History documentary charting the birth and growth of the Scottish nation.
Through the winning and losing of an American empire and the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment, Neil Oliver reveals how in the second half of the 18th century Scotland was transformed from a poor northern backwater with a serious image problem into one of the richest nations on Earth. This was the dawn of the modern age when Scotland made its mark on the world by exporting its most valuable commodities - people and ideas.
Through the winning and losing of an American empire and the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment, Neil Oliver reveals how in the second half of the 18th century Scotland was transformed from a poor northern backwater with a serious image problem into one of the richest nations on Earth. This was the dawn of the modern age when Scotland made its mark on the world by exporting its most valuable commodities - people and ideas.
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TVTranscript
00:00In Scotland, no other name casts such a long shadow.
00:05The Jacobites' failure to restore Bonnie Prince Charlie
00:08to the British throne in 1746 was a catastrophe.
00:12While the rest of Britain now saw Scots as hated traitors,
00:16the defeat had left Scotland divided and bankrupt.
00:20But there was another, less well-known Culloden.
00:23He was the son of the late King of England,
00:27But there was another, less well-known Culloden.
00:30Here in Jamaica.
00:32This beautiful place was once a sugar plantation.
00:35Many of them round here were owned by Jacobites
00:38who had fled Scotland after their final defeat.
00:41But why travel all this way to reinvent yourself in a new life
00:45while carrying with you all the baggage of the old one?
00:49Because the very name Culloden was to be a bloody reminder
00:52that they must never again allow themselves to be so humiliated.
01:01But rather than dwell on defeat, on the Britain that might have been,
01:05the exiled Jacobites started afresh.
01:08Jamaica was a land rich in resources, waiting to be exploited.
01:13From halfway across the world, they helped rebuild Scotland,
01:17injecting it with wealth and new possibilities.
01:23It was the dawn of a new era, when Scotland made her mark on the world
01:27by exporting her most valuable commodities, her people and ideas.
01:32Ideas that would help start a revolution.
02:23After Culloden, there was chaos.
02:2817-year-old Jacobite John Wedderburn had been lucky to escape the battle with his life.
02:33But his father had been captured, his land seized and sentenced to hang.
02:38Now young Wedderburn was on the run.
02:43He needed money and he needed to disappear, fast.
02:53Dodging spies, sleeping in hedges, half starved, Wedderburn found his way to Glasgow.
02:59There he boarded a ship, destined for the colonies.
03:06Young John Wedderburn's world had been turned upside down.
03:09A trip like this would have been terrifying for a boy who, after all,
03:12had spent his whole life living in Scotland.
03:15And even supposing he survived the harsh voyage, who knew where he would end up?
03:22MUSIC
03:46After months at sea, John Wedderburn arrived here, in Jamaica.
03:53To Wedderburn, it must have seemed fierce and strange.
03:57Men as black as the earth, working in fields filled with giant plants,
04:01the place splitting with heat.
04:07In spite of its otherworldliness, it was a British colony,
04:11a place where a young man with energy and enterprise could reinvent himself.
04:17But what as?
04:22As John Wedderburn was searching for his future abroad,
04:25another young Scot was hoping to find it at home.
04:31Adam Smith had been studying in England and missed the upheaval of the Jacobite rebellion.
04:37As the dust settled, he returned to a country at a crossroads.
04:42To many Scots, the past was a dark place.
04:45It was time to start again.
04:48This was the dawn of a modern age,
04:51an age that was ready to embrace new ideas and a new philosophy.
04:57From childhood, Adam Smith had questioned everything around him,
05:01even the existence of God.
05:04Now, he was determined to make a change.
05:07Even the existence of God.
05:10Now, he was determined to make his mark in this new Scotland as an academic.
05:16Rejecting Christianity as a student at Oxford,
05:20Smith set out to better understand human behaviour
05:23and how it impacted upon the codes and laws that govern society.
05:28At the time, it was radical, almost taboo.
05:32Smith argued that if God was removed from our understanding of the world,
05:36man's true nature would be revealed.
05:41He said that man's fundamental drive was not to please God,
05:45but to please himself.
05:47And controversially, that this invisible hand of self-interest
05:51was what made for a healthy, productive society.
05:56The ideas contained in his lectures threatened to blow apart a world
06:00that had always been dominated by God.
06:09But just as Smith's reputation began to spread,
06:12something happened that would change both Smith's and Scotland's future forever.
06:17Europe's First World War.
06:21In 1756, a global war broke out over trade.
06:25Until then, trading with colonies in America, Canada and the Caribbean
06:29had been a free-for-all.
06:31But with so many valuable resources at stake,
06:34Europe's leading powers fought to take control.
06:37The war lasted seven years, and a million lives were lost.
06:41But eventually, Britain won the war.
06:45The war lasted seven years, and a million lives were lost.
06:49But eventually, Britain prevailed, securing a trading empire
06:53that stretched across the Atlantic for a century to come.
07:06The British victory made a huge impact on one element of Scottish society,
07:10Glasgow's tobacco merchants.
