unpracticable for them to raise any kind of subsistence from the lands whereon they may be seated.”Footnote 39 Belcher summarized to the board: “I thought it high time to give him [McNutt] notice, that unless his plan could be better supported in point of expence, it could not possibly be carried into execution here, without peremptory orders from the king's ministers, and a public fund allotted for that purpose.”Footnote 40 Belcher's discouragement was by this time moot; though he had not received the order, the government had forbidden further immigration of Irish settlers the previous May.
McNutt fumed about his treatment in a series of bitter memorials to the Board of Trade in the early months of 1763. He reminded the board that they had resolved that his proposal was “very beneficial to the publick service” and “highly deserving [of his majesty's] royal favour and encouragement, as being the most fit and proper means for speedy peopling of the province”—and that now, having in good faith and on the recommendation of the board encouraged many of his countrymen to sell their belongings in preparation to emigrate, he had “been the innocent ruin of many familys.”Footnote 41 The board acknowledged that their reversal had indeed put McNutt and his settlers in an unfair position and agreed to allow the settlers already in Nova Scotia to receive grants according to the original terms; but the original scheme—to settle several thousand Northern Irish Protestants in Nova Scotia—was firmly squashed.Footnote 42
Ulster Emigration and Competing Ideologies of Empire
Given this collection of letters, memorials, and directives, it is hardly puzzling that scholars have arrived at the conclusion that the Board of Trade simply changed its mind when weighing the benefits of Nova Scotia settlement against those of maintaining a Protestant majority in Ulster. Yet there are several problems with the “ambivalence” explanation. First, McNutt was clear from the beginning that he intended “to direct the course of such Irish familys as were going to the other Provinces.”Footnote 43 His initial proposal, which was so well received by the board, clearly described land grants that could support as many as nine thousand people and set out an ambitious scheme to fill those lands with Northern Irish families.Footnote 44 The shift from official assent to disapproval, then, cannot have been merely about the numbers. Second, the board took steps to block Northern Irish immigration to Nova Scotia specifically, not to the other American colonies that were the destination of the vast majority of emigrants from Northern Ireland. Indeed, during the same two years in which McNutt's three ships left Londonderry bound for Nova Scotia (1761 and 1762), ten ships left the same harbor for Philadelphia, and eight sailed from Belfast for the ports of Philadelphia and New York.Footnote 45 If the scale of emigration out of Ulster were the primary concern, blocking settlement in Nova Scotia would have been a singularly ineffective way of addressing the problem.
What, then, explains the Board of Trade's change of mind? Why thwart a scheme that was otherwise poised to succeed in bringing about the rapid settlement of a strategically important colony? The answer, I argue, lies in the shifting political landscape of British government in the early 1760s. McNutt and his settlers were caught up in the beginnings of a political realignment that resulted in a momentous shift in imperial policy. These years marked a transition of power between political groups with radically different ideologies of empire. Patriot Whigs sought an integrated commercial empire emphasizing colonial consumption and open markets. Neo-Tories, on the other hand, sought an extractive empire in which the colonies were economically and politically subordinated to the metropole.Footnote 46 Horrified by the huge price tag of the Seven Years’ War, they also strongly favored austerity with regard to colonial spending and advocated colonial taxation to increase revenues. This neo-Tory conception of empire would come to full fruition after George Grenville came to power in 1763, in policies such as the Stamp Act.Footnote 47
But the sea change was already under way by spring of 1762, when a major shakeup of government, prompted in part by the ballooning war debt and the political preferences of the new King George III, brought the neo-Tory position to the fore. The Scottish Tory and royal favorite John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was at precisely that time escalating efforts to wrest the reins of government from his rivals William Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle. As McNutt made his second appearance at the Board of Trade, the fall of Newcastle's ministry was imminent, and the position of secretary of state for the Southern Department—which oversaw colonial matters and worked closely with the Board of Trade—had already changed hands from the Patriot Whig William Pitt to the conservative Earl of Egremont, who helped execute the vision of his brother-in-law, George Grenville. And the Board of Trade itself saw substantial turnover; of the eight seats on the board, five changed hands between McNutt's two visits.Footnote 48 In that interval, the Earl of Halifax, the long-standing first lord of trade whose stewardship in developing the colony of Nova Scotia is evident in the name of its capital city, left the board to become lord lieutenant of Ireland, taking with him another member, William Gerard Hamilton, as his chief secretary. The three members who kept their seats were all neo-Tories or Bute sympathizers. Edward Eliot, initially a supporter of Newcastle, was already currying favor with Bute in 1761; Edward Bacon built a consistent neo-Tory voting record, supporting Bute and later Grenville and North; and Soame Jenyns, a political pragmatist who tended to support the ministry in power, confirmed his neo-Tory sympathies later in the 1760s in a pamphlet vehemently defending the Stamp Act.Footnote 49 Of the five new members, at least two, George Rice and Sir Edmund Thomas, owed their appointments to Bute.Footnote 50
