IN 1818, AT THE AGE OF 38, THE REVEREND JOHN SPROTT left Scotland for British North America. Or did he? Physically, to be sure, he reached Saint John, New Brunswick, safely; and soon he moved on to Nova Scotia where, after serving briefly in the pastoral charge of Windsor, Newport, and Rawdon, he became, in 1825, minister in Musquodoboit, some 40 miles east of Halifax. Although he visited Scotland three times – in 1826, 1834, and 1844 – he remained the minister of the Musquodoboit congregation until 1849, and thereafter continued to live on his farm in Middle Musquodoboit from where he embarked on numerous preaching tours in rural Nova Scotia. He died in Musquodoboit in 1869 and was buried there.[1] However, his mental horizons were arguably somewhat different from his physical ones; in many important ways he never left his native land. As he himself once stated: "We sleep in Nova Scotia but our dreams are all in Scotland."[2] Sprott was very much the product of his Galloway upbringing. Distance from his homeland, of course, lent enchantment to the view, and there was a certain sentimentalism in much of his correspondence to his family and friends in Scotland, India, the South Seas, and North America in the many letters and articles published in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Halifax Morning Chronicle, the Pictou Colonial Standard, the Presbyterian Witness, the Reformed Presbyterian Magazine, the Galloway Advertiser and Wigtownshire Free Press, and the Galloway Register. There was an idealized re-creation of the scenes, places, and people of his youth and early manhood, a longing for the "green hills and blooming heather" of home, the "sweet streams of Galloway and the mountains of Minnigaff." Knowingly or not, he was participating in a mythologizing of Scotland and its past. Sturdy Scottish peasants possessed of "canny foresight and gude common sense," pious and inspiring Scottish ministers, and the Covenanting martyrs of southwest Scotland populate his reminiscences.[3]

Recently scholars have attempted to deconstruct such myths while simultaneously emphasizing their importance in the making of local and national identities. Ted Cowan, for example, has pointed out, although myths have been seen as something untrue, they are also "a codification of historical experience."[4] Certainly myths, particularly the Highland myth, has been of prime importance in shaping our understanding of the relationship between Scotland and Nova Scotia, as the editors and contributors to two recent books have suggested.[5] Although connections between Scotia and Nova Scotia were originally a Lowland affair in the main, from at least the time of the ’45 it has been the Highland heritage that has received overwhelming attention and has hijacked historical representations of the area’s past.[6] There are other myths, however, that also need to be considered in any investigation of the Scottish emigrant experience in Nova Scotia, and other strands of what one writer has referred to as the "Scottish Discursive Unconscious," with its "limited and repetitive repertoire of images and utterances relating to Scotland."[7] Those images and utterances include the excellence of Scottish education, the heritage of Calvinism and of the 17th-century Covenanting movement, kailyard literature with its sentimental and nostalgic treatment of parochial life, and hostile attitudes to the Irish and other non-Scots not lucky enough to have had this history.[8] All of these were of profound significance to the Presbyterian Sprott. The importance of Scottish emigrants in the life of Nova Scotia in the early-19th century is obvious; between 1815 and 1839, they accounted for 21,833 of the 39,243 known arrivals at Nova Scotian ports. As for Presbyterianism, it was the largest religious denomination in the province, its adherents comprising roughly one-third of the population in 1817 and identified in the 1827 census as some 37,650 out of a total population of 123,600. Presbyterian ministers, then, proved vitally important as cultural carriers and intellectual leaders in late-18th and early-19th century Nova Scotia.[9]

This article uses the career of one Presbyterian minister, John Sprott, as a means of understanding something about the construction, transmission, and mutation of the myths alluded to above. It will unpick the major elements of his life in Scotland and see how they influenced his actions and experiences across the Atlantic Ocean. It will also show that the flow of influence was not just in one direction. Sprott was an acute observer. His writing frequently focused on descriptions of life in Nova Scotia during the half-century of his residence there while his journeys back and forth – his aim, although not quite met, was to "see the playground of my infancy and the sepulchres of my fathers once in the seven years" – enabled him to analyze changes in Galloway society.[10] In the end, Sprott was both consumer and producer of myths.

He is, on many counts, a good choice for this exercise. Sprott came from a geographic area, Galloway, which is difficult to assign within the usual Highland or Lowland divisions and which possessed its own particular culture. He did not leave his native land until he was in early middle age; there had been ample time, then, for the formation of strongly held views. Sprott’s career did not begin only when he set foot in British North America, and an understanding of the Scottish emigrant experience requires analysis of origins as well as destinations.[11] Moreover, enough materials by and about him survive to make this a plausible exercise. To be sure, he did not possess the outstanding intellectual abilities of the "learned and talented" Thomas McCulloch of Pictou or the reputation of the revered James MacGregor of East River, Pictou County.[12] Nonetheless, he was confident that his letters would be read "after the dust of years has rolled over my grave."[13]

