How the Scottish Enlightenment and Scotch-Irish Built America

The deepest source code of the American mind wasn’t written in England. It was written in Scots.

A small, cold, poor country on the edge of Europe spent two generations asking one question: how can free people govern themselves without a master? Their answer—delivered through both philosophers and frontiersmen—became the source code of the United States.

In the summer of 1776, a fifty-three-year-old Scottish bachelor published a book in London. It was long, it was dense, and it was about money—about why some nations grow rich and others stay poor. That same summer, three thousand miles away, a group of colonial lawyers, planters, and printers signed a document declaring that thirteen British colonies were now free states.

The book was The Wealth of Nations. The man was Adam Smith. And the connection between his book and that declaration is not a coincidence of the calendar.

Here’s the claim I want to make, and I’ll make it strongly so we can test it together: the United States is, in a real and traceable sense, a Scottish invention. Not a British one. Not purely an English one. A Scottish one.

Let me be careful, because “country X invented country Y” is usually overheated nonsense. I don’t mean the Scots did it alone. The English political tradition is real and enormous—Magna Carta, the common law, the Glorious Revolution, John Locke. The Romans and the Greeks gave us immense gifts as well. What I mean is narrower and, I think, more interesting: that the specific intellectual machinery the Founders reached for when they had to actually design a country—the working theory of human nature, of commerce, of how order arises—was disproportionately Scottish. And that a second, entirely separate stream of Scottish people supplied the raw temperament of a huge swath of the American character. Two gifts, from one small nation, arriving at the same moment.

This article traces both lines—from Edinburgh and Glasgow to Philadelphia and Virginia, and then up into the hollows and ridgelines of Appalachia, where a very different Scottish inheritance still shapes who Americans are.

What Was the Scottish Enlightenment?

Most people have heard of the French Enlightenment—Voltaire, Rousseau, the Parisian salons. Fewer know that arguably the more consequential Enlightenment, at least for America, happened up in Scotland.

Picture Scotland in the early 1700s. A small country—maybe a million and a quarter people. Cold. Genuinely poor, one of the poorer nations in Western Europe. It had just entered an unpopular union with England in 1707, which many Scots saw as a humiliating sellout by a bankrupt elite. And bankrupt is not a metaphor: a few years earlier Scotland had nearly ruined itself on the Darien scheme—a disastrous attempt to plant a trading colony on the isthmus of Panama. It failed spectacularly and swallowed a huge fraction of the nation’s available capital.

So: small, cold, poor, recently humiliated, having just lost its independent parliament. By every reasonable expectation, a backwater. And yet—within a generation or two—this country produced one of the greatest concentrations of genius in human history, the kind you otherwise only see in fifth-century Athens or Renaissance Florence.

Consider the roster. David Hume, whom many consider the greatest philosopher ever to write in English. Adam Smith, who essentially founded economics and was a profound moral philosopher besides. Adam Ferguson, a founder of sociology. Francis Hutcheson, the moral-sense theorist who taught Smith. Thomas Reid, founder of the “common sense” school. Lord Kames, pioneering theorist of property and historical development. William Robertson, one of the most celebrated historians of the age. And in the sciences: James Watt, whose steam engine helped launch the Industrial Revolution; Joseph Black, a founder of modern chemistry; James Hutton, the father of modern geology. All of it pouring out of two small cities within a few decades.

Why there? Why then? There are real answers.

Education. Scotland had a near-universal parish school system, rooted in the Presbyterian Kirk. John Knox’s Reformation had pushed the radical idea that everyone should be able to read—so they could read Scripture for themselves. That was a religious goal, and one of the reasons the protestant reformation syncs so closely to the liberty movement. But the unintended consequence—hold onto that phrase, it becomes a theme—was one of the most literate general populations in Europe. On top of the parish schools, this tiny nation had five universities; England, with five times the population, had just two.

Practical universities. The Scottish universities were a different animal from Oxford and Cambridge, which were essentially expensive finishing schools for Anglican gentlemen. The Scottish ones were urban, affordable, and taught useful things—medicine, law, natural science, moral philosophy—often by lecturers who depended on student fees and therefore actually had to be good.