Such high turnover on the Board of Trade was highly unusual. What had been a relatively stable body under Lord Halifax since 1748 became after 1760 a tumultuous arena in which successive ministries vied to promote their divergent imperial ideologies (figure 1). That the 1762 board that so disappointed McNutt thought of itself as an essentially new body is evident in their dubious statement that the “late commissioners” of the board (those in office the previous year, including the three who yet remained) had acted “wisely and properly” in supporting McNutt's initial venture.Footnote 51 This was offered as a conciliatory preface to their adamant reversal of the previous board's decision. Their suggestion that the “late board” had considered and approved a much more circumscribed venture, involving only a few hundred migrants, is not supported by the records. The British government was not ambivalent about McNutt's scheme; rather, two quite different groups of officials viewed it through the lenses of two contrasting conceptions of empire, and came to two different conclusions about its conduciveness to British imperial progress.
Figure 1 Board of trade turnover, 1748–1770.
From the Whig perspective, McNutt's proposals offered a cheap, quick means of accomplishing their goals for Nova Scotia: to establish a new, commercially integrated colonial market filled with prosperous and productive subjects who could contribute to the British economy as both producers and consumers, and to establish a thriving maritime trade base from which to counter French encroachment in the North Atlantic. The board that reviewed McNutt's first proposal in February 1761 expressed its certainty that the fertile lands of the colony would “want only to be seen, for the people to be in love with them,” and viewed Ulster Scots’ willingness to undertake “a Voyage attended with … charge and hazard” as an encouraging sign that Nova Scotia's enticements would ensure its rapid development by large numbers of Northern Irish Protestants.Footnote 52 When McNutt proposed putting some of the settlers to work building roads, raising hemp, and developing the fishery, or when his Londonderry merchant partners wrote to the board praising the Ulster Scots as “very industrious and skillfull in manufacturry,” and promising to “[open] and [carry] on an intercourse of trade and commerce” with the “said province”Footnote 53 once it had been settled, they articulated exactly what Patriot ears wanted to hear.Footnote 54
But the more conservative board members, including several neo-Tories, who considered McNutt's scheme a year later, heard something quite different. Their priorities were to reduce expenses and to reform colonial administration, centralizing and strengthening control across the empire in order to make the resources of the colonies subservient and conducive to the interest of Britain. For neo-Tory officials more interested in precious metals and monocultures than in colonial markets for British manufactures, Nova Scotia had little to recommend it. Its relative lack of natural resources determined its low value as a colony—a value that would not be enhanced by settlement. For them, Belcher's notice that McNutt had “involved the [provincial] government by his two transportations hither in the expense of near five hundred pounds” to feed the settlers through their first winter was cause for great alarm. And his suggestion that “a public fund [be] allotted for that purpose” would only have further prejudiced them against the scheme.Footnote 55 Unlike Patriot Whigs, who advocated investment in colonial development, neo-Tories insisted on austerity. For officials reluctant to spend money even on what they considered to be productive colonies, devoting scarce funds to settling new ones that promised few resources for Britain made little sense. As the Earl of Bute expressed it, “We ought to set about reforming our old colonies before we settle new ones.”Footnote 56
Revisiting the Scheme, Summer 1765–Summer 1766
The decisive role of party politics in the fate of McNutt's settlement scheme is further supported by its brief, ill-fated reprise between the summers of 1765 and 1766, coinciding almost exactly with the Marquess of Rockingham's equally brief, ill-fated ministry. This window of time, during which colonial policy returned partially and temporarily to the Patriot playbook, brought the Earl of Dartmouth into the position of first lord of trade, replacing the neo-Tory Earl of Hillsborough, who had served from September 1763 until August 1765 and would recapture the post from Dartmouth in August 1766 after Rockingham's fall. In its communications to the Nova Scotia governors, Hillsborough's board repeatedly insisted on extreme parsimony and harsh terms for land grants; Dartmouth's board, on the other hand, lobbied the king to make an exception for McNutt to allow him to settle families on far more generous terms.
