Robert Burns: Colonial histories and contested legacies

Scotland’s role in the history of empire and colonialism is now more widely known. As numerous historians have outlined, Scots were disproportionately represented within the British Empire as traders, settlers, colonial administrators, soldiers and missionaries. The wider recognition of this has led cultural institutions, ranging from the heritage sector to schools and universities, to reconsider how to tell national stories without shirking uncomfortable or difficult truths about Scotland and Empire.

In this period of reckoning, it is inevitable that Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, should come under further scrutiny, particularly as he lived in a society shaped by colonial entanglements of various kinds. Take, for example, Burns’s snuff box, which would have been filled with snuff made from imported tobacco grown on colonial plantations using enslaved labour. In recent years more has also come to light about Burns’s tentative emigration plans and ambiguous attitude towards transatlantic slavery; his poetic musings on the after-effects of the American Revolution; his poems and songs that reflected global politics; and also the swift arrival of his work in the early American Republic, where his poetry and persona would undergo continual processes of re-evaluation.

Perhaps most famously, Burns came close to following hundreds of other Scots in sailing to Jamaica to work as a plantation ‘book-keeper’ (overseeing enslaved people in sugar cane fields). Struggling both economically and artistically, Burns booked three separate tickets for himself: on the Nancy from Greenock for Savanna-la-Mar on 10 August 1786; the Bell from Greenock for Port Morant at the end of September 1786; and the Roselle from Leith to Kingston on 23 December 1786. Interestingly, it was not Burns’s moral opposition to chattel slavery that led to his decision to stay in Scotland, but rather the increasing popularity of the first edition of his book of poems, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, printed in Kilmarnock in July that year.

Within weeks of publication of this book, Burns wrote to John Richmond with the intention ‘to try a second edition of my book’ which would detain him ‘a little longer in the country.’ [i] The second appearance of Burns’s poetry ‘in guid black prent’, [ii] sold by William Creech in Edinburgh on 21 April 1787, catapulted the poet into the cultural sphere of Scotland’s most eminent literati and meant his tentative emigration plans were now firmly put aside. In the same year, a third London edition was published and sold by Andrew Strahan and Thomas Cadell in collaboration with Creech. [iii] While Burns entertained and charmed potential future patrons in Edinburgh, his volume, quite remarkably, was already being reprinted and sold in America as early as July 1788.

Considering Burns in relation to American print, politics and debates over slavery and abolition complicates his poetic legacy. The troubling possibilities of what Burns ‘might have been’ (had he emigrated to Jamaica) were seemingly not an issue for the American abolitionists who championed his works in the 19th century. In 1859, Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) even offered up a speculative defence of the poet’s unfulfilled emigration plans: ‘I think I see Robert Burns following a gang of slaves, and chanting “A man’s a man for a’ that”.’ [iv] While Beecher, Frederick Douglass (1818–95), William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) and several other activists appropriated Burns into the context of American abolitionism, the truth is that the poet had very little to do with abolitionist movements in his own lifetime, unlike several of his contemporaries. That is, Burns does not appear to have engaged with any of the widespread petitions and incentives calling for abolition in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paisley, Dundee, Aberdeen and Ayr. [v]

This is perhaps made all the more surprising by the fact that Burns was no stranger to commenting on transnational affairs and politics, albeit in often cautious terms. An example of this comes in his ‘Ballad on the American War’, which first appeared titled as ‘A Fragment’ in the Edinburgh edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1787). A highly nuanced political song known, rather confusingly, by three different titles, it became most commonly referred to as ‘When Guilford Good our Pilot stood’ after appearing under that name in James Johnson’s 1788 Scots Musical Museum (Volume II) and George Thomson’s 1793 publication of A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.

Over nine stomping verses, Burns’s speaker lampoons British military figures, heralds American revolutionary heroes, and reflects on the political chaos that engulfed Britain in the wake of America’s successful revolt. Such biting satire was timely given the Congress of the Confederation had ratified the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the war, earlier in 1784. Burns’s ‘Fragment’, arguably more so than any other of his poems or songs, reveals the extent of his engagement with international affairs and politics. Evidently, Burns had access to several newspapers and pamphlets that detailed revolutionary events and provided commentary on their consequences for Britain and, more specifically, Scotland. And yet beyond fleeting references, it appears Burns had little to say on slavery and abolition in spite of his shrewd awareness of political affairs as well as increasingly prominent abolitionist movements in Scotland.

Does all this complicate the poet’s legacy? Most probably.

But then complicating our national histories, even our national heroes, is no bad thing. Rather than diminishing our histories, these explorations simply add complexity and nuance to our understanding of the past in all its complex forms.

Footnotes

[i] Letters, 1:54–55

[ii] Ibid, 96

[iii] It should be noted that Creech did not inform Burns about the ‘third edition’ nor his arrangement with Strahan and Cadell. See The Critical Heritage, 11.

[iv] James Ballantine (ed), Chronicle of the hundredth birthday of Robert Burns (Edinburgh and London: A. Fullarton & Co., 1859), 580

[v] See Ian Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 85