The clubs. Edinburgh had an extraordinary culture of intellectual sociability. The Old Town was crammed onto a single ridge, so the lawyers and professors and ministers lived on top of each other and organized into dozens of societies—the Select Society, the Poker Club, debating clubs, dining clubs where serious men argued for hours over claret. Hume and Smith were close friends in this world. These ideas weren’t produced by lonely geniuses in towers; they were hammered out in the friction of smart people disagreeing in person, for years.

Mass literacy from the bottom, cheap practical universities in the middle, intense face-to-face debate at the top, and a whole country with something to prove. That’s the engine.

But here’s what matters most for our story, stated as sharply as I can: the central question the Scots kept circling was how does a free society actually work? Not “how should a king rule.” Not “what does God command.” But: when you have free individuals each pursuing their own interests, with no absolute monarch and no central command, what holds them together? What produces order, morality, and prosperity from the bottom up?

And notice why the Scots were primed to ask it. After the union, with the old court and parliament gone, Scotland began to transform itself through trade and improvement—largely without anyone directing it from above. They were living inside a real-time experiment in spontaneous development. The abstract question was the story of their own surprising rise.

That question—how do free people order themselves without a master?—is the seed of America.

David Hume: The Skeptic Who Cleared the Ground

Let’s start with the most radical mind of the bunch.

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. He’s often called the greatest philosopher to write in English, and he was also—scandalously for his time and place—a religious skeptic. It cost him: he was denied a university professorship twice, blocked by an establishment that suspected him of atheism. So he made his living as a librarian, historian, and essayist.

His pure technical philosophy—on causation, on why we can’t actually prove the future will resemble the past—is a whole other article. What matters here is Hume the political and economic thinker, because that’s the Hume the Founders read. He maee three major contributions:

A theory of human nature. Hume argued, in his famous and misunderstood phrase, that reason is “the slave of the passions.” Humans aren’t rational calculators who occasionally get swayed by feeling; it’s the reverse. Remember our study of Pathos. The emotionless man isn’t one of great reason, but one who’s paralyzed by indecision. No, human beings are bundles of emotion, habit, and self-interest, and reason is the tool we use to get what our passions already want. This sounds cynical, but it leads somewhere intensely practical: if you’re designing a government, don’t design it for angels. Design it for actual human beings, who are self-interested and sometimes corrupt, and build a machine that works with that raw material.

That is essentially James Madison. In Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The entire American architecture of checks and balances—separation of powers, ambition set against ambition, faction against faction—is built on a Humean premise. It doesn’t try to make people virtuous and then trust them; it assumes self-interest and engineers a structure where competing interests check each other and produce a tolerable outcome anyway. It’s the root of durability and self-correction.

Factions and the size of a republic. The conventional wisdom, going back to the classical world and powerfully restated by Montesquieu, held that a republic had to be small—that self-government required a shared virtue you could only sustain in a compact community, and that a large country could only be held together by a king. This was a genuine problem for America, which was going to be big. Hume challenged it head-on: in his essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” he argued that a large territory might actually be more stable, because the sheer multiplicity of factions makes it harder for any one of them to dominate the rest. Bigness could be a feature, not a bug.

Madison takes that and runs it into the end zone in Federalist 10—plausibly the most important and original work of American political theory ever written. The way to control faction, he argues, is not to suppress it but to enlarge the republic: extend the sphere, take in more interests, and no single faction can form an oppressive majority. The very size everyone thought would doom a large republic becomes the thing that protects liberty. That’s Hume, refined and Americanized.

Commerce and liberty. For most of Western history there had been a deep moral suspicion of commerce; the classical and aristocratic traditions looked down on merchants as grubby and corrupting. A gentleman should just be wealthy, not work hard to improve his station. Hume attacked this directly. Commerce, he argued, civilizes: it makes people more industrious, knowledgeable, sociable—and freer, because it disperses wealth and power away from the crown and grows an independent middle class. Commerce and liberty rise together.

Step back and see what Hume has done: he cleared the ground. Humans are self-interested—build with that. Big republics work—good, because America will be enormous. Commerce liberates rather than corrupts—wonderful, because America will be a vast commercial republic. Every plank ends up load-bearing in the American foundation.

Adam Smith: The Architect of Commercial Society

Now, the man whose great book shares its birth year with American independence.