07:14Suddenly, the colonies had opened up,
07:17and the River Clyde was their gateway to the West.
07:27The Glasgow merchants rapidly became the wealthiest
07:30and most successful businessmen in Britain,
07:33outstripping their rivals in London and Bristol
07:36and gaining 50% of the world trade in tobacco.
07:39With their uniform of gold-topped canes and scarlet frock coats,
07:43they announced their presence as the country's first self-made men.
07:52These tobacco lords fascinated Adam Smith.
07:56They seemed to embody his ideas.
08:01They were the selfish, self-interested men
08:04he believed would benefit society.
08:08It seemed that the wealth created by these men
08:11was the key to generating improvement and progress in society.
08:15But Smith wanted to get closer.
08:18He wanted to learn precisely how these men made their money
08:21and how they spent it.
08:29You can imagine Adam Smith down here at the docks
08:32watching all the frenzied activity.
08:35This was his first real experience of big business.
08:38A huge labour force pulling together to unload the ships,
08:41heaving barrels, hauling on fresh supplies.
08:44After the secluded cloisters of the university,
08:47the atmosphere here must have been overwhelming.
08:55For Smith, there would have been a resonance to this scene
08:58because it wasn't his first experience of seeing seafaring entrepreneurs.
09:06Smith had grown up in Kirkcaldy in Fife,
09:09where smuggling was rampant.
09:12His father was the local customs officer
09:15and had fought a losing battle against the smugglers
09:18who found ever more ingenious ways to evade the law.
09:21Adam Smith was left with the feeling
09:24that his father's interventions had been pointless,
09:27that nothing can stand in the way of self-interest.
09:30Making money was man's natural instinct.
09:35After observing the Glasgow merchants trading empires at first hand,
09:39Smith concluded that what drove their ambition to succeed in business
09:43was an insatiable, stop-at-nothing desire to turn a profit.
09:47And he admired them for it.
09:55On the other side of the world, in Jamaica,
09:58Scottish entrepreneurs were also getting rich,
10:01John Wedderburn amongst them.
10:06It didn't take long for the Jacobite runaway to find his way.
10:10He settled here, in the west of Jamaica, near Montego Bay,
10:14and quickly set about finding the occupation
10:17that would make him his fortune, sugar.
10:24Running a sugar plantation was not a job for the faint-hearted,
10:28but before long, Wedderburn was expanding his estates
10:32and amassing huge profits.
10:52John Wedderburn's estate lay just a few miles from the town of Culloden,
10:56so he would regularly have passed this way.
10:59Within a couple of decades, a name synonymous with defeat and division
11:03had come to mean something quite different for the Scots in Jamaica.
11:08Money was beginning to heal the wounds for many exiles like Wedderburn.
11:12Having fled halfway across the globe,
11:15he was starting to live the life he once hoped to inherit in Scotland.
11:19John Wedderburn was becoming a comfortable, landed gentleman.
11:24Just what kind of money are we talking about?
11:27How rich could you get?
11:29Well, John Wedderburn got to own ten.
11:32Ten properties.
11:36All totalling over 17,000 acres of land.
11:40Of the 168,000 acres of land which was returned...
11:46So he had ten per cent of...
11:48He had ten per cent of the land,
11:50and he was the largest landholder in that part of the world
11:53and could be seen as ranking as among the top five landowners in this country.
11:57Right.
11:58We have his will here.
12:00His will was probated, and we have a copy at the island record office.
12:04All his entire estate was valued at 300,000 pounds Jamaican currency.
12:14In today's money, we're talking about 22 million pounds sterling.
12:20That would be the value of their entire estate.
12:24By any stretch of the imagination, he was a top dog.
12:27He was. He was.
12:31As Scottish settlers were making inroads into the Caribbean,
12:35Glasgow tobacco merchants were building on their success in America.
12:39Their transatlantic operation was tightly controlled by three mafia-like families,
12:44the Glassfords, Spears and Cunninghams.
12:51Their fleets of lightweight ships
12:53could cross the Atlantic faster than any vessel had done before.
13:01Young William Cunningham was heir to one of the big Glasgow firms.
13:05His job was to supervise the speedy turnaround of his father's ships.
13:10Time was money, so as soon as the cargo was unloaded here in Virginia,
13:14the ship was sent back to Scotland, packed with barrels of tobacco.
13:18Here in Chesapeake Bay, between 1750 and 1770,
13:21the Cunningham docked twice a year, full of goods to sell to the planters.
13:25It was young William's job to get rid of as many leather-bottomed chairs,
13:29golf clubs, silver teapots, cream jugs and china plates
13:33as he could sell from the company store.
13:40The purpose of the stores was not just to make more money.
13:43They were a means to keep the economy going.
13:47They were a means to control the supply and price of tobacco.
13:50Cunningham was expected to find and persuade
13:53even the smallest and most far-flung growers to sell their tobacco.
13:59Demand for tobacco in Europe was outstripping the supply
14:02and Scots traders were out to find every last leaf.