Hillsborough's board made its priorities clear in its letters to the newly appointed Governor Montagu Wilmot in late 1763 and early 1764. The lords of trade felt moved by “the difficulties and embarassments” arising “from the exceedings upon the grant of Parliament for the service of Nova Scotia” to urge Wilmot “in the strongest manner the absolute necessity” of staying on budget, and they ordered him to employ his “utmost endeavor to reduce the expence of the establishment as much as possible,” for “the strictest oeconomy [would] be expected.”Footnote 57 They instructed him to run a tighter ship when it came to collecting quit rents, to adhere to a new, less generous set of terms when parceling out new land grants, and to prioritize “upon all occasions & at all times” the promotion of those resources that constituted, in their eyes, Nova Scotia's value as a colony: naval stores and, especially, the fishery.Footnote 58 For Hillsborough, one of the principal “objects” of colonial policy was “to preserve a due dependence in the colonies upon the Mother Country.”Footnote 59 This meant, in part, restricting colonial manufactures. In response to the board's effort to take stock of the extent of manufactures in Nova Scotia, the new lieutenant governor, Michael Francklin, proudly took “the honour to inform Your Lordships that there are no manufactures of any sort carried on,” with a few exceptions. Among these was the domestic production of linen in the townships of Truro, Onslow, and Londonderry, the destinations of McNutt's Northern Irish settlers. Francklin was quick to assure the board that “these very people who have been bred in this way will make less linen when they get into better circumstances which will be very soon.”Footnote 60
Between 1763 and 1765, McNutt had expended his land-promotion energies elsewhere, especially in South Carolina,Footnote 61 but in 1765 the door to Nova Scotia reopened. McNutt's migration path from Ulster to Nova Scotia had been severed in 1763 in the wake of the political shift that stacked the board with neo-Tories and Bute appointees. Their decision was confirmed in an explicit and unambiguous order to Governor Henry Ellis and Lieutenant Governor Montagu Wilmot on 27 April: the colonial government was to proceed with grants according to the original, generous terms agreed to by the previous board in spring of 1761 but only for those Northern Irish families that had been introduced “on or before the day of the date of this Our Instruction, and to no other person or persons whatsoever.”Footnote 62 It is conceivable that McNutt misunderstood the board's decision, retaining only their acquiescence to the favorable terms he sought for his settlers. It is far more likely that he comprehended the decision fully and that he bided his time until the political winds over Whitehall once again shifted, presenting him with the opportunity to ignore a stipulation that the new arbiters of colonial policy, more sympathetic to Nova Scotia's development, might be similarly inclined to overlook.
Whatever his motivations, McNutt sought and eventually secured vast land grants with several associatesFootnote 63 and returned to Halifax in 1765 with “several gentlemen of ability of Philadelphia who came in behalf of themselves” and others to view lands in Nova Scotia “and to apply for grants.” As Lieutenant Governor Francklin later informed the Board of Trade, “McNutt had assured” these prospective settlers that the king's instructions to the governor in late spring 1763 “directing the Terms of Settlement to be granted to the settlers he had introduc'd into this Province from the Kingdom of Ireland included them and all others whom he should introduce and promised that they should have lands on those terms which was not only deceiving those people, but also created many difficulties for the Government here.”Footnote 64
The question of appropriate terms for land grants had been on Governor Wilmot's mind for some time. When he received the Hillsborough Board of Trade's spring 1764 instructions calling for austerity, a crackdown on rent payments, and significantly harsher terms for new land grants, he immediately pushed back against the changes. He wrote to the board that he was “apprehensive” that new settlers, who were “in general … very poor,” would be “totally disabled … from their undertaking” if held to the new terms, which included the “unusual conditions” of an initial payment of five shillings per fifty acres at the time of the grant and the payment of quit rent after two years, whereas previous grants in the province had allowed ten. Fearing that “these new conditions might make an unfavourable impression on the people of the continent, to whom the former conditions were sufficiently known,” he proposed to keep the new terms secret “until an explanation and further directions cou'd be had from Your Lordships.”Footnote 65