Everybody knows Smith—father of economics, the “invisible hand,” free markets. All true. But here’s what almost everyone gets wrong: you cannot understand Smith if the only thing you know is The Wealth of Nations. He was first and foremost a moral philosopher; he held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. His first great work, seventeen years earlier, was a book about ethics and psychology, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He regarded it as his more important book and revised it his whole life.

And the key to Smith is that in that first book he asks the same question Hume asked—the question the whole Scottish Enlightenment was obsessed with. If people are self-interested, how does a decent, moral society emerge from the bottom up?

His answer is sympathy—closer to what we’d call empathy in today’s language. We have a natural capacity to imagine ourselves into another person’s situation and feel a shadow of what they feel. Remember our Pathos studies again, how we care more about the individual than the statistic because we can see ourselves in them. From this, Smith builds the impartial spectator: an imagined, fair-minded observer inside your own head, judging your conduct as a reasonable neutral person would. Your conscience, on this account, is that internalized voice. Which means morality is not imposed from above by church or king. It emerges from within, from our social nature. Morality is decentralized—and hold that word, because it’s the through-line of everything here.

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith applies the same bottom-up logic to the economy. The famous passage: it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we get our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Each person, pursuing his own gain, is “led by an invisible hand” to promote an end—the prosperity of the whole society—that was no part of his intention.

This is the most important single idea Smith gives America: spontaneous order. A complex, prosperous, intricately coordinated society can arise and sustain itself without a central planner directing it. Nobody is in charge of feeding London, and yet London gets fed every day, through the uncountable self-interested decisions of farmers and shippers and bakers, coordinated by prices rather than command.

Now, make the leap the Founders made. If economic order can emerge from free individuals without a king managing the grain supply, then maybe political order can too. Maybe you don’t need a divine-right monarch to keep society from dissolving into chaos. Maybe free people, governing themselves through law and commerce and voluntary association, can produce something more prosperous and more stable than any absolutist regime. The success of decentralized economic order is the proof of concept for decentralized political order. Smith’s butcher and baker are the quiet argument that a people can run themselves.

That is the intellectual permission slip for the American experiment—the answer to the terrified objection, but without a king, won’t it all fall apart?

Two more Smith points for the Founders specifically. First, he wrote about the American colonies directly in Wealth of Nations, attacking the mercantilist system that treated colonies as captive markets to be milked for the mother country. He even proposed that Britain should either grant the colonies genuine representation in Parliament or let them go—he saw the coming conflict in cold economic clarity.

Second, and crucially misunderstood: Smith was not a naive cheerleader for business. He warned relentlessly that merchants and manufacturers conspire against the public, that any gathering of people in the same trade tends to end in a scheme against consumers, that businessmen forever lobby politicians for monopolies and special privileges. Government choosing sides. The deep American instinct—suspicion of concentrated power in both forms, political and economic; the worry about cronyism and the cozy collusion of big business and big government—is profoundly Smithian. He gave America both halves: love of free commerce, and distrust of the powerful interests who would rig it.

Adam Ferguson: Civil Society and the Warning

Our third figure is the least famous today and, for that reason, the most surprising—and in some ways the most prophetic.

Ferguson is often called a founder of sociology. He’d been a chaplain to a Highland regiment, the Black Watch, and there’s a story that at one battle he refused to stay back with the baggage and charged to the front with the soldiers—keep that image in mind. His major work is An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). In a chorus of Scots mostly celebrating commercial modernity, Ferguson is the one casting a worried eye on where it might be heading.

Civil society. Ferguson popularized the concept—the dense web of associations, communities, and institutions that sit between the lone individual and the central state. Families, churches, clubs, guilds, militias, town meetings, voluntary associations of every kind. His argument is that this middle layer is where liberty actually lives. The picture of politics as just the individual versus the all-powerful government is dangerously incomplete; the real protection of freedom is in the crowded middle ground. A people rich in civil society can govern themselves and resist tyranny. A people stripped down to atomized individuals facing a giant state is ripe for despotism.

If you’ve read Tocqueville on the American genius for forming associations for everything—a committee, a society, a new church or school—you’re recognizing Ferguson’s civil society, observed in the American wild fifty years later. The Scots described the mechanism; the Americans were living inside it.

