The Linguistic Landscape of Eighteenth-Century South Argyll, as Revealed by Highland Scot Emigrants to North Carolina

Historians have long known that a sizeable stream of Scots emigrated from south Argyll to southeastern North Carolina beginning in the 1730s, but what language these colonists brought has hitherto been unexplored because of the lack of contemporary documentation. However, analysis of private correspondence to relatives in Scotland evidencing speech patterns reveals that the islands of Islay and Jura in particular were as linguistically complex as today. Some writers evidence only educated English, while many others show phonological influence of Gaelic and grammatical influence of Lowland Scots on their English. One finds both in especially the letters of Alexander McAllister of Islay, well west of the Highland Line and considered overwhelmingly Gaelic-speaking until well into the twentieth century. Possible sources of the influence of seen most strongly in verbal concord, are discussed, especially from communities of Lowlanders planted in nearby Kintyre in the sixteenth century.Keywords: Argyll colony, Emigrant letters, Hebrides, Lowland North Carolina, Scottish Gaelic, Scottish Highlands.In 1700, the Reverend Archibald Stobo was a clergyman accompanying the Company of Scotland's second expedition to settle its New Scotland colony in Darien, on the eastern end of the Isthmus of Panama. He was able to see at close range the dissension that wracked Scotland's most ambitious - and as it turned out, final - attempt to establish its own permanent colony overseas. Despite huge financial and material sacrifice by the Scottish nation and constant efforts by Stobo and two other ministers to instil harmony, the colony was beset by poor planning, morale decimated by tropical disease, and rivalries in leadership, among many other woes. Threatened by its proximity to Spanish settlements and actually lying within territory claimed by Spain for two centuries, the colony was quickly undermined and had an ignominious collapse, with capitulation to and dispersal by the Spanish within months. After nearly a century of schemes, Scotland's final effort to extend itself overseas had failed. The Atlantic world was being increasingly dominated by major European powers at the expense of smaller nations, and the Darien disaster inevitably hastened the march of events toward parliamentary union with England in 1707. An exasperated, if not helpless, Stobo wrote to a fellow clergyman on 2 February 1700 describing his unhappy situation and citing a further cause of division: Near on a third [of the colonists] at least are wild Flighlanders who cannot speak nor understand Scotch, which are barbarians to us and we to them (Prebble 1969: 250).Though the Spanish granted many former colonists passage to Jamaica, few could hope to see Scotland again. Stobo might have been one of the fortunate ones, had his ship not foundered off the coast of South Carolina. Nearly all aboard were lost, but he survived to make his way to Charles Town, as it then was, capital of that colony, and to pastor churches in the vicinity thereafter for nearly forty years.1After the failure of Darien, state-sponsored attempts to plant Scots in the Americas came to an end, but Scots (especially from Ulster) were to form an increasingly larger proportion of the influx from the British Isles to North America as the eighteenth century unfolded. They made their marks usually within communities of mixed extraction, however, but one of the most successful, indeed remarkable, exceptions to this was in the Upper Cape Fear of southeastern North Carolina. This region became known as the Valley of the Scots, with a third of its colonial population being from one small comer of Scotland, hailing almost entirely from South Argyllshire for the first thirty years, especially from Kintyre and the nearby islands of Islay, Jura, and Gigha. A generation later came others from Skye and the mainland (including Flora and Allan MacDonald). The trickle of migrants began in 1732, but it grew in earnest when a group of 350 went out in 1739 to establish what is often called the Argyll Colony a hundred miles upriver from Wilmington, in a rural district around and to the south of Cross Creek (early also known as Campbelltoun), modern-day Fayetteville (Meyer 1961, Stewart 1985, 1990). …