14:08Young men like William were hand-picked by the elders back in Glasgow
14:12because they had specific qualities or qualifications.
14:16They had to be single so they could devote all of their energies to the business.
14:20They had to be likeable and trustworthy
14:23so that they could ingratiate themselves with the local community.
14:26They were under constant pressure to expand the business and to raise profits.
14:31So above all else, they had to be ruthless.
14:43On the same day every year, the local price of tobacco was decided,
14:47usually at the county courthouse.
14:51It was the most important day of the year.
15:00All the local growers turned up and a heated exchange ensued.
15:06A market price was set depending on how good the harvest had been
15:10and what the demand was from Europe.
15:15It was a gentleman's agreement that everyone should stick to this price no matter what.
15:22But William Cunningham's company didn't get rich playing by the rules.
15:25They played dirty.
15:40Cunningham was instructed to ignore the market price
15:43and to deal with the farmers directly.
15:46The firm back in Glasgow encouraged them to offer credit
15:49to farmers who were otherwise paid only once a year at harvest time.
15:53Now the credit could take the form of a loan
15:56or it could be a choice of the goods just brought in from Scotland.
15:59But it was a deal with the devil.
16:01Having taken the loan or the goods, the farmers were shackled to the merchants
16:05and at harvest time those merchants could demand whatever price they wanted for the tobacco.
16:10It was commerce without conscience.
16:14Cunningham and company did well.
16:16They managed to beat the farmers down to 20% less than the market price
16:20using the lure of credit.
16:22But there would be a price to pay in the long run.
16:26The local economy began to falter
16:28as the tobacco growers sank further and further into unsustainable levels of debt.
16:34By the 1770s, the farmers of Virginia and Maryland
16:37owed Scottish merchants over a million pounds.
16:43Scottish business was booming, but it was sucking America dry.
16:49The Scots traders were described by one American farmer as
16:52vile weeds, which if cut down, grow more fiercely.
16:56In truth, they were clannish, mafia-like
16:59and they put profit before ethics.
17:02Adam Smith considered them perfect examples
17:05of the kind of self-interested capitalists
17:07he believed were vital to bring forth wealth and progress.
17:11Smith thought greed was good
17:13and these men were nothing if not very, very greedy.
17:24By the 1760s, Glasgow was beginning to look very different
17:28for some.
17:30Adam Smith watched as the merchants ploughed fortunes into great houses
17:35and the Merchant Quarter became an exclusive community
17:38on the edge of the city.
17:54Not content that their mansions were the most expensive houses
17:57ever to be built in the city, they went further.
18:01They helped the local borough to build this church, St Andrew's,
18:05which was modelled on St Martin's in the Field in London.
18:16It perfectly sums up their showiness, their conspicuous wealth
18:20and their self-serving aspirations.
18:28The balconies were mahogany,
18:30imported from Honduras on one of their ships.
18:44After just six years in Virginia,
18:46William Cunningham returned from the New World to the Old.
18:49In his short time overseas,
18:51he'd been promoted to running the entire Virginia operation.
18:54He'd proved himself in that ruthless world
18:57and now he returned to Glasgow to join the ranks of older merchants
19:01and to oversee the family firm in considerably more comfort from home.
19:07As Scotland's trading empire grew,
19:09so did the reputation of the Scottish Enlightenment.
19:12The control of the harsh and repressive Scottish Kirk was waning
19:16and now, a generation of intellectuals made the study of human nature
19:20their primary focus.
19:22It was a time of great change,
19:24a time of great change and a time of great change,
19:27a time of great change and a time of great change,
19:30a time of great change and a time of great change.
19:33A generation of intellectuals made the study of human nature,
19:36not God, their new religion.
19:39They made waves,
19:40which rippled all the way across the Atlantic to America.
19:44One of the colony's leading lights,
19:46Benjamin Franklin,
19:47was keen to meet these radical young thinkers.
19:50During a trip to Scotland, he got the chance.
19:55Franklin's father was English
19:57and he had lived on both sides of the Atlantic,
20:00so he was familiar with the politics and the culture
20:03of both Britain and America.
20:05He had a brilliant mind.
20:07He could turn his hand to anything.
20:09He was a publisher, a musician, a scientist, a writer
20:13and he was in Scotland to collect an honorary degree in law
20:17from the University of St Andrews.
20:20As both an agent and representative of the colonies,
20:23Franklin was keen to discover how the Anglo-Scottish Union worked,
20:27what unity and strength it brought this emerging superpower.
20:31But after touring Scotland,
20:33Franklin gained quite a different impression of Great Britain.
20:36He told Scotland's finest minds one evening in 1759
20:40how all he'd seen was inequality and poverty.
20:44Among the guests was Adam Smith.
20:47Later, he put his thoughts in a letter to a friend.
20:52I have lately made a tour through Ireland and Scotland.
20:55In these countries, a small part of the society are landlords,
20:58great noblemen and gentlemen, extremely opulent,
21:01living in the highest affluence and magnificence.
21:04The bulk of the people, tenants, extremely poor,
21:08living in the most sordid wretchedness,
21:10in dirty hovels of mud and straw and clothed only in rags.