No conclusions had been reached when McNutt arrived with his Philadelphia “gentlemen of ability” the following spring, bringing matters to a head. Wilmot coveted the “commercial people and others in good circumstances” represented by McNutt's party, who included “considerable numbers of Germans” who had “so overstocked the good lands, and those situated within any convenient distance of navigation,” that they had “turn'd their thoughts to this Province.” Wilmot observed that Nova Scotia was poised to produce large quantities of “Fish and Hemp,” wanting only “a sufficiency of laboring people” to realize its potential, and that in this productive manner, “those people … will be sufficiently diverted from any attention to manufactures.” Wilmot further relayed that McNutt had produced “many letters” from American colonists desiring land on the favorable conditions McNutt had obtained in 1761. These terms were the ones McNutt had promised, and they were “the only terms on which they [would] accept of the Lands.” Wilmot was torn. He acknowledged that these terms “differ[ed] considerably” from those set forth in Hillsborough's board's 1764 instructions, but he was loath to lose so many prosperous settlers. Having perhaps reached a point of confusion after so many mixed signals from the various boards’ inconsistent directives, he prudently asked the board to make a determination “whether the sudden acquisition of a very considerable number of the most beneficial settlers … will not produce more Advantages to the Publick, then any which can be derived from the difference of terms & conditions.”Footnote 66
Wilmot's plea, together with a fresh memorial from McNutt, came under consideration of Lord Dartmouth's board in late spring 1766, just months before Rockingham's fall and Hillsborough's return as first lord of trade later that summer.Footnote 67 Citing the “great publick benefit” that would attend “the acquisition to this important and infant Province of so large a number of useful colonists,” and emphasizing that McNutt's proposed terms were “no more than what has been already approved in former grants,” Dartmouth and his fellow lords of trade recommended that the king allow Wilmot to move forward with the grants for Protestants who had previously been resident in the colonies.Footnote 68 At the same time, they wrote to Wilmot asking him to wait for the king's answer and enclosing, for Wilmot's consideration and response, McNutt's latest memorial, which wrongfully accused the colonial government of violating its instructions and stifling the growth of the colony.Footnote 69
McNutt's memorial sparked an investigation by the council in Halifax into the colonial government's dealings with him. Lieutenant-Governor Francklin, thoroughly fed up with McNutt by this time, spearheaded the effort. McNutt, the committee claimed, had put the government in an impossible position. He had promised grants according to the 1761 terms (which the Board of Trade had affirmed only for those settlers that McNutt had already brought to Nova Scotia by April 1763) and had expected the government to violate the terms for new grants laid out in the king's 1764 instructions. The government had either to disobey its orders or risk losing a windfall of several thousand financially stable settlers. Wilmot managed to hold off the prospective settlers for several months, but his hand was forced in October 1765, “as the time drew nigh when the Stamp Act was to take place.”Footnote 70 Still waiting for a response to his request for instructions, and faced with “very impatient” men who now suspected that Wilmot had kept them waiting five months “to no other purpose than perhaps, that of being obliged to pay the Stamp duty,” Wilmot, Francklin reported, determined that it would be “expedient and most adviseable” to move forward with the grants according to a slightly abridged version of McNutt's desired terms. To McNutt's claim that the colonial government had stifled settlement by disobeying orders regarding grants to his settlers, Francklin responded that it was proof that McNutt was “very deficient in veracity.”Footnote 71
Apart from one final vessel carrying “about fifty persons chiefly belonging to Families before introduced and settled by Colonel McNutt” from Ireland to Halifax in 1766, McNutt's longed-for migration stream under his control from his native Ulster to his utopian Nova Scotia did not materialize.Footnote 72 Having lost the support of the colonial government, his activities dwindled, and with them his claims, lost to escheats and conflicting claims.Footnote 73 Furthermore, the fall of Rockingham and the reversion to Grenville's neo-Tory imperial policies precipitated the collapse of the Nova Scotia boom. McNutt settled himself at Port Roseway (now Shelburne, Nova Scotia), a reluctant has-been who nevertheless continued to promote the idea of a Presbyterian Irish colony in Nova Scotia. His Patriot politics only hardened with the coming of the Revolutionary War, during which he