I know there was a large Scottish force present at the Battle of Brandywine. I didn't know they were considered foreign though; that's pretty shocking.
Remember, there was a very large literature in England portraying Scots as foreigners, and as agents of Jacobite-style tyranny for the Hanover regime (long before Scott, the
English were confusing Highlander and Lowlander). So if we know that the American revolutionaries were starting out with some ideas from English dissenting whiggery (which is ironically a Scots word, but less ironically began as a deadly insult), it follows. Indeed, the pamphlets of John Wilkes were popular in America, I believe. It's just suited both parties to delete it from history. But you can read a nice concise study of it in Devine's excellent book
To the ends of the earth, the first history to tackle our diaspora holistically.
It wasn't just Brandywine, either. Scots were a quarter of the officer-corps in America, which is much larger than our share of the British Isles population. And Scotland was unanimously loyalist in the petition-war back home. Not that there weren't those sympathetic to America in numbers not so much fewer than elsewhere, but the ability of the regime's patronage machine to completely silence them is worthy of note. There was no such success elsewhere, and some regions (like East Anglia where the colonists of New England were from) were almost as unanimous in calling for compromise and concession.
Another interesting thing is that, contrary to received ideas about Protestant and Catholic, the Irish got a much nicer looking at. The worries and goals of Grattan's Patriots in the context of the British Empire (which had only really gained that capital E in the previous decades) seemed to many Americans - and anxious Britons - to be analogous, while the Scots sat there making a fat sack of cash out of both of them. Which was kind of true, to be fair.
The majority of Americans at the time understood as referring to the Hessians. I believe earlier drafts referred to "Scotch and foreign mercenaries", suggesting they were two groups.
Scottish 'and
other foreign mercenaries'. Devine,
To the ends of the Earth, 136, citing a study of the development of the DoI text.
If we weren't foreign, why would we have been mercenaries?
There is a rich literature of American Scottophobia from this time which can be found in the chapter 'In the land of the free' of Devine's book; probably more than there ever was about Hessians. The stage Scotsman was a recognised Anglo-American type, unlike the stage Hessian.
Either way, my point about them being contrasted with the main British army stands. The earlier drafts indeed referred to "British brethren." The War of Independence was fought to avoid authoritarian tyranny, and independence was the best method, it wasn't a nationalist thing to escape "foreign influence", although the process resulted in a new nation.
Naturally contradictory tendencies were at play, and indeed by bringing this up I'm highlighting the link between strands of American and English radical thought.