21:14And the effect of this kind of civil society
21:17seems only to be the depressing multitudes below the savage state,
21:21that a few may be raised above it.
21:26This trip was to have a profound effect on Franklin.
21:29He was disillusioned by what he saw in Scotland.
21:32Its union with England had not made it a thriving country.
21:36Men had no chance of being equal.
21:39At least America was a place where a man could succeed through his own efforts.
21:43America was unfettered by centuries of class division and corruption.
21:48It was a place of new beginnings,
21:50where there was real potential to create a civilised and fair society.
22:03Scotland was becoming more polarised than ever.
22:06Tobacco lords like William Cunningham were getting rich,
22:09but ordinary working people were not.
22:12Dr John Witherspoon was the minister of a church in Paisley,
22:17and he worried that Scotland was now a place
22:19where his congregation struggled both materially and spiritually.
22:27As their moral guide, he was hard-pressed to show them
22:30anything that was good or fair about the society they lived in.
22:37But he was more than just a minister.
22:39Witherspoon was also one of the leaders of the Popular Party,
22:43a movement within the church opposed to the imperious influence
22:47of Scotland's elite classes.
22:49Although he was an educated man,
22:51he hated what he regarded as the loose, soft world of the Edinburgh intellectuals,
22:56who were hand-picked by the same rich patrons
22:59who controlled the country with an unseen hand.
23:08He had become well-known for writing a satire
23:11lampooning the system of patronage amongst intellectuals.
23:15For Witherspoon, the ideas of Adam Smith
23:18and the other leading lights of the Enlightenment
23:20were the ideas of the privileged few.
23:23They could afford to intellectual gameplay
23:25and debate concepts as profound as the significance of God.
23:29In writing it, Witherspoon raised an uncomfortable question.
23:35But what kind of society will we have
23:38if our responsibilities are set by man and not by God?
24:03Out in Jamaica, just such a society had put down roots.
24:08Not only had it lost God, but it was fast descending into hell.
24:12This was the dark side of Scotland's progress to the modern age,
24:16because the engine driving both the tobacco and sugar industries
24:20was slavery.
24:33John Wedderburn, although a Christian man,
24:36knew that he could not plant, weed and tend his sugar canes
24:40and manage his acres of plantation without slaves.
24:47Every port in Jamaica in the 18th century
24:50had something called a scramble.
24:52When ships docked, bringing the newly enslaved from Africa,
24:56there was a rush to inspect them
24:58and pick the best and strongest for your plantation.
25:01It was much like farmers sizing up the best animals
25:05at an agricultural auction.
25:15John Wedderburn found such scrambles hard to face.
25:18Human beings were on display like cattle.
25:21Half had already died during the journey
25:23and many others in the tight confines of the ship
25:26had contracted diseases.
25:28But all of that was as nothing compared to the lives they were about to face
25:32with back-breaking physical labour and soul-destroying confinement.
25:47For all of his career as a sugar planter,
25:49Wedderburn had tried to turn a blind eye.
25:52But he did attend one scramble in the spring of 1762
25:57and in amongst the sorry crowd he saw a young boy,
26:00only 12 or 13, that he found he couldn't ignore.
26:08He was called Joseph Knight
26:10after the captain of the ship that had been his prison
26:13on the three-month journey from Guinea.
26:15He was now a commodity for sale to the highest bidder.
26:28Joseph became Wedderburn's personal servant.
26:31Something about him appealed to Wedderburn.
26:34So he spared Joseph the hard labour in the fields
26:37and had him brought inside instead to be trained up as a houseboy.
26:41He learned to speak English, to read and write.
26:44Wedderburn even allowed him to be baptised.
26:49Knight became the focus for Wedderburn's personal struggle with slavery.
26:53Perhaps having one indoors that he treated well, almost humanly,
26:57allowed Wedderburn to ignore the hundreds that were no better than animals,
27:02whipped and chained in his cane fields.
27:09When Wedderburn was finally rich enough to return to his beloved Scotland,
27:13he took Joseph with him.
27:15He'd grown into a fine-looking man
27:17and he was a Christian by then as well,
27:19equal to any man in the eyes of God.
27:21But he was still Wedderburn's slave.
27:52Although John Wedderburn had returned to a country he had never stopped loving,
27:57Joseph Knight was arriving in yet another place
28:00that reminded him how far he was from home.
28:22In Wedderburn's Perthshire mansion, Knight did odd jobs around the house.
28:27He took his meals and slept below stairs, along with the domestic staff.
28:32But apart from his colour, there was one other crucial difference
28:35that separated him from the rest of the servants.
28:38They were paid.
28:52MUSIC
29:08Knight felt lost.
29:10He drew some comfort from a friendship with a housemaid called Annie Thompson,
29:15but it was his only consolation.
29:17He was now 24, educated and restless.
29:24He asked his master if he could learn a trade,
29:27perhaps shaving and cutting hair,
29:29and Wedderburn agreed.