It is also important to note that McGregor and McCulloch, the most famous Presbyterian ministers in the early history of Nova Scotia, undoubtedly benefited from the hagiographical approach taken to them in works composed, respectively, by a grandson and a son, and that there were some who felt that the accolades were inappropriate. An anonymous review of George Patterson’s Memoir of MacGregor, for example, in the Monthly Record of the Church of Scotland in Nova Scotia and the Adjoining Provinces, commented on its "almost idolatrous reverence for the memory of a distinguished relative" while the Kirk minister from East River, an admittedly biased Donald Fraser, remarked in 1829 that the story of all Presbyterians in the province being united into one church was "just about as true as that Dr MacGregor and Dr McCulloch merit all the praise . . . lavish[ed] on them."[14] Sprott also had reservations. In a review of James Robertson’s History of the Mission of the Secession Church (1847), a work that incorporated MacGregor’s own account of his work verbatim, Sprott pointed out that it was "fortunate for the Rev. Mr McGregor’s fame that his labours were written by himself" and that MacGregor had benefited from arriving in the midst of Scottish Highlanders in Pictou who had a "strong attachment to our church." Perhaps, suggested Sprott (who himself received scant attention from Robertson), the "mine of research" on the colonial vineyard was not yet exhausted; the manuscripts and journals of other labourers "who have traveled further" (Sprott was clearly referring to himself) could easily furnish another volume.[15] An analysis of Sprott should help in the construction of a more nuanced picture of Scottish, and more specifically, Presbyterian, influences in Nova Scotia.

A good place to begin to examine how myths were constructed, transmitted, and became mutated is to look at some of the prominent attitudes towards non-Scots – specifically the Irish – as demonstrated in the Galloway of Sprott’s youth. Galloway, comprising the counties of Kirkcudbright and Wigtown, was neither the Highlands nor the Lowlands; it was sui generis, its character formed by its particular geographical situation. At the time of Sprott’s birth (1780) it had few contacts with other parts of Scotland; the main land routes from Scotland to England also bypassed the area, apart from the direct road that ran between Carlisle and Dumfries to connect with Portpatrick for the Irish packet service.[16] Only 32 kilometres separated the Rhins of Galloway from Ulster; in 1798, at the time of the Irish rebellion, Sprott heard the guns at the battle of Ballynahinch across the water.[17] The aftermath of the rebellion brought over many Irish people to Galloway and seasonal work and cattle drives also increased Irish familiarity with the area. Local reaction was frequently hostile; here, then, are some of the origins of Sprott’s anti-Irish prejudices. The author of the Old Statistical Account entry on Portpatrick, for example, four-and-a-half kilometres distant from Stoneykirk (the village of Sprott’s birth), pointed out under the heading "Influence of Local Circumstances on Morals" that Irish sailors were riotous in his parish, the quantity of whisky brought there was "amazing," and "almost every house is an inn." Similarly, the author of the account of Stranraer (another important port eight-and-a-half kilometres from Stoneykirk and a place where Sprott for a time attended school) also alluded to the presence of "too many retailers of whisky" and the "pernicious habit of dram-drinking"; the town was "oppressed with Irish vagrants."[18] Stoneykirk itself had "a regular set of drouthy neighbours . . . who often met at the tavern to discuss the politics of the parish."[19] Undoubtedly these things left their mark on Sprott. Years later in Nova Scotia, in an address on temperance, he recalled how, at the communions of his youth, "Satan had planted his garrisons, and booths were set up for the sale of ardent spirits."[20] Two temperance societies were set up in Musquodoboit during his ministry and the local Mi’kmaw chief, a neighbour of the Sprott family, greatly resented the fact that he no longer received his welcoming dram when he called at the manse.[21]

Gallovidian anti-Irish prejudices certainly crossed the Atlantic successfully with Sprott. The editor of the Galloway Register was firmly informed that the "descendants of Saint Patrick" living in Nova Scotia were "less fortunate, less thoughtful, less reflective" than the Scottish settlers, and this view of the Irish as "feckless" was no doubt gratifying to much of the newspaper’s readership.[22] In Sprott’s opinion the Catholicism so common among the Irish was another mark against them, but Irish Protestants also incurred his displeasure: he referred to some Irish missionaries in New Brunswick as "the spawn of the Irish secession" and suggested that their chief difficulty was not, as the Belfast Covenanter suggested, because of political agitation, but rather because of their "indifference to Divine things."[23] Such views, however, were mainly for consumption by correspondents in Scotland; many of the families in Sprott’s own congregation in Musquodoboit originally came from Londonderry, New Hampshire, a town founded by immigrants from the Irish town of the same name. They were Ulster Scots, mainly Presbyterians, some of whom had settled in Truro, Nova Scotia, before moving on to the Musquodoboit Valley in the late-18th century. Towards them and towards other Nova Scotian Ulster Scots a more sympathetic attitude was to be expected.[24]

An analysis of Sprott’s education in Galloway and in other parts of Scotland can help us to understand another part of the cultural baggage with which he crossed the ocean. He himself was convinced of the excellence of his Scottish education and, particularly, of the outstanding quality of Scottish parish schools. The idea that Scottish education was for centuries superior to that of England and elsewhere has been a long-lasting one. In company with other "myths," however, this belief has come under criticism in recent years.[25] But in Sprott’s writings it is readily apparent. He began his education in the parish school of Stoneykirk, later noting that "our class books . . . were the Bible and the Catechism. We knew nothing of English grammar, geography, mental arithmetic, history or composition." Elsewhere, he states that the chief books available in his area of Galloway in his youth were the Bible, Boston’s Fourfold State, Confession of Faith, Scottish Worthies and Pilgrim’s Progress, and that if additional reading was required it was necessary to send to Glasgow for it.[26]