supported independence and actively sought Nova Scotia's share in it.Footnote 74 In a comment that seems to recall his earlier frustrations with the Board of Trade, he asserted in a pamphlet (ca. 1780) that the grant for Nova Scotia settlement had been “unconditional” and supportive of legislative autonomy in the interest of “encouraging the settlement of the country, which would have been the true interest of Britain to have strictly adhered to.”Footnote 75 As it was, McNutt predicted that the northern provinces would follow their southern neighbors’ example, and he optimistically published a “Constitution and Frame of Government of the Free and Independent State and Commonwealth of New Ireland”–—“New Ireland” being the name he hoped would replace “Nova Scotia.” This pamphlet contained a “Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the State of New Ireland,” which included, among others, “the enjoying and defending Life and Liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting Property, and pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.”Footnote 76
The Ulster Scheme and the Planter Migration
McNutt's Ulster scheme failed, I argue, because a political change at the highest levels of government in Britain led to the replacement of one vision for the colony of Nova Scotia with another. The vision McNutt sought to bring to fruition, with the encouragement of the 1761 Board of Trade, was that of a populous, commercially developed Nova Scotia whose trade would more than compensate for initial government investment in settlement. But his project was incompatible with the goals of the new neo-Tory arbiters of policy after 1762, who instead envisioned Nova Scotia as a model for the kind of coercive, unilateral, extractive colonial administration they hoped to establish across the empire. From the neo-Tory perspective, settlement was desirable, but not at the expense of further appropriations and not if it meant compromising on their idea of what the political structures that connected colonist to king ought to look like. Nova Scotia was to be their bulwark against the increasingly obstreperous colonies to the south.Footnote 77
An alternative explanation for the failure of McNutt's scheme would look to Halifax rather than Whitehall and to the same local factors believed to have brought about the end of the planter migration, which occurred around the same time. Surprisingly, in the large body of scholarship on the planter movement—why New Englanders went to Nova Scotia and why they did not rebel during the American Revolution—the question of why they stopped going sometime around 1763 has received less attention. Explanations have tended to suggest a confluence of local circumstances. George A. Rawlyk, in one of the few explicit efforts to tackle this question, attributed the collapse of the planter migration by the end of 1763 to “a serious economic recession in Nova Scotia, an intensifying dissatisfaction with the Halifax authorities, the availability of inexpensive, fertile land west of the Appalachian barrier, and the opening up of new areas in present-day Vermont and western New Hampshire.”Footnote 78 Yet most of these circumstances are traceable, at least in part, to the new neo-Tory imperial policies.
Droughts in 1761 and 1762 and the removal of most of the Acadian population were clearly important contributing factors to economic recession, but the neo-Tory squelching of industry, curtailing of currency, and parsimony with needed government funds that Nova Scotia had previously relied upon can only have intensified the trouble.Footnote 79 Furthermore, recession was acute in but not limited to Nova Scotia; it was felt throughout the American colonies at the end of the Seven Years’ War and therefore posed a problem for prospective planters wherever they might choose to go, or indeed if they chose to stay.Footnote 80 The second explanation, an intensifying dissatisfaction with the Halifax authorities, is only further evidence of precisely the change in imperial policy that I have traced; the structure of Nova Scotia's colonial government bound it more tightly than other American colonies to the will of British authorities, making it especially reactive to political change. The third and fourth explanations concern alternative destinations. Certainly, New Englanders keen to move might be swayed by more attractive options. But the “inexpensive, fertile land” west of the Appalachians had been on offer during the heyday of planter migration, and its availability was sharply limited in October 1763—around the time the planter migration was dwindling—by George III's Royal Proclamation forbidding settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. New territory for settlement in present-day Vermont and New Hampshire might indeed have been an appealing alternative to settlement in Nova Scotia, but the reasons for its appeal include political as well as economic considerations.