29:31Knight was released for a few hours a week for training in the local town.
29:35It was probably on one of those trips that he came across a newspaper
29:39headlining a fascinating drama that was the talk of London.
29:43An African slave named Somerset had taken his master to court
29:47in a bid to gain his freedom.
29:49He had argued that anyone living in England was British
29:52and that all British citizens should be free men.
29:55The lords of the king's bench were up in arms,
29:58and Knight, reading carefully as he'd been taught to by his master,
30:02would have been amazed to discover that Somerset had won.
30:14MUSIC
30:20As Knight dreamt of a new life as a free man,
30:23the Reverend John Witherspoon gave up his old life in Scotland.
30:27He'd been offered a fresh start in America,
30:30teaching at Princeton College, New Jersey.
30:34But his wife thought he'd lost his mind.
30:37For her, this wasn't a new life.
30:4011 weeks at sea was more like a death sentence.
30:46But Witherspoon knew it was time to go.
30:49Scotland had gone soft on religion.
30:52The influence of the church was waning here,
30:54and Scotland was going to hell in a handcart.
30:57It was becoming a country where commerce seemed to matter more than Christianity.
31:02The place had lost its moral compass.
31:05He had a point.
31:08MUSIC
31:14Witherspoon wasn't alone in starting a new life.
31:17Scotland's rural communities were leaving en masse
31:20after years of hardship and poverty.
31:23The famous literary figures Boswell and Johnson
31:26wrote a diary of their highland travels.
31:29They remarked on seeing a whole village celebrating on the eve of their emigration,
31:33dancing a jig they called America.
31:38Johnson was later to describe the empty villages and broken communities
31:43as an epidemical fury of migration.
31:50While the colonies represented a new beginning for Witherspoon
31:54and thousands of other rural Scots,
31:56the bonds that tied America to Britain were beginning to look like shackles.
32:02America viewed her British master with growing frustration.
32:06Lack of representation at Westminster,
32:09coupled with increasing taxes on tobacco and imported goods,
32:12fuelled resentment and talk of rebellion,
32:15as Witherspoon would soon find out.
32:29In spite of the darkening mood across America,
32:32in the hallowed community of Princeton,
32:34Dr Witherspoon could not have received a warmer welcome.
32:40All the students turned out to light up Nassau Hall,
32:43the college's central building.
32:45It was a glorious beginning to his career.
32:48In that moment, he fell in love with the place,
32:51with its seriousness, its sense of community and its beauty.
32:56It was a place where the new world could be shaped.
33:01If there was one thing Witherspoon could be relied on to do,
33:05it was to bring his boundless energy and enthusiasm to the job.
33:09He lived up to his magnificent welcome
33:11and straightaway set about spring-cleaning the place,
33:14airing it and opening it up to new ideas.
33:20His big obstacle was money.
33:23When he arrived, the college was in debt
33:25and keen to keep the place independent
33:28and away from the meddling of patrons,
33:30he set out as a one-man band to raise the funds himself.
33:37Using all the charismatic charms he could muster,
33:39he set out on an open-air preaching tour.
33:43Witherspoon's style was unusual.
33:45He spoke from the heart rather than the page
33:48and he drew people in with a rare mix of emotion,
33:51common sense and great oratory.
33:55In Williamsburg, Virginia, Witherspoon raised the equivalent
33:58of £5,500 with just one sermon.
34:01He quickly secured Princeton's future by expanding the library
34:05and by funding new places for increasing numbers of students.
34:08As well as raising money,
34:10he also unintentionally raised his own profile.
34:13Beyond Princeton, his reputation grew,
34:16both as a man of the people and as an eloquent future leader.
34:25Witherspoon had two ambitions for Princeton.
34:29The first was to be a cutting-edge centre of learning.
34:39He brought with him the Scottish Enlightenment's thirst
34:42for knowledge and understanding,
34:44and he created a curriculum where students would read widely
34:47and open their minds to all points of view.
34:52The second was to rid his students of any false sense of entitlement.
34:57Once a week, he opened the place up for meetings,
35:00inviting townsfolk to mix with students for lively debating sessions
35:04that inspired camaraderie and democracy
35:07and blew away the cobwebs of elitism.
35:10In Witherspoon's new America, it would be education,
35:13not social standing, that elevated men to great things.
35:18In Perthshire, John Wedderburn's only ambition
35:22was to live the life of an aristocrat.
35:25His sugar fortune had brought him Ballandine House
35:28and had ensured him a comfortable retirement.
35:31Of all his staff, he was particularly pleased with Joseph Knight.
35:36He felt that it had been an act of charity to rescue the boy.
35:42But below stairs, all was not well.
35:57Joseph Knight could not settle.
35:59He didn't want to spend the rest of his life in domestic service.
36:03In fact, he had already staked his claim to a different future.
36:07Annie Thompson was pregnant with his child.
36:10He wanted to be free to marry her and have a family.
36:16Knight broke the news to his master.
36:18Uppermost in his mind was the case of Somerset, another African slave.