The brief list is instructive. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress had obvious appeal to pious Scots anxious to tread the true Christian path. The Bible and Confession of Faith were, of course, the bedrock of Presbyterian belief. Human Nature in its Fourfold State, by the Reverend Thomas Boston (1677-1732), was a staple in Presbyterian households; it was the most frequently reprinted Scottish book of the 18th century and hugely influential over the religious life of Scotland for over a hundred years.[27] Sprott later noted that a "better class of emigrants," the Scots, brought with them to Nova Scotia their Bibles, their Catechisms, and Boston’s Fourfold State.[28] The Scots Worthies (Sprott’s Scottish Worthies), or the Biographia Scoticana, published in 1775 through public subscriptions by the pious, contained inspirational biographies of Reformation and Covenanting heroes. Cowan is doubtless correct in suggesting that, at the popular level, Howie’s book "probably had a greater impact than all the works of Enlightenment philosophers put together."[29]

While Sprott wrote affectionately of his schooling and his schoolfellows, we gain a different perspective from the minister of Stoneykirk, who observed in the early 1790s that the buildings were wretched and the schoolmaster’s stipend not such as to attract the talented. The Scottish parish school system implemented in the 17th century was, to be sure, the first truly national one in Europe, but the funding of it rested with the local landowners who were required to pay – if they could.[30] Moreover, although for four months of the year more than 130 children attended the Stoneykirk school, after the first of March "the number dwindles down to twenty or thereabouts."[31] Sprott was the son of a tenant farmer and probably among those whose services were needed on the family farm in the spring and summer months. Nonetheless, he was from a literate and devoutly Kirk background: in later life he wrote of his father’s admiration for the printed sermons of Robert Walker, who had lived in Galloway for a time before becoming one of the two ministers of the High Church in Edinburgh (located in St. Giles), as well as for the 17th-century Puritan divine Isaac Ambrose’s Looking unto Jesus.[32] He was also clearly a determined lad. We do not know when he decided to enter the ministry – perhaps he had been pledged to it at birth, as was the custom in many pious Scottish homes and as had been the case with James MacGregor – but at the age of 18 he began to learn a little Latin, the main entry requirement for university. When the teacher moved away within a year, he started to travel the five miles to the school of the Inch, on the outskirts of Stranraer, where he "planted some Greek and Latin roots" under a Mr. Wallace.[33] During the Irish rebellion, when the Galloway countryside needed to be searched for Irish refugees and there were fears of a French invasion, a reluctant Sprott, compelled to volunteer in Captain Maitland’s Company of Foot, mounted guard (as he tells us) with his Virgil in one hand and his musket in the other.[34] Having obtained, then, some knowledge of the classics, he entered the University of Edinburgh at the age of 20 – quite late by the standards of the day.[35]

The lasting results of his school years were made clear much later in Nova Scotia. Sprott became a member of the Halifax Board of School Commissioners and an examiner of teachers. When the board wished to introduce a "uniform and superior series" of class books for the schools, it was to Scotland he turned for information on what he considered the superior – and cheap – class books recently introduced there in the parish schools, the "pride and ornament of Scotland." Although some fellow board members had suggested using American books Sprott quickly brushed this aside, suggesting that they contained not only Republican principles but also "a total want of the beautiful morality of the gospel."[36] He clearly held firm views concerning the superiority of Scottish education. Moreover, Sprott himself provides some backing for the existence of that character so beloved of the later Scottish kailyard novelists and by a generation of earlier historians – the "lad o’ pairts" – who through his own drive and ability and perhaps the support of a local dominie makes good and achieves a university education.[37]

Sprott also took care to ensure that his five children received the best possible education. Daughter Jane, who reported frequently to her relatives in Scotland, proudly announced at the beginning of 1838 that the report in the Novascotian of the Musquodoboit school described it as exhibiting "force and brilliancy." "George and I," she continued, "have finished English Grammar, and though I am little more than 10 years old I have reached Compound Interest in ciphering." Elsewhere she told her cousin in Galloway of the large number of newspapers and magazines that came into the Sprott household: "We can sit here by the fireside and learn what is going on all over the world," she wrote, adding a little wistfully, "There are few who can receive the honours of the college but all are graduates of the hearth."[38] Certainly her brother George’s future academic achievements at the University of Glasgow and the quality of the works he wrote on the history and liturgy of the Church of Scotland during his distinguished ministerial career were a tribute to the intellectual vigour of the Sprott hearth and the quality of Mr. McDonald’s and later Mr. Watson’s teaching in Musquodoboit.[39]

The University of Edinburgh, which John Sprott entered in 1800, was not at the summit of its reputation. The glory days of the Edinburgh literati were largely over.[40] To be sure, there were still some outstanding professors, although we note that Sprott’s memories of some of their teachings are highly critical. In an address to the Young Men’s Christian Association in Halifax in 1863, Sprott reflected that he was old enough to remember the lectures of Dugald Stewart and John Leslie. But what most struck Sprott about these teachers of moral philosophy and science was their irreligion: they "kept as great a distance from Christianity as possible." A student of Sprott’s background could hardly come to terms with the views of suspected atheists, and one should, of course, be wary of assuming that attendance at lectures involves approval of ideas presented. Sprott was also, naturally, highly critical of the ideas of David Hume, and he was calmly confident that the most famous Scottish atheist of the 18th century would soon be forgotten together with other "unprincipled writers" such as Byron and Voltaire.[41] Although he undoubtedly adhered to some of the values that Richard Sher has recently identified as the common core of Enlightenment ideas, he was no uncritical purveyor of Enlightenment thought to Nova Scotia.[42]

