‘Them that are dispersed abroad’: The Covenanters and their Legacy in North America, 1650–1776

Abstract

The legacy of the covenanters in North America can be measured through the commercial and political networks they forged with Dutch reformed, Independent, and puritan allies in the seventeenth century. These alliances were forged by their mutual antipathy to episcopacy, royal absolutism and catholicism. English Americans protected and supported the sons of covenanters and their mercantile and political projects to allow them to evade and undermine imperial restrictions on their work and worship. Covenanters earned a reputation as redoubtable and reliable anti-popish reactionaries that inspired British officials to settle Scots on dangerous colonial frontiers in the eighteenth century.