36:22He was hopeful that Wedderburn would at least consider his liberty,
36:26perhaps even give him his freedom.
36:28But Wedderburn was horrified.
36:30Despite all the privileges and help he'd given Knight over the years,
36:33Despite all the privileges and help he'd given Knight over the years,
36:36all the skills that had endowed him with his independence of mind and spirit,
36:41Wedderburn refused to let him go.
36:46Somerset had been freed in London,
36:48but Knight didn't know that the law was different in Scotland.
36:51No slave had ever been freed here.
36:54But he was so enraged by Wedderburn's refusal that he made his mind up to leave.
36:59He would elope with Annie Thompson, the housemaid.
37:03Who had already been dismissed over her relationship with Knight.
37:10Wedderburn found Knight packing his bags and summoned the magistrate.
37:14He was arrested and taken to Perth jail,
37:16and no doubt the chains and confinement reminded Knight of the earliest days of his slavery.
37:21John Wedderburn, when pushed, had proved to be the kind of man
37:25who was more interested in enjoying his own wealth and liberty than offering it to others.
37:30He had his limits, and Joseph Knight had pushed him to the very edge.
37:41Joseph Knight had no money, no influence, nothing to win him his freedom.
37:45Or so he thought.
37:47But the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Henry Dundas,
37:50was outraged by his case and offered to represent him.
37:54The case went to the Court of Cession in Edinburgh,
37:57the highest court in Scotland.
38:00For Dundas, it was the case of the century.
38:03The rights and liberties of the British subject.
38:06It was the most controversial issue of the day.
38:09England had just freed her first slave.
38:12The colonies were agitating for release from their British master.
38:16Increasingly in Scotland, fundamental human rights were being acknowledged.
38:20But what haunted liberal philosophers and thinkers
38:23was the knowledge that Scotland's success and wealth
38:26depended on slavery.
38:38The documents of the case have survived.
38:40Both John Wetherburn and Joseph Knight recorded lengthy memorials
38:44stating their grievances in their own words,
38:47to be used by the advocates and judges as evidence in court.
38:51What details, what insights come out of this record?
38:56A great amount of detail about the facts of the case.
38:59Not only that, but the feelings that are involved.
39:02And I think John Wetherburn's hurt feelings,
39:05he sees himself as a good master,
39:07and that Joseph Knight is somehow betraying the good treatment
39:11that he was given.
39:13On the other hand, of course, Knight's own strong feelings
39:16of wanting to be emancipated from his status.
39:19That's an amazing irony, isn't it?
39:21From our 21st-century perspective,
39:23the slave owner would be indignant about his behaviour being questioned.
39:29Yes, that's right.
39:30He obviously felt he had strong rights in the case
39:33and that he'd done the decent thing, if you like.
39:36What aspects of that could you show me in the paperwork?
39:40Well, I think one thing that we can pick out here
39:43is where Wetherburn talks about the time
39:46when Joseph Knight had read in the newspapers
39:49about the famous case decided by Lord Mansfield in England in 1772,
39:54which appeared in the newspapers, obviously,
39:56and he gave him an idea that he was now free.
39:58So Wetherburn claims that after this time,
40:01Knight becomes discontented and sullen
40:03and is wishing to pack up and leave.
40:05Discontented and sullen? That's right.
40:07Presumably not speaking, taking the huff, if you like.
40:10For having the temerity to want to be free.
40:12That's right, exactly.
40:14There are other parts we could perhaps pick out here.
40:17This is Wetherburn referring to Knight's claim about his clothing
40:23and that he was clothed as well as the rest of Sir John's servants,
40:27but that his stockings were generally coarse, except four pairs,
40:31and that he got no regular pocket money.
40:34Pocket money? Yes. For a grown man, after all.
40:37Yes. Nor nothing for wages.
40:39It's quite interesting in a way, isn't it,
40:42that given that it was a society that accepted slavery
40:46or that still accepted slavery at that time,
40:48and yet his words are recorded in just as much detail as Wetherburn's.
40:55You know, there's a demonstration that the court was recognising him.
40:59Oh, yes. Already.
41:01Yes, as an individual, of course,
41:03with perfect rights to come before the court and make a claim.
41:16MUSIC PLAYS
41:35This is where the drama unfolded.
41:37The case was called from that little window.
41:39The judges sat in the alcoves.
41:41The advocates took the floor and everybody else stood and watched.
41:45Wetherburn and Knight included.
41:53The case, as predicted, provoked passionate debate.
41:57Counsel for Knight argued that he did not consent
42:00to give up his liberty in the first place
42:02and that stepping onto British soil
42:04should give him the constitutional right to liberty
42:07that is offered to every man in any free country.
42:12Pandering to the pockets of Scotland's elite,
42:15Wetherburn's lawyers made an argument they believed few could reject.
42:19Make a choice, they said.
42:21Choose between liberty and money.
42:23They asserted that Scotland was the first commercial nation in the world
42:28and that we had interwoven our interests
42:31with those of our settlements in the New World
42:33and that, therefore, the institution of slavery is absolutely necessary.