Critics of the University of Edinburgh were numerous. There were no yearly examinations and few students actually bothered to take degrees; Sprott, for example, did not.[43] It was also a rarity for divinity students to study Hebrew, for attendance at the class was recommended and not mandatory. Sprott, again demonstrating his intellectual commitment, was one who did; years later he reminded the Reverend Robert Burns, at that time secretary of the Kirk-connected Glasgow Colonial Society, that they had once stood side by side in the Edinburgh Hebrew class.[44] Following his studies at Edinburgh, Sprott spent four sessions at the Reformed Presbyterian Divinity Hall in Stirling (1804-1807). The classes were small (no more than half a dozen or so students, so that lasting friendships were made), and the professor was the Reverend John McMillan, grandson of John McMillan of Balmaghie, the first minister of the Cameronians (Covenanters who had remained aloof from the Church of Scotland after the Revolution Settlement of 1690 had restored Presbyterianism as the established church in Scotland). McMillan of Balmaghie’s followers were often called McMillanites, and they formed the basis of the Reformed Presbyterian Church.[45] Sprott, then, although he wrote affectionately of the parish church in Stoneykirk and had been baptized and brought up in the Church of Scotland, had by this time committed himself to the somewhat uncompromising principles of Reformed Presbyterianism, with its exacting ideal of a covenanted nation and a constitutional government under a covenanted king.[46] He nowhere states why he joined the Reformed Presbyterians; perhaps it was a reaction against the "enlightened" views of his Church of Scotland university professors.

Sprott was licensed to preach by the Reformed Presbytery in 1809. His ultimate aim was ordination and settlement over a Reformed Presbyterian congregation in Galloway, but this did not occur. "I received call after call to congregations," he later wrote, but "was repeatedly disappointed."[47] What had happened? In 1810, he received a call from Water of Urr in Galloway, a difficult congregation that contained other dissenters from the kirk besides Reformed Presbyterians, including 30 families of Antiburghers.[48] He accepted this call, but the source becomes deliberately vague at this point: "Difficulties emerged. . . . Much that could not be supported was advanced and considerable wrangling" took place. Sprott gave up the struggle in 1811. However, the presbytery censured the proceedings and the call was renewed. Sprott was once more chosen, 81 out of a congregation of 185 having signed the call, but more problems occurred as "the same contentious spirit manifested itself and the starting of a new cause was threatened." In July 1815 Sprott finally withdrew from this contest and joined the Relief Church, another Presbyterian group outside the established Church of Scotland, "on the ground of change of views."[49] He emigrated three years later, sailing from Kirkcudbright in the brig Nile on 8 August 1818. His motives, as with other emigrants, were clearly mixed. If there was something of a "push" factor here, with Sprott’s career obviously not progressing and serious economic problems existing in Scotland in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, there was also a clearly identifiable "pull." It was not just the fact that the Church of Scotland Presbyterian minister at Saint John, New Brunswick (Sprott’s initial destination), was the Reverend George Burns, brother of the Reverend Robert Burns and another fellow-student of Sprott in Edinburgh.[50] In emigrating, Sprott was fulfilling a dream of his youth. He had been caught up in that "dance called America," as James Boswell termed it, which swept Galloway as it did other parts of Scotland in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Over 30 years after he sailed for British North America, Sprott reflected that "a splendour had been thrown around the undertaking which concealed the difficulties of the case" and that "flaring accounts" were published regarding the beauty and fertility of the New World and the happy lot of the settlers. Sprott never regretted his translation to the New World, but time gave him a sharper view of the realities of pioneer life and a more accurate perception of the "emigrant myth" of the instant wealth and independence to be acquired across the Atlantic.[51]

The events of Sprott’s boyhood and early manhood are highly instructive in any assessment of his later career. Both physically and mentally, his first 38 years had shaped his behaviour in Nova Scotia. Physically they made the rigours of life as a pioneer minister not only bearable but even attractive. Here was a man who had spent the first 18 years of his life on a farm, who had each year for four years walked to the University of Edinburgh and back (150 miles each way), and who had criss-crossed Galloway for a decade as an itinerant preacher before he emigrated, often taking services in barns or in the open air.[52] It was an excellent preparation for his missionary labours in Nova Scotia and the stories of his journeys there are legion: crossing rivers on ice floes, meeting bears in the forest, being pursued by wolves on the Sheet Harbour Road.[53] Clearly he generated a mythology of his own.

