ABSTRACT
There are few better places to begin a consideration of the development of provincial cultures in eighteenth-century Britain than with a sermon that some British observers came to regard as one of the more provocative proclamations of American resistance to imperial authority in 1776, ‘The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men’, preached in Princeton in May of that year by John Witherspoon, president of what was then the College of New Jersey. Witherspoon had come to America from the textile town of Paisley in Scotland only eight years before, but during that time he had managed to establish himself both as a prominent figure in the religious, political and cultural affairs of the colonies and as the principal spokesman for the Scottish and Presbyterian communities in America. It was in the latter role that he appended to his sermon a brief ‘Address to the Natives of Scotland Residing in America’, in which he defended Scottish-Americans against accusations of excessive loyalty to empire and antipathy to liberty and attempted to secure their support for the American cause. He began that endorsement of American independence with a strong declaration of the sense of patriotism and ‘attachment to country’ that he felt. Strikingly, the country to which he referred was not America but Scotland. 1