42:38But the judges' decision took everyone by surprise.
42:41In spite of Wetherburn's appeal to collective greed,
42:44Scotland's top judges ruled for freedom.
42:56The Knight case sent a strong message across the Atlantic.
43:00Britain had ruled to free a lowly slave,
43:04yet it continued to deny America
43:06an equal relationship with its colonial master.
43:09Benjamin Franklin described the storm that was coming
43:13if America's grievances weren't recognised.
43:18He wrote,
43:34This was the warning bell.
43:36America had had enough.
43:46In Princeton, Dr Witherspoon couldn't help himself
43:49but get involved in the increasing unrest.
43:52He saw the matter as a deeply moral and religious one
43:55and was convinced that it was in God's plan to free America from Britain.
43:59He wrote a public letter to all the Presbyterian churches in the colonies
44:03urging ordinary people to come together
44:05to reject Britain's shackles
44:07with its crippling regime of taxation and control.
44:13Every parishioner from Georgia to Maine
44:15would have heard it read out in church.
44:19He urged all of Christian America to listen carefully.
44:23We must think of America as a nation, he said,
44:26We must think of America as a nation, he said,
44:29and assert our rights as such.
44:31He knew that this wouldn't happen without a fight
44:34but he argued that he preferred war with all its horrors,
44:38even extermination,
44:40to slavery riveted on us and on our posterity.
44:47In April 1775,
44:49British troops marched into Lexington, Massachusetts
44:52to control crowds demonstrating against British rule.
44:56Shots were fired and eight men were killed.
44:59It was the start of the American Revolution.
45:03Witherspoon had got the war he wanted.
45:10And so had William Cunningham.
45:13Back in Glasgow, many Scottish merchants would never recover
45:16the debts owed to them by the American tobacco planters.
45:20But war with the colonies just made Cunningham wealthier.
45:27In the build-up to the conflict,
45:29Cunningham had stockpiled as much tobacco as he could lay his hands on.
45:37Now fighting had cut off the supply,
45:39he started selling it at an astronomical price.
45:46Cunningham might have been the talk of the Merchant Gentlemen's Club,
45:50but to Adam Smith, this was shameless war profiteering.
45:57As the American Revolution broke out,
46:00Smith was working on a book about commerce.
46:06It was the sum of all his observations
46:08on Scotland's trade with America.
46:10But the war proved to be a turning point for him.
46:17The merchants' greed and William Cunningham's profiteering
46:20began to sow doubts.
46:23Cunningham's behaviour appalled Smith.
46:26Despite his friendship with them,
46:28he began to paint an unflattering picture of the Glasgow merchants
46:31and their questionable moral practices.
46:34He attacked their monopolising spirit
46:36and even went so far as to say
46:38that if the government were composed entirely of merchants,
46:41it would be the worst of all governments for any of them to exist.
46:46Cunningham's behaviour,
46:48despite his friendship with them,
46:50said it would be the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever.
46:56The rest of society had not benefited as much as Smith had hoped.
47:00The money had gone into the bricks and mortar of great houses.
47:03Greed and vanity had blinded the merchants
47:06to any real self-regulation or social responsibility.
47:10Maybe it was more than just government taxation
47:13that provoked the American War of Independence.
47:16If the merchants hadn't displayed such rapacious greed for profit,
47:20if they hadn't pushed the tobacco growers into such huge debt,
47:24then perhaps America wouldn't have felt aggrieved enough to go to war.
47:32In Princeton, John Witherspoon believed
47:35that America was waging not only a just war,
47:38but a war that had God's providence.
47:41His stirring views and increasingly popular sermons
47:44drew the attention of the British.
47:46The college became known as the seedbed of revolution,
47:50and British forces stormed Princeton,
47:53destroying everything in their path.
47:59Witherspoon evacuated the university just in time,
48:02and no-one was hurt.
48:04Cannon fire wrecked many of the buildings,
48:06but to his horror, British troops damaged the one thing he cared most about,
48:10his library.
48:15But this setback only served to strengthen Witherspoon's religious faith
48:20and his resolve to fight for liberty and bring democracy to America.
48:27Everything Witherspoon had been working for
48:30was to culminate in one tightly-worded document
48:33that declared a new set of liberties for this new nation.
48:37It was called the Declaration of Independence.
48:45The wording was argued over to the finest detail.
48:48This was going to be a country whose very beginning
48:51was based on democracy and equality.
48:54Not everyone involved could agree to the revolutionary ideas held in it,
48:59but Witherspoon was there, behind the scenes,
49:02urging the process along.
49:05Witherspoon didn't just argue for independence and democratic freedom.
49:09He brought the pulpit onto the floor of Congress.
49:12The only clergyman present,
49:14Witherspoon argued that many Americans would hesitate to join the revolution
49:18unless their cause was seen to be just in the eyes of God.
49:22God must bless America.
49:26It was almost certainly Witherspoon
49:28who championed the line that forms the very last sentence in the document,
49:32which states,
49:34and for the support of this declaration,
49:36with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence,
49:40we mutually pledged to each other our lives,
49:43our fortunes and our sacred honour.
