Siol nan Gaidheal forum

Scotland was at the time providing the human backbone of the British empire; its emigrant population was flooding towards the colonies and the British military filled its ranks heavily with Scotsmen. At the same time, profound social antipathy and discrimination greeted a Scot in either London or the American colonies. Anti-Scottish politics were rampant in late eighteenth-century England. Scots were treated as something akin to an infestation of human rats, not as bad as the Irish but not much better; indeed, their generally better education made them more suspicious for it.

Given miserable economic conditions in Scotland, Aitkin emigrated to London as a painter but soon found crime — highway robbery, breaking and entering, shoplifting — more profitable. The prospect of likely arrest and the hangman, however, turned his attention towards the American colonies. As quoted in a pre-execution memoir, he said “America presented itself to my imagination, and I readily believed it would turn out most to my advantage.” So Aitkin joined the mass of transatlantic émigrés hoping for better on the far side of the ocean. By the time he reached Jamestown, Virginia, having purchased passage by agreeing to indentured servitude, Aitkin was only twenty-one years old.