Planter studies literature contains ample evidence that many planters chafed under what they perceived to be the Nova Scotia colonial government's curtailment of their liberties, even if they eventually acclimatized themselves to the extent that the revolutionary movement did not take hold there in the 1770s. Precisely how much their experience differed from their expectations is less certain. Elizabeth Manke rightly observes that “between the founding of Halifax and the American Revolution, loyalty for generous grants of land was the quid pro quo of settlement.”Footnote 81 But worth exploring is the question of when the extent of that quid pro quo became clear to the planters. Did they knowingly accept more restrictive government from the beginning? Were they duped by misleading assurances of colonial government-as-usual on the Massachusetts model? Or did they uproot their lives in response to genuine positive signals, only to be caught up in the effects of a political transition with imperial scope? Planter scholarship on the long process of negotiation over tightening local governance and control over land distribution between colonists and colonial authorities may suggest the latter.Footnote 82
Prospective planters certainly would have been well aware that Nova Scotia's colonial government had always had a more authoritarian structure than its southern neighbors. It bore the legacy of military government; it lacked a charter; its capital began as more a fortress than a town; and its colonial administration consisted of a governor and an appointed council, without an elected assembly until 1758.Footnote 83 Nevertheless, the beginning of the planter movement coincided with a period of more liberal imperial policy, when positive signs may have given New Englanders cause for cautious optimism that postwar Nova Scotia would be different.Footnote 84 The second of Governor Lawrence's catalyzing invitations to New England settlers in early 1759 explicitly, if misleadingly, advertised a government “constituted in like manner with those of Massachusetts, Connecticut and the other Northern Colonies.”Footnote 85 That government had recently held the first meeting of its new assembly, established at the behest of the Board of Trade expressly to encourage settlement, in October 1758.Footnote 86 The board's insistence on adding a representative body to the Nova Scotian colonial government demonstrates that they understood the correlation between political rights and the scale of immigration—and that they were willing to grant certain rights in order to increase that scale. But for planters who took these as good signs, the subsequent reality proved disappointing, as the colonial government cracked down, responding to the Board of Trade's turn toward authoritarianism and austerity.Footnote 87
While a full accounting of why the planter movement ended is beyond this article's scope, the findings do suggest that the question might be fruitfully reexamined in light of shifting politics, and hence priorities, at Whitehall. Such a reexamination might assess the degree to which the imperial policy changes that stopped Ulster Presbyterians from moving to Nova Scotia may also have made the move less desirable for prospective Yankee migrants. In the most recent volume of Acadia University's Planter Studies conference proceedings, Jerry Bannister calls for the field “to re-balance the international perspective and put the North back into Atlantic history.”Footnote 88 Further study of the imperial politics of planter migration, particularly if attuned to the negotiations of power among the diversity of Nova Scotia settlers, colonial officials, and imperial policy makers, offers one enticing opportunity to answer this call to reposition Nova Scotia as central to debates about and political struggles over the meaning of empire.
Conclusion
To scholarly debates about the eighteenth-century British Empire, this alternative reading of McNutt's failed venture contributes supporting evidence for recent arguments that place party politics at the heart of the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s.Footnote 89 It further suggests that studies of Ulster migration must be imperial in scope. Most scholarship on Ulster Scot migration has emphasized either economic or cultural explanations for the scale and timing of emigration waves. According to some mid-twentieth-century social historians, Ulster Scots migrated in patterns that were straightforwardly correlated with rising rents and bad harvests. In this view, making sense of the crests and valleys in the stream of emigration out of Ulster required only charting it against such economic vectors.Footnote 90 For later cultural historians, Ulster migration could best be explained by cultural isolation and confession-based disenfranchisement. These scholars’ narratives emphasize Ulster Scots’ identity—ethnic, but especially religious—and their condition of perpetual, palpable otherness as the principal motivations for emigration.Footnote 91 Both explanations are compelling and essential to any account of Ulster Scot migration. But the story of McNutt's scheme suggests that to fully account for patterns of Ulster migration requires not only economic and cultural explanations but also political ones. Certainly, Ulster Scots migrated in reaction to economic desperation as rents rose and crops failed, and undoubtedly they migrated because their Presbyterian identity marked and stifled them in the Irish social landscape. But they also migrated in patterns that were impacted directly, and in some cases decisively, by imperial politics in the metropole.