49:48Now the declaration not only proclaimed independence,
49:52it was a visible demonstration to the American people
49:55that it was God's will to back the revolution
49:58and free America from British tyranny.
50:10Witherspoon persuaded any remaining doubters to sign the declaration,
50:14saying,
50:16There is a tide in the affairs of men, a nick of time.
50:20We perceive it now before us.
50:22To hesitate is to consent to our own slavery.
50:31The fighting continued for another seven years,
50:34but in the end, the British conceded defeat.
50:41To Witherspoon, it seemed that divine providence had turned the tide.
50:50In 1783, a peace treaty was signed,
50:53and America secured her independence.
51:05The idea of a new world order
51:08The ideas of John Witherspoon and Adam Smith
51:11had lit the fires of revolution.
51:15Both men were products of the Scottish Enlightenment,
51:18and both had given the world a new moral philosophy by which to live.
51:23John Witherspoon had combined religion and politics
51:26to help bring intellectual and constitutional freedom to America.
51:31In his tenure at Princeton,
51:33he had introduced to his campus
51:35Native American and black students.
51:38He educated many of the next generation of American leaders.
51:42They included one future president,
51:45one vice president,
51:4739 congressmen,
51:49and three Supreme Court judges.
51:54And here lies the man who chose Princeton over Paisley.
51:57He decided on America as the best place to fight
52:00for the principles of liberty and democracy,
52:03backing the country he believed had the best chance of delivering them.
52:07He continued as head of the college for another decade after independence,
52:11and he's buried here in the cemetery at Princeton.
52:22John Witherspoon was a bundle of contradictions.
52:25A Christian man whose past had taught him to look at the world
52:29from the position of the underdog.
52:31And yet he could not find it in his heart to give night his freedom.
52:37Wedderburn spent the rest of his life in Perthshire,
52:40living on the fortune that he built on the exploitation of others.
52:43He also achieved the long-held ambition of laying his Jacobite past to rest
52:48and restoring the good name of the Wedderburn family.
52:51He reinstated himself as the sixth baronet of Black Ness.
52:55But it's a title that serves only to remind us
52:58of a much more shameful past,
53:00namely the blackness of Wedderburn's slaves,
53:03and one slave boy in particular, Joseph Knight.
53:09Knight never saw Wedderburn again.
53:11As a free man, he married his sweetheart, Annie Thompson,
53:15and then simply disappeared.
53:21There's no record of him after the trial,
53:23but there's some speculation that he became a miner,
53:26where, amidst the coal dust that clung to everything,
53:29the colour of his skin no longer marked him out as different.
53:36In 1778, William Cunningham got to build the house of his dreams,
53:40the ultimate symbol of his wealth and vanity,
53:43and paid for with the spoils of war and slavery.
53:47At £10,000, this was the most expensive house ever built in Glasgow
53:52and now lives on as Glasgow's gallery of modern art.
53:58In the same year as American independence,
54:00Adam Smith finally finished his book.
54:03In writing it, his theories about self-interest as a force of good
54:07had fallen apart.
54:09William Cunningham's profiteering taught Smith
54:12that economics isn't just about making money,
54:15it's about the social responsibility that comes with it.
54:19In The Wealth of Nations,
54:21Smith gave the world its first study of the moral and political dimensions
54:25of a country's economy.
54:27Its success was to mark Adam Smith
54:30as one of the Enlightenment's most influential thinkers
54:33and the father of modern economics.
54:37On the last page of the book, he wrote,
54:39"'It is surely time that Great Britain should free herself
54:42"'from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war
54:46"'and of supporting any part of their establishments in time of peace.'"
54:50He was right, of course.
54:52It was time to let America go.
54:54It reads like a diary of the build-up to the American Revolution
54:58and it's every bit as much about a country's struggle for self-determination
55:02as it is about economics.
55:09In the end, there were no winners or losers.
55:12The new American Constitution made good its promises of rights and freedom for all,
55:16but it never occurred to the Founding Fathers
55:19to extend those same freedoms to slaves.
55:22It took a civil war to rid America of slavery
55:25and it's struggled with the legacy ever since.
55:30And while Britain's vision of liberty
55:32remained bereft of democratic principle for decades to come,
55:36it abolished slavery
55:38and paved the way for other European nations to follow.
55:47And what of Scotland?
55:49In the wake of American independence,
55:51there was a feeling in the air of anti-climax, of dissatisfaction.
55:55Parallels were drawn between America and Scotland.
55:58It seemed as though all the best intellectual efforts
56:01of the Scottish Enlightenment
56:03had gone to providing America with the blueprints
56:06for liberty.
56:08But while Scotland thought and talked,
56:10it was America that had put those ideas into action.
56:25In truth, America had changed everything for Scotland.
56:28She had helped to lay the foundation stones
56:30for one of the first and most influential democracies in the world.
56:34As part of Great Britain,
56:36she had taken her first faltering steps onto the world stage
56:40and she would never look back.
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