Unintended consequences. Ferguson has a brilliant line: nations “stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Societies, institutions, customs, languages, markets—they evolve. They grow organically out of countless human actions over generations, but no single mind designed them. This is Smith’s invisible hand applied to the whole of human institutions, and it’s a deeply conservative idea in the best sense: it counsels humility. The evolved wisdom embedded in old traditions—traditions you didn’t invent and may not fully understand—often contains hard-won knowledge, and you should be cautious about tearing it all up for some clean rational blueprint. The utopian planners who think they can redesign society from scratch are Ferguson’s early, polite, devastating target.

The warning. Here’s what makes Ferguson the worried prophet, and it’s uncomfortably relevant today. He feared that commercial society—for all its wealth and refinement—might quietly make men soft. That the very thing Smith celebrated, the division of labor, might also fragment and diminish the people caught inside it. If every man becomes a narrow specialist absorbed in private comfort, he may lose the broad civic capacities, the public spirit, the toughness a free people needs to stay free. A nation of comfortable, specialized, private individuals might slowly become passive—handing the defense of their liberty to a professional army and the running of their affairs to a paternal government—and wake one day to find their freedom traded away for comfort, without anyone ever quite deciding to give it up.

Ferguson’s antidote was citizen virtue, and specifically the citizen-soldier: free men must be personally willing and able to defend their own freedom, not fully outsource it to a hired army or a paternal state. It is why my show is named Citizen. And that idea—the armed, self-reliant, civically engaged citizen, suspicious of standing armies, ready to muster in defense of his community, an expert on his history and traditions—lands in America with tremendous force. It’s in the Founding-era horror of standing armies, in the militia tradition, in the Second Amendment. And it was woven into the bones of one particular group of Scottish immigrants pouring into the colonies in exactly these decades. Ferguson theorized the citizen-soldier in an Edinburgh study. There were people sailing to America who simply were it.

So before we reach the polished Founders in the drawing rooms of Philadelphia, we have to leave the city for the backcountry.

The Scotch-Irish and the Appalachian Attitude

So far the Scottish Enlightenment has been ideas—books, philosophers, the sociable world of the lecture hall and the debating club. But there’s a second great Scottish stream into America, and it didn’t come through libraries. It came through hardship, from tough bastards, and it settled in the mountains.

These are the Scotch-Irish, and the name is misleading, so let me untangle it—because the history inside the name is the whole point.

Go back to the 1600s. The English crown, facing rebellious Catholic Ireland, pursued a policy of “plantation”—settling the troublesome north, Ulster, with loyal Protestants. They planted tens of thousands of Lowland Scots—tough, poor, fiercely Presbyterian people from the border country—into the north of Ireland. These Scots lived in Ulster for generations but never fully prospered and never stopped being outsiders: squeezed by absentee landlords charging brutal “rack-rents,” discriminated against as Presbyterian dissenters by the Anglican establishment, battered by periodic bad harvests.

So, starting around 1717 and continuing in great waves all century, they left—by the hundreds of thousands—for America. Scottish in origin, Irish by way of a few generations in Ulster. That’s the hyphen. By the Revolution, they may have numbered a quarter of a million or more. This is when part of my family arrived in the United States, from Glasgow and Galloway, to Belfast and Derry, to the Appalachians.

Here’s the crucial part. Where did these people come from originally, before Ulster? The Scottish Lowlands and especially the Anglo-Scottish borderlands—for centuries among the most violent, lawless, unstable regions in the British Isles. The border was a war zone for three hundred years: raided and counter-raided, terrorized by feuding families and organized cattle-rustlers, the Border Reivers. Central government, in Edinburgh or London, was distant and useless. The law did not protect you. The crown did not protect you.

When you live for generations in a place like that, you develop a particular culture, because you must. Intense loyalty to kin and clan, because your extended family is your only protection. A fierce, prickly sense of personal honor—because in a world without effective law, your reputation as someone who will retaliate is your only security; you do not tolerate an insult, because tolerating one marks you as prey. A deep, instinctive suspicion of all outside authority—of governments, taxes, distant officials—because in your experience, outside authority was only ever a predator or a parasite, never a protector. A warrior ethos, a readiness to fight. And, paradoxically, a fierce egalitarianism and personal independence: no man is your better by birth; you bow to no lord; rank is earned through force of character, not granted by a distant aristocracy you have every reason to despise.

