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Ip SHS, ’&Z SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY FOURTH SERIES VOLUME l6 Autobiography of John McAdam with Selected Letters Autobiography of JOHN McADAM (1806-1883) WITH SELECTED LETTERS edited by Janet Fyfe, ph.d. ★ ★ EDINBURGH printed for the Scottish History Society by CLARK CONSTABLE LTD 1980 © Scottish History Society 1980 o. 1980 ISBN o 906245-10-9 Printed in Great Britain PREFACE I should like to thank especially Captain Alex McAdam, who has carefully preserved the papers of his grandfather and given permission for their publication. His assistance, and that of his niece, Miss Moira McAdam, has been invaluable. The suggestion to edit John McAdam’s autobiography came originally from Dr William Ferguson, for whose constant encour- agement and help I am truly grateful. Much of the work was completed during my tenure of a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, January to April, 1979. For an ideal working environment I am grateful to the Honorary Director, Professor William Beattie, and Secretary, Miss Margaret Jardine. My thanks go also to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a generous research grant. Letters of enquiry were courteously answered by descendants of McAdam’s associates, scholars, archivists and librarians too many for all to be named individually. I am especially indebted to Dr Anthony P. Campanella, International Institute of Garibaldian Studies, Geneva, and Mr C. N. Campbell, former Senior Partner of Robert McTear & Co. My transcription of the manuscripts was carefully checked by Mr Clifford Collier. Any errors that remain are my responsibility; that there are not more of them is due to Mr Collier’s conscientious performance of a tedious task. Mrs Rosemary Wallace is much to be commended for her excellent and speedy production of the final typescript. For arrang- ing for this assistance, and many other kindnesses, I thank Miss Ishbel MacGregor, Administrative Secretary, School of Library and Information Science, University of Western Ontario. Those letters not in the possession of Captain McAdam are pub- lished through the co-operation, and with the permission, of the archivists and librarians in charge of them: Dr W. A. L. Seaman, County Archivist, Tyne and Wear County Council, Dr Gyorgy Pajkossy, National Library of Hungary, Dr Istvan Kallay, Hungarian vi PREFACE National Archives, Dr Marziano Brignoli, Museo del Risorgimento, Milan, Mr T. A. Garvatt, Co-operative Union Library, Manchester, and Dr Campanella. Finally, I wish to thank Dr Thomas I. Rae for his patient attention and advice. JANET FYFE University of Western Ontario December, 1979 CONTENTS Preface v Introduction ix AUTOBIOGRAPHY I SELECTED LETTERS 95 BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX I95 Index 237 A generous contribution from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland towards the cost of producing this volume is gratefully acknowledged by the Council of the Society JohnMcAdam was bom at Port Dundas, Glasgow, on 5 August 1806, the second son of James McAdam, formerly a farmer in Stirlingshire and now a carter and vintner, and Helen Baxter. After a brief, but apparently thorough, schooling, and a period of miscellaneous occupations including driving carts, he was appren- ticed to a shoemaker in Glasgow and later went into business on his own account. Under the aegis of such veteran reformers as James Turner of Thrushgrove, John Ure and John Tail, McAdam entered active political life in the agitation leading up to the 1832 Reform Act. In a newspaper article which McAdam preserved, with no source, date or signature but obviously written by a former member of the Reform Association in 1859 or the early 1860s, the writer recalled the famous ‘Black Flags’ demonstration of Saturday 12 May 1832 as ‘an exceedingly bold movement’, the credit for which, he believed, was ‘ due to Mr John McAdam, one of the most resolute, active, and honest men I have ever met’. There were then three major associations in Glasgow working for Parliamentary Reform, the Political Union, the Reform Association and the Trades’ Com- mittee. McAdam belonged to them all, and already at that early date showed that capacity for bringing together people of diverse social classes and diverse shades of opinion to work together for a common cause which was to be so marked a characteristic of his later work. Between July 1833 and the spring of 1847 his participation in Glasgow politics was interrupted by his emigration first to Upper Canada and then to Mississippi. The prime importance to McAdam of his North American stay was in the effect which experience of life in a republic had on his later republican beliefs and in the fortuitous introduction he was given to the ideas of Mazzini by attacks on them in the Native American press. X AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN MCADAM On his return to Glasgow he immediately took up where he left off and