So much for the physical response to the pioneer environment. What of the religious, social, and political responses? Sprott was certainly no narrow-minded religious fanatic (except where the Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, were concerned). He admired the Church of England, writing warmly of such men as the Right Reverend James Stewart, who for many years worked as a missionary in Lower Canada, and Dr. John Stevenson, professor at the Anglican King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Of course, both of these men were from Galloway.[54] He also retained a life-long affection for the Church of Scotland and had many friends within it. He reacted very favourably to the formation of the Glasgow Colonial Society and, as already noted, corresponded with its secretary, his fellow-student at Edinburgh, the Reverend Robert Burns. He was not amused, however, when during one of his visits to Scotland a Kirk minister from Halifax, the Reverend John Martin of St. Andrew’s Church, seemed to be poaching souls in the Musquodoboit area.[55] Perhaps there was a certain piquancy here. Martin, like Sprott, had for a time been a member of the Reformed Presbyterian Church and had attended its divinity hall for one session. After Martin’s death in 1865, Sprott reflected that he had known him in Scotland and that he was waiting for Martin on the wharf at Halifax when he landed. Despite their occasional differences, they were friends for 40 years.[56] As for the Reformed Presbyterian Church, that had been the church of his youth and training and of his early missionary work. As a fellow minister from Nova Scotia observed, Sprott always spoke of it "with the fondness and fervour of a first love."[57]

He had little patience, however, for Presbyterians who remained separated from other Presbyterians by "certain invisible points which can only be seen by very sharp-sighted people," and he frequently called for a union of all Presbyterians.[58] Again, the impact of his Galloway upbringing is apparent. Perhaps it was disputes of this type that had split the congregation at Water of Urr and had helped to drive Sprott out of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. Sprott’s wife, Jane Neilson of Kirkcowan, Galloway, shared her husband’s reservations on these matters and had doubtless reinforced his views.[59] Although both Sprotts clearly admired the piety of "good Mr Reid," the minister of the Reformed Presbyterian congregation at Newton Stewart, Galloway (of which the Neilson family were at one point members), it was hard to forgive his uncompromising rigidity when he drove Jane Neilson’s parents from the communion table because they did not agree with him on the knotty matter of the Auchensaugh Covenants. "Contending about miserable cobwebs’" was Mrs. Sprott’s verdict on this narrow-mindedness.[60] We should note, however, that one person’s "miserable cobwebs" might be someone else’s shield and support and that Sprott had also caused dissension in 1836 within his own Musquodoboit congregation by holding a closed communion; the excluded members wrote to Pictou, requesting and then receiving a minister to dispense the Lord’s Supper. The ritual of fencing the table, and the lengthy recital of sins that accompanied it, reminded participants at these solemn occasions that communion could just as easily exclude people and bitterly divide communities as it could foster solidarity.[61]

Of course, there were also Reformed Presbyterians in Nova Scotia. Two Irish missionaries, the Reverend William Sommerville and the Reverend Alexander Clarke, lived within a day-and-a-half’s ride of Sprott’s house in Musquodoboit. He recognized their "talent and acquirement" but, as he confided to his brother-in-law, the Reformed Presbyterian minister of Rothesay in 1840, he had never met with these brethren; he had refused to ask them to assist at his communion services because although they would doubtless have agreed, they would not of their own accord, on principle, come to the communion table of Presbyterians not of their stripe.[62] Nor did Sprott believe that the restless, floating population of Nova Scotia could be brought to a consistent support of Reformed Presbyterian ideas.[63] James MacGregor, as a strong Antiburgher, had had similar problems when he confronted, in 1786, what Susan Buggey refers to as "the fluid North American religious frontier."[64]

Sprott had arrived in British North America in 1818, the year after the formation of the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia, which originally contained both Church of Scotland ministers (there was no Kirk Presbytery until 1823) and ministers from the Secession (see n.48). He was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Truro in 1819 and later ordained to the ministry. However, whatever talents Sprott possessed – and they were many – he was not a committee man; his relationship with the courts of the church was frequently difficult. As an obituary of him carefully noted: "We cannot say that he took a prominent part in Church Courts, or in promoting what may be called denominational advancement" – surely a rather bland summation of the sometimes tempestuous relationship of Sprott with presbytery and synod.[65] Perhaps here lie the roots of the neglect of Sprott in the pages of those narrowly denominational volumes of Robertson (1847) and McKerrow (1867) on the missionary work of the Seceders (see n.15). At the time of the bitter conflict between the Church of Scotland and the Secession over the best ways of supplying ministers to Nova Scotia, for example, it was quite clear that Sprott wanted "no part in the bitter controversy" between Dr. McCulloch, the founder of and advocate for Pictou Academy, with its home training for Presbyterian ministers, and the Secretary of the Glasgow Colonial Society Reverend Robert Burns, who felt, as did Sprott, that Scottish-trained ministers should be sent over. The influential McCulloch resented Sprott’s attitude, which he felt inimical to the continued success of the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia, and he also resented Sprott’s close ties to the Church of Scotland; further friction between the two would occur in later years.[66]