They brought that entire package to America, fully intact. And where did they settle? Not the comfortable, settled coastal cities—those were taken, by English Quakers and Puritans and Anglicans they didn’t much like, and the feeling was mutual. They poured inland, to the dangerous edge: down the Great Wagon Road through Pennsylvania, into the Shenandoah Valley, and all along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains—the Carolina backcountry, what became Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia.

Why the mountains? Partly cheap, available frontier land. Partly because the rugged terrain resembled the borderlands they knew. And partly—this is the deep one—because out there, on the violent, ungoverned edge of settlement, with no government to lean on, that inherited border culture of self-reliance and armed independence wasn’t an old-country habit. It was precisely what survival required. The culture and the environment fit like a key in a lock. The frontier didn’t weaken them the way it would weaken soft men; it confirmed them.

And this is where you get the deep roots of the Appalachian attitude—and a huge chunk of the broader American frontier character, far beyond the mountains, because these people and their descendants kept pushing west. The cussed, bone-deep independence. Don’t tread on me—which isn’t a polished philosophical proposition but a snarl and a warning. The reflexive suspicion of the federal government, of distant elites, of bankers, of anyone in a fine coat giving orders. The intense honor culture, which historians and social scientists have linked directly to higher rates of feuding and personal violence in the South and Appalachia—the world of the Hatfields and McCoys, of the duel, of the man who will not be disrespected. The fierce, flag-waving patriotism that coexists, without any felt contradiction, with a profound distrust of the actual government: love of country, suspicion of the state. The self-reliance, the rifle over the cabin door.

And these people were decisive in the Revolution, especially in the brutal southern campaign. Take one battle: King’s Mountain, October 1780. About an hour from where I was born. A British officer named Patrick Ferguson—no relation to our philosopher—threatened to march over the mountains and lay waste to the frontier settlements if they didn’t submit. Exactly the wrong thing to say to these people. The Overmountain Men—Scotch-Irish frontier militia who lived by that border code—mustered themselves with no orders from any government, elected their own officers, crossed the mountains, hunted Ferguson down, and destroyed his force. It was a turning point in the southern war, won by self-organized, self-armed citizen-soldiers who answered to no central command and fought because their honor and their homes had been threatened. Men who just wanted to be left alone. A British official reportedly described the whole Revolution as, in essence, “a Presbyterian rebellion.” Given who was doing much of the backcountry fighting, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

Now look at the symmetry, because this is the heart of it. Scotland sent America two separate gifts, through two separate channels, at the same moment. From the universities and clubs of Edinburgh and Glasgow: the intellectual architecture—Smith, Hume, Ferguson; the worked-out theory of liberty, commerce, human nature, spontaneous order, civil society. The blueprint, drawn by philosophers. From the borderlands and Ulster: the temperamental architecture—a flesh-and-blood culture of independence, honor, suspicion of authority, egalitarianism, and armed self-reliance. The gut instinct, carried by farmers and fighters.

And here’s the thing that will give you chills: the two halves agree. Ferguson, the Edinburgh professor, theorized that liberty requires the virtuous citizen-soldier, personally willing to defend his freedom against distant power. The Overmountain Men, who had almost certainly never heard of him, simply were that idea—walking the Appalachian ridgelines with long rifles and a lot of attitude. The philosopher’s theory and the frontiersman’s reflex were the same conviction, arrived at from opposite ends—one through argument, the other through the business end of a rifle. Scotland sent both, and they met and recognized each other on a new continent.

The Transmission: How Did the Ideas Actually Get Here?

I don’t want to leave you thinking the connection between Edinburgh and Philadelphia is just a vibe. The transmission is documented, specific, and in places startlingly direct.

The single most important conduit is one man: John Witherspoon. A Scottish Presbyterian minister steeped in the Scottish Enlightenment—specifically the “common sense” philosophy of Thomas Reid—Witherspoon was recruited across the Atlantic in 1768 to become president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton. From that chair he taught Scottish moral philosophy directly to a generation of the men who became the American leadership class. His most famous student, sitting in his classroom, was a quiet, brilliant young Virginian named James Madison—the same Madison who would write Federalist 10 and 51, soaked in Hume. And Witherspoon became a revolutionary himself, served in the Continental Congress, and signed the Declaration of Independence—the only active clergyman to do so. One human being, a literal bridge across the ocean: Scottish Enlightenment in, American Founder out.