very quickly became prominent, along with his brother William, in the Chartist movement. Again, he showed his talent for reconciliation in an attempt to unify the disparate elements of Glasgow Chartism. His brother was now a successful master potter and, instead of resuming his own trade, Me Adam joined him in the Hyde Park Pottery. This partnership, both in business and in politics, lasted until 1879 when the pottery was closed, William emigrated to New Zealand, and John retired to live with his now very numerous family. He had married in 1851 and had ten children of whom two died in infancy. Linked with McAdam’s work for the Chartist and later Reform movements was his support for the European nationalist movements which were so constant a concern of British foreign policy and British public opinion throughout the nineteenth century. He was an enthusiastic propagandist and fund collector for the Polish, Hungarian and Italian movements and a personal friend of many of their leaders throughout his life. This is perhaps his greatest, though not his only, claim to remembrance, and it receives a proportionate measure of attention in the Autobiography. In June 1873, at a meeting of Glasgow citizens, presided over by Bailie Young, Me Adam was presented with an inscribed clock and five hundred and fifty-two sovereigns in recognition of his long-continued services to the cause of reform at home and abroad. In thanking the citizens for this testimonial, McAdam told them what he intended to do with the money. It may, he said: enable me to help other good movements without trenching on my family’s means; and, should competent critics advise publishing, may enable me to render what justice I can to the memory and services of men - some of them forgotten - during the last forty years; and to explain many circumstances, connected especially with Italian movements, which could not at the time be explained with safety to the brave men engaged . .x 1 Glasgow Herald (11 June 1873), 4 INTRODUCTION xi It would appear that the competent critics did advise publishing, for shortly afterwards McAdam began to write his autobiography. At the time of his death, in November 1883, he had completed a rough draft of the whole and revised some sections of it. The manuscript remained, and still remains, in the possession of his family, unpublished until now. Because McAdam was unable to complete his work, some anomalies remain in the text. The dates of writing and revision, as might be expected, vary from section to section. At the top of the first page, the date of June 1877 has been crossed out and replaced by October 1880. Some later parts, however, are dated 1876, and throughout there are sections which have been copied verbatim from still earlier writings. The final two paragraphs must have been written in 1883, as he there refers to his age as seventy-seven. Further complications in dating arise from McAdam’s habit of continuous revision. Apparently he re-read the manuscript at intervals and made small corrections to bring it up to date. For example, in a section written in 1876 he mentioned several people as being still alive at that date, then later deleted the name of one who had died in the meantime. Such later corrections are mentioned in footnotes only when they affect the sense of the passage. The manuscript consists of loose pages, mostly unnumbered and some of them out of order. The sequence, therefore, had to be re-created. Interspersed are newspaper clippings, usually with no indication of source or date. Some of them, referred to in the text and with their intended locations marked, were obviously meant to form part of the text, though whether in whole or in part is not always clear. Generally they have been included in the printed text only to the extent that they add substance to it. Other clippings, which were probably left in the manuscript by accident after having served as aids to McAdam’s memory, have been omitted altogether. Part of the Autobiography seems to have been based on Journals kept by McAdam contemporaneously with the events described. Other sources, besides the newspaper clippings, were the many letters he wrote for publication in Glasgow newspapers, and his voluminous, carefully preserved, correspondence with the leaders xii AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN MCADAM of the Continental revolutions and their British sympathizers. No autobiography, obviously, can be wholly free from the defects of subjectivity and imperfect knowledge, but McAdam has obviously tried to be truthful and accurate and to that end has supplemented the uncertain memories of his old age with the written evidence he had accumulated in the past. The many comments made by his contemporaries about his truthfulness and trustworthiness are justi- fied by the accuracy of the Autobiography.1 The facts he presents have been editorially verified by evidence from other sources wherever possible.

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