A further source of dispute between Sprott and members of the church courts arose in 1861 when Sprott solemnized a marriage between Mr. Samuel Archibald of Musquodoboit and his deceased wife’s niece. The presbytery found this marriage to be contrary to the law of the land and within the prohibited degrees of affinity; equally serious was the fact that in order to solemnize this wedding he had invaded the charge of a settled minister, his successor at Musquodoboit, the Rev. Robert Sedgewick.[67] Sprott’s response to the charges having proved unsatisfactory, the presbytery declared him "no longer a Minister of this Church."[68] He had bluntly pointed out that since he had taken no part in the 1860 union of the Free Presbyterian and Secession Presbyterian churches in the Maritimes, he owed the presbytery "no canonical obedience" and was entirely beyond their control.[69] It was not until 1865 that a softening of attitude on both sides allowed the 85-year-old Sprott, now in failing health, to be restored to the ministry. He had never been an avid attender at presbytery, and indeed the frequency and duration of his missionary tours in rural Nova Scotia would have rendered that impossible. Perhaps these absences from the church in Musquodoboit contributed to those "differences of opinion" with his congregation that led to his resignation from the charge in 1849. His plain-speaking approach was no doubt another reason. As his ten-year-old daughter Jane observed of a sermon he delivered at the communion in Truro in March, 1838: "‘Father preached with authority and told the wise people what he thought of them." Sprott’s obituarist for the Presbyterian Witness also remarked on the keenness, even severity, of his criticisms of men and manners.[70] He had been an opinionated man in Galloway and he remained so in Nova Scotia.

Musquodoboit was not the easiest of congregations. Sprott’s predecessor, the Reverend John Laidlaw, a Burgher, was driven to resign in 1822 when accused of breaking the Sabbath: carrying a pound of tea in his pocket, asking the blacksmith to send up the next day the harrow teeth he had ordered, and sending away a tub of butter by carrier. He departed for the United States and died soon after. Sprott later commented that "Laidlaw’s blood still lies at the door of the Musquodoboit people."[71] It is clear from local histories of the area that divisions within the congregation resulted in substantial disruptions to Sprott’s ministry in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1836, for example, the proprietors of the Presbyterian church arranged that Sprott and a competing minister should preach on alternate Sabbaths in order to avoid a clash, and Sprott’s resignation in 1849, it has been argued, was related to the re-emergence of "certain Burgher and Anti-Burgher fires which had smouldered underground since 1817 [the year of the formation of the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia] and now appeared to fan into flames."[72] All the Presbyterian divisions of Scotland had, it appeared, arrived safely in Nova Scotia.

It should by now be obvious that Sprott’s background, especially his Covenanting background, had prepared him to be an outsider. However, it was the Covenanters of old, of the 17th century rather than their spiritual descendants in Scotland or Nova Scotia, whom Sprott truly admired. Furthermore, although the Covenanting tradition still possessed a powerful appeal in Galloway, where so many of the crucial events had occurred, it must be emphasized that a much-embellished version of events had developed there in the 18th century – in part the creation of the Reverend Robert Wodrow, whose History of the Sufferings of the Church was published in 1721. Seven years earlier, in 1714, there had appeared a work entitled A Cloud of Witnesses, which contained dying testimonies, epitaphs, and other memorials of the Covenanting martyrs – those who had "suffered for the truth in Scotland since 1680."[73] Wodrow used some of the same materials as the compiler of A Cloud of Witnesses; he produced an influential and in many ways scholarly work, but in his hands events such as the death of John Brown of Priesthill became, as Ted Cowan has recently stated, more parable than history and the notorious story of the Wigtown martyrs (the women allegedly drowned off the coast of Galloway for their Covenanting beliefs) was transmuted from traditional story into established fact.[74] John Howie’s Scots Worthies added weight to these traditions. Proof of the continued, and indeed expanded, interest in the Covenanters in the 19th century can be found in the large number of martyrs’ monuments erected in the period, often through the voluntary contributions of those who revered the memory of these "sufferers for conscience sake" (as the monument in St. Michael’s churchyard, Dumfries, describes them). In order to solicit contributions for that particular monument in 1831, the Reverend William Symington of Stranraer had preached a lengthy and moving sermon, retelling yet again the now fully accepted stories of John Brown and of the Wigtown martyrs, and emphasizing the Covenanters’ "noble and successful struggle for religion and liberty with the avowed enemies of both."[75] The stories of the Covenanters were mythologized further by emigrants from the area such as Sprott. For him, Galloway was indeed, as the 17th century Covenanting leader Renwick had remarked, "flower’d with martyrs."[76] Names such as Renwick, Cargill, Peden, and Cameron – the leaders of the movement – appeared and reappeared in his sermons in Nova Scotia and met, we must assume, with some response. In Musquodoboit itself there were families whose history was directly connected to the Covenanting movement.[77] Moreover, Sprott’s continuing connections with the Symingtons had reinforced his ideas about the Covenanters, which were readily transferred to the next generation. William Symington’s published work reached the Sprott household in Musquodoboit, as George’s letter to Master Symington demonstrates: "I have just now read your father’s sermons on the Scottish martyrs."[78] The continued fascination in Nova Scotia with the books and authors so popular in Scotland is also evident in Thomas McCulloch’s Stepsure Letters: there are references to Mrs. Grumble’s husband voting for the inclusion in the town library of The Crook in the Lot, three sermons of Thomas Boston, and to "Scotch Worthies" wandering "among moors and mosses." Although McCulloch was brought up in Paisley, his family, like Sprott’s, was from Galloway; in the Letters, Stepsure’s neighbour Scanocreesh is an admirer of the Covenanters and McCulloch hoped not only to produce and publish a substantial novel set in "the Days of the Covenant" but also to counter the "misrepresentations" of Sir Walter Scott in his Old Mortality, a work which presented Covenanters as dangerous fanatics.[79]

Yet despite this public fascination with the Covenanters, an examination of the Old Statistical Account indicates that most inhabitants of Galloway were, at the time when Sprott was growing up there, attenders at the parish kirk. In other words, the Cameronians, or Old Dissenters, or Mountain Men, or Society People, or McMillanites, or Reformed Presbyterians, as they are variously called, together with members of the 18th-century Secession Presbyterian churches, were in fact very much in the minority.[80] Nonetheless, they were accustomed to challenging established authority, in politics as in religion, and this lent them an importance beyond the numerical.