My focus in this article has been on the role of imperial politics at the highest levels of government. There is, however, a related story to be told about the imperial politics of the emigrants themselves. Accounts that have focused on identity have taken into account the political manifestations of discrimination against Ulster Scots. But these accounts have primarily discussed domestic Irish politics, citing Ulster Scots’ dismal position therein as a facet of their broader cultural disenfranchisement. In particular, histories that take Ireland to be more colony than kingdom have highlighted the implications of shifting British politics for Irish subjects, including Presbyterians, in ways that emphasize their status as the colonized.Footnote 92 Benjamin Bankhurst offers a compelling alternative portrayal of Ulster Scots’ political self-image in the mid-eighteenth century. Rather than frustrated victims seeking relief from political repression in Ireland, he suggests, they were active and enthusiastic participants in the imperial project who “came to embrace British imperial expansion in the era of the Seven Years’ War.”Footnote 93 Much has been made of the prominent role of the Scots-Irish in the fight for American independence, and of their Ulster Presbyterian brethren in the Irish Patriot Movement of the 1770s and 1780s.Footnote 94 Bankhurst has shown that as early as the concluding years of the Seven Years’ War, “Irish Protestants—like the colonists themselves—had been emotionally invested in the expansion of British dominance in North America.” The positions he highlights—support for the war, for colonial development, and for an identity “as enthusiastic imperialists in their own right”—are consistent with Patriot politics in England and elsewhere in the empire.Footnote 95
Expanding on this analysis, studies of this people's later eighteenth-century revolutionary activity on both sides of the Atlantic warrant a more integrated exploration of a common, prior identification with Patriot political ideology. Interestingly, some evidence suggests that the political sympathies of McNutt's migrants—people of Ulster origin who came to live together in Londonderry, Onslow, and Truro townships either directly from Ulster or from New England as part of the planter migration—were more inclined toward rebellion than were most of the planters, who famously failed to rebel. One hint appears in the colonial council's 1766 report on McNutt's activities. In response to his request that two representatives (rather than one) from each of his townships be allowed to sit in the general assembly, the committee demurred. They had experienced, they complained, “more difficulty in keeping peace and good order” in those “two little towns of Truro and Londonderry settled by Colonel McNutts followers” than in any other settlement in the province. They had no doubt about the reason: the two townships were “composed of persons from the Charter Governments, who still retain so great a degree of republican principals that they make it a point to oppose on all occasions every measure of government … the dangerous influence of which spirit cannot be too much guarded against as the late unhappy disturbances in America more than abundantly prove.”Footnote 96
Yet many other townships were also composed of people from New England who did not overly stress the colonial government with their “dangerous” republican spirit. What set the residents of Londonderry and Truro apart from those of other planter townships was not their charter government past but their Ulster heritage. A decade later, the characterization was still in play: in the heated summer of 1776, the Royal Navy admiral and lieutenant-governor Mariot Arbuthnot resentfully referred to the people in the region of Truro as “great levellers.”Footnote 97 Thanks to McNutt's bad timing and his failure to navigate the shifting politics in London, Nova Scotia authorities were largely spared the “dangerous influence” of a major migration from Ulster. The same, of course, cannot be said for the American colonies to the south.
The feasibility of McNutt's vision for turning the stream of Ulster emigration north to Nova Scotia has often been treated as dubious.Footnote 98 One reason for skepticism has been McNutt himself, whose effusive memorials and grandiose, failed schemes have caused him to be cast as “distinctly untrustworthy,” “utterly unreliable,” and “frenetic and unscrupulous.”Footnote 99 Without denying there is some truth in this portrayal of McNutt's eccentricities, it is possible nevertheless to acknowledge that the terms he offered to his countrymen were attractive enough to tempt large numbers of potential emigrants. If the political winds had not shifted when they did, McNutt could plausibly have succeeded in his aim of directing at least a portion of the flow of Northern Irish emigrants from the mid-Atlantic colonies to Nova Scotia, a redirection that might have had significant ramifications for the large migration wave that followed in the early 1770s. Once a critical mass of Nova Scotia immigrants had assuaged their countrymen's natural fears of traveling to an utterly unknown place—once they had established the soft landing of a community with shared identity that potential migrants could look forward to joining—the cheap coastal land on offer in Nova Scotia might conceivably have tempted thousands of Ulster Scots to go there instead of to Pennsylvania or South Carolina. Indeed, it appears that those who made the journey and survived the difficult beginning did find at least some of the advantages McNutt had promised. A notice for the brief, abortive effort to revive the emigration route to Nova Scotia in 1766 provides some clues to McNutt's immigrants’ fate (though of course it must be read with a grain of salt): “It would swell this advertisement to too great a length to enumerate all the blessings those people enjoy who have already removed from this country to said province, it may suffice to say, that from tenants they are become landlords, from working for others here they now work for themselves, and enjoy the fruits of their own industry.”Footnote 100