Then the reading habits and friendships of the Founders. Jefferson regarded the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart as one of the greatest thinkers of the age, and his thinking on morality and rights carries clear debts to Scots like Lord Kames and Francis Hutcheson—some scholars hear Hutcheson’s language echoing in the Declaration itself. Hamilton’s economic thinking engages directly with Smith. Madison’s Federalist essays are saturated with Hume. And Benjamin Franklin is almost a one-man transatlantic cable: he traveled to Scotland, met Hume and Smith in person, became genuinely friendly with them, and later called his weeks there among the happiest of his life—with a real possibility that Smith discussed Wealth of Nations with him while it was still in progress. These were not strangers across an ocean. They were correspondents and friends in the same republic of letters.

And, most diffusely but maybe most powerfully, there’s the philosophy that became the default operating system of American higher education. The Scottish “common sense” school—Thomas Reid’s, carried into America by Witherspoon and others—became, for nearly the next century, practically the official teaching philosophy of American colleges. And it fit America perfectly. It was in part a reaction against Hume’s radical skepticism: Reid argued that if your philosophy concludes you can’t know the external world exists, something has gone wrong with your philosophy, not the world. Ordinary people, he held, possess common-sense faculties that reliably grasp real truths—about the world, about right and wrong. It was optimistic, practical, democratic, anti-skeptical: plain people can perceive truth and can be trusted to govern themselves. And you can hear it in the most famous sentence of the founding: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” That confidence that there are moral and political truths so plain any reasonable person can simply see them, without an authority to interpret—that is Scottish common-sense philosophy talking. The Declaration opens in a Scottish accent.

So the pipeline is real and overdetermined: through Witherspoon and the Princeton classroom, through personal friendships and transatlantic visits, through the specific books on the Founders’ shelves, through the philosophy taught to nearly every college-educated American for a century. Not a vibe—a documented transmission of specific ideas from specific Scots into the specific minds that designed the United States.

The Theory and the Temperament

America likes to tell itself a story of pure self-creation—a brand-new thing under the sun, conjured out of nothing in 1776, owing nothing to anyone. It’s a stirring story. But ideas have parents. Nations have parents. And an awful lot of America’s parentage traces to a small, cold, brilliant, recently humiliated country that, for about two generations, became obsessed with one essential question: how can free people govern themselves, prosper, and remain decent, without a master?

The Scots answered from two directions at once, and the answers converged. In the lecture halls, Hume and Smith and Ferguson built the theory: self-interest can be channeled, not suppressed; order can emerge from the bottom up; commerce civilizes; big republics can be free; morality grows from our social nature; and liberty lives in the thick web of civil society, defended by self-reliant citizens. Out on the frontier, the Scotch-Irish supplied the temperament that made the theory live: don’t tread on me, trust your kin, defend your own, bow to no man by birth, keep the rifle loaded and the government at arm’s length.

The theory and the temperament. The Edinburgh philosopher and the Appalachian rifleman. The blueprint and the building material. America—its mind and its gut, its institutions and its instincts—is in large part what happened when those two Scottish inheritances met, recognized each other, and fused on a vast new continent.

And here’s the closing thought, because it isn’t only history—it explains a tension you can still feel in America every day. Those two inheritances don’t always agree. Sometimes they argue. The Enlightenment Scot believed in reasoned order, in institutions, in the civilizing power of commerce, in the careful constitutional machine. The border Scot believed in honor, in suspicion of all authority, in the right to be left utterly alone. American life is, in a real sense, the permanent negotiation between those two Scottish souls—between the philosopher who wants to build the system and the frontiersman who doesn’t want anyone telling him what to do. That push and pull isn’t a flaw in the American character. It is the American character. And now you know where both halves came from.

So the next time someone tells you the American character came straight from England, you can tell them: try again. Keep going north, across the border. The deepest source code—the operating system underneath both the Constitution and the cussedness—an awful lot of it was written in Scots.