How did Sprott’s Covenanting sensibilities affect his actions across the Atlantic? It might be argued that the nature of colonial society gave less room for challenges to authority since, as he quickly realized, it was far less hierarchical than in Galloway; as he observed, "An absurd equality prevails."[81] His diary jottings and letters confirm the observations of many other emigrants that British North America, while offering much to the hard worker who wished to get on in the world, was "no place for a gentleman": the squire, the army officer, and their spouses were forced into all kinds of demanding physical tasks. For many reasons, then, Sprott found himself welcome in broader social circles than would have been the case in Scotland; his experiences, again, mirror those of Thomas McCulloch, who wrote in 1816 that he enjoyed a degree of respectability "to which I could never have aspired in Britain."[82] At the time of Sprott’s first marriage (1821), those who called to offer congratulations included the Honourable Judge Wilkins, Mr. Haliburton, and the Honourable James Fraser; at the time of his second marriage (1824), Sprott observed that "the influential people called on my wife."[83] His many letters to the bereaved also demonstrate the range of his connections. Yet he was not one to curry favour with anyone, as has already been demonstrated.[84] In common with his heroes, the Covenanters, he profoundly distrusted governments – regarding them as generally corrupt. He was born at a time when memories of the Galloway Levellers revolt of 1724 still persisted, and well understood the frustration of these Galloway objectors to the Enclosure movement, with all that it meant for the commercialization of agriculture and the destruction of the old values.[85] Like the Covenanters, the Levellers sought refuge in the hills and moors and undoubtedly Covenanting ideas provided some of their inspiration; one report asserts that the Levellers read aloud the Solemn League and Covenant in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of their actions.[86] Sprott had also personally experienced what he referred to as the "stirring times" of the French Revolution and the Irish rebellion. The response of Secession and Covenanting ministers and congregations to such events varied, but there was certainly some involvement by these groups in the radical politics of the day, with support being given to the cause of the Friends of the People and criticisms made of the repressive policies of the Pitt government. After all, as Colin Kidd has argued, resistance theory had "long been the marrow of Presbyterian politics" and, among Presbyterians, the Seceders and Covenanters had borne the heaviest burden of potential disloyalty.[87] However, the response was far from uniform; the Neilson family’s Covenanting minister in Newton Stewart actually excluded from communion "all who united with the friends of the people."[88]

Sprott’s translation to what he called "the wilds of Nova Scotia" initially seemed unlikely to afford him opportunities to express his political ideas except at the most local of levels. For years – indeed, as late as the 1860s (by which time the phrase was hardly an accurate one) – he headed his letters to the Scottish newspapers "from the backwoods," perhaps understanding that this touch of exaggeration made them more interesting to a Scottish audience. That description had been appropriate at the beginning of his career in the Musquodoboit valley and along the Eastern Shore. But all was soon to change. In 1833, on one of his famous "rambles" through Nova Scotia, Joseph Howe, editor of the Novascotian and advocate of political reform, made his way along the atrocious roads that led to Musquodoboit. There he spent an enjoyable Sunday, attending the Presbyterian Meeting House and making the acquaintance of the Reverend John Sprott, whom he described to his wife Susan Ann as "a rough being, of some education and talent, but wanting . . . polish sadly"; Sprott’s discussions, continued Howe somewhat patronizingly, "were not altogether uninteresting but he every now and then got into the wide ocean of theology without compass or chronometer."[89] Howe was introduced to a great many folk, and met several old acquaintances; he found himself "a lion for the day" and noted with interest how populous the settlement was and that it was wholly Presbyterian. The next morning, he breakfasted with the minister at seven o’clock, later remarking that Sprott, poorly paid as all country ministers were, had already been at work on his farm for a couple of hours by then.[90] Howe shrewdly sensed that he could benefit from the assistance of this Presbyterian minister, just as he had already made use of the talents of Thomas McCulloch of Pictou, and soon the two were corresponding regularly.[91] Musquodoboit became of substantial importance to Howe’s burgeoning political career as the Presbyterian minister had an unrivalled knowledge of the local community and, just as significant, Sprott and Howe shared many political ideas concerning the evils of oligarchy and the rights of the people.

By 1835, with Musquodoboit about to become a part of the recently reorganized County of Halifax, Howe was anticipating success as candidate for the county in the forthcoming election: "Musquodoboit . . . will vote for me to a man before any other candidate that may offer."[92] It was a conviction that John Sprott had helped to foster, and it proved correct in 1836; the poll concluded in Musquodoboit’s Presbyterian Meeting House and Howe and his fellow reformer William Annand were declared elected as members for the county. By 1840 Sprott’s daughter, Elizabeth, describing the political excitement in the area as another election approached, could announce proudly to her cousin in Scotland that the Honourable Joseph Howe, one of the leaders of the Whigs, was "a particular friend of ours"; it was during that election that a large number of Musquodoboit reformers were brought to the Halifax poll to intimidate electors of a Tory disposition.[93] Before the 1843 election, Sprott wrote an analysis for Howe of the political situation in Musquodoboit, informing him that agents of Robert Logan were "beginning to move in the waters" (for there were rumours that Annand would not stand), although only "a fragment of the Tory interest," in addition to "the malcontents in our Church" and Logan’s own relatives, seemed likely to support him. The "great battle in Onslow" (the recent confrontation between Howe and the Baptist Edmund Crawley on the subject of denominational colleges) had led the Baptist Bulletin to claim that Howe had "promised us all [his ministerial supporters] Chairs in the new college," but Sprott assured the Reform leader that he was clear that Howe had promised him nothing. He also made it plain that he had no intention of traveling to distant counties to attend political meetings in order to "make rough waters among peaceable people" and to allow his clearly restless congregation the opportunity to drive him out permanently.[94] The connection between Sprott and Howe was strengthened further when, in 1846, the Howe family took up residence in Upper Musquodoboit, in an elegant house owned by Annand, and lived there for several months. Whatever else Musquodoboit was, it was far from being a political backwater in the 1830s and 1840s, and it ceased to be a geographical one.[95] It became a centre of the Reform movement; the rural alienation from the wealthy Halifax oligarchy found its voice and Sprott was at the heart of it all, keeping Howe up-to-date on local affairs and noting with glee, when the provincial governor attacked Howe and his Reform party as they struggled to achieve responsible government for Nova Scotia, that if a man wished to get rid of an anthill "he could crush it by putting a flat stone on top of it," but it was "a more difficult business for a Tory Lord to get rid of a band of Patriots."[96] He remained a lifelong admirer of Howe and of the tenacity with which he pursued "Liberty, Free Trade, Reform and Education."[97]

Sprott had come by his Reform beliefs honestly. He could summon up the images of the early Covenanters of south-west Scotland, who stood by their principles whatever the cost; he understood the frustrations of the Galloway Levellers of the early-18th century and their resentment of enclosing "improvements"; he had seen first-hand the democratic aspirations of the political reformers of the 1790s; and he applied the understanding of events that he had acquired during his first 38 years, flawed and mythologised in some ways though it was, to his 51 years in Nova Scotia. This is not to suggest, however, that he was untouched by his North American experiences – far from it. He admired what he perceived as the freedom-loving aspects of the United States sufficiently to call one of his sons after the first President (alas, George W. did not appreciate it, lamenting to the son of his father’s old friend Symington that he would rather have been named after "some revered North Briton").[98] He had a sharp eye and a ready pen with which to note changes in society and similarities and differences between Scotia and Nova Scotia. He wrote lengthy descriptions of changes in Nova Scotia agriculture and commerce for the Galloway papers. His three visits to his native land, in addition to his breadth of reading in the Scottish press and his wide range of correspondents, allowed him to describe and explain Galloway to the bluenoses and Nova Scotia to the Scots.[99] In his long life he both absorbed and helped to create and propagate a number of myths in his homeland and his adopted country. In Galloway the Covenanting myth had become a part of his very being. In Galloway, too, he had absorbed ideas regarding Scottish educational excellence and prejudices about the Irish and the evils of drink. In his years in Nova Scotia his laments for "times, places and peoples past" were typical of thousands of Scottish immigrants to Canada, whose imaginings helped to preserve for them a world that was passing.[100] His sentimental reminiscences of Scotland and latterly of the early Scottish settlers in Nova Scotia were popular with those seeking an idealized past – he became himself an early exponent of kailyard literature – and his printed letters were read in faraway places, including Ceylon, as his son George found when he was a missionary in Kandy. Sprott, then, contributed to the myth that "the old days were the best days." Yet he was also a brisk commentator on that which was modern. He made a contribution to the literature of emigration; some of his articles in the Galloway newspapers were undoubtedly useful for those considering leaving Scotland, for he would draw on his personal experiences to explain what was actually involved. Here he was myth-breaking rather than myth-making.

Sprott had an acute eye, a sharp tongue, a ready pen, and the physical constitution to enable him to make good use of them until he was well into his 80s (he died in his 90th year). The length of his career, his frequent crossings of the Atlantic and his extensive travels in Nova Scotia – he once boasted that his horse had been in every stable in the province – afforded ample opportunity for observation and comment. His Gallovidian origins set him apart from any neat categorization as "Highland" or "Lowland" and thus he provides a different perspective from the usual ones in the secondary literature of Scottish emigration. If we are to believe Cowan, the creation and transmuting of myths are a particular specialization of the Scots, who "have perhaps the greatest capacity for self-mythologization of any nation on the planet, outside the United States."[101] Sprott’s experiences give us a vivid picture of the way in which one Presbyterian minister experienced the transition from a particular area of Scotland to Nova Scotia, and of the cultural baggage he carried with him. Drawing the map of the mental journeyings of the Reverend John Sprott, who himself became an object of mythology after his death, can help us to come to some understanding of these processes.[102]