Adam Ferguson, Walter Scott and White Supremacy

In the grounds of St Andrews cathedral sits the memorial gravestone of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723-1816). Unlike the other gravestones, it does not purely commemorate his life, but also commemorates his views on natural and moral philosophy, and the concept of progress and social hierarchies.

It sits against the east wall of the graveyard and is noticeably larger and of a different style than most of the other gothic gravestones. Its strong neoclassical style is a reference to the fact that Ferguson believed the people of greatest beauty, industry and skill were from Greek and Roman antiquity.

Ferguson studied theology at the University of St Andrews and in 1745 he was ordained as an army chaplain in the Black Watch regiment. He witnessed war firsthand at the Battle of Fontenoy before taking up an academic career. He was appointed as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University in 1759 and then in 1764 became Professor of Moral Philosophy.  At the base of the memorial is an inscription written by Sir Walter Scott that celebrates his work. It states:

Here rest the mortal remains of Adam Ferguson, LL.D. professor of moral philosophy of the University of Edinburgh. He was born at Logiewald, in the county of Perth, on the 20th June, 1723, and died in this city of Saint Andrews, on the 22d day of February, 1816. Unseduced by the temptations of pleasure, power, or ambition, he employed the interval betwixt his childhood and his grave with unostentatious and steady perseverance in acquiring and in diffusing knowledge, and in the practice of public and of domestic virtue. To his venerated memory. This monument is erected by his children, that they may record his piety to God and benevolence to man and commemorate the eloquence and energy with which he inculcated the precepts of morality and prepared the youthful mind for virtuous actions. But a more imperishable memorial to his genius exists in his philosophical and historical works, where classic elegance, strength of reasoning, and clearness of detail secured the applause of the age in which he lived and will long continue to deserve the gratitude and command the admiration of posterity.

Ferguson’s principal work was An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Written in 1767, it was one of the most systematic and influential histories of civilization to emerge from the Scottish Enlightenment. He drew his ideas from observations from the real world and combined his natural and moral philosophy approach to create a natural history of race.

Ferguson believed that all humans were made in the image of God and so all races were one monogenetic species. The highest level of human in the hierarchy were the people from Europe, which he designated as stretching as far as the Caucasus, which later led to the classification of ‘Caucasian’ to mean white people. He believed that variations in complexion and moral attitude were determined by geography and climate. Humans degenerated the further away from Europe they lived, and their skin became progressively darker. Humans were classified into three separate states – savage, barbarous and civilised. He believed darker-skinned people were savage and lighter-skinned people were less savage. Ferguson thought that skin tone changed the more civilised you became, and so whiteness was always perceived as more civilised and superior to blackness.

The way to progress from being a savage to being a barbarian and ultimately to being civilized was through the ownership of property or capital. It was a racial capitalistic system, founded on Ferguson’s religious beliefs. For Ferguson, capitalism is based on theology: everything is a gift from God, and the more you have, or obtain, the closer to God you are and the more civilised you are. Acquiring more property is doing God’s work, so capitalism is a noble and godly imperative to create a civilised society. These ideas justified European colonialism and slavery. The exploitation of colonial resources created more capital and so increased the civilised status of Europeans.

The accumulation of capital by Europeans resulted in the building of lavish properties and monuments at home. So Ferguson’s large memorial is itself an example of the wealth accrued through colonial capitalism.

Ferguson travelled to Philadelphia in 1778 to negotiate a return of the American colonies to the British Empire. His observations of Indigenous American people during this period reinforced his philosophy of hierarchy. He saw them as barbarous people because they understood and owned property, but they were not, in his view, as civilised as the white Europeans. Their skin tone was also between dark and light, and this appeared to confirm his theory of skin colour being linked to progress. 

These observations influenced Ferguson’s entry on ‘history’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1780. This included a chart that graphically showed the progress of history across nations. European nations were most prominent, with histories going back to the biblical flood. But for both Africa and America, the chart indicated that history only began in 1500 with the arrival of Europeans. Ferguson deliberately ignored the long and rich histories of both continents and dismissed any sense of Indigenous civilisation.

Ferguson and his contemporaries’ thinking was highly influential in the Southern States of America, where many of the planters and governors were Scottish and Protestant. Ferguson’s theories justified the ownership of enslaved people and provided the theological basis for white supremacy. This influenced the religious symbolism of organisations like the Ku Klux Klan.

Ferguson’s writings were also a major influence on Sir Walter Scott. The ideas of progress and history in An Essay on the History of Civil Society informed Scott’s approach to history that appears in his writings. His romantic novels gave an historical legitimacy to ideas of racial purity and social hierarchies that were underpinned by Christian chivalry. His novels were greatly admired by white supremacists in the American South and the imagery of the burning cross used by the Ku Klux Klan was taken directly from Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Mark Twain accused him of causing “more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.” Sir Walter Scott is celebrated in a massive statue in the centre of Glasgow’s George Square.  

It is surprising how much Ferguson’s memorial in St Andrews and the statue of Sir Walter Scott in George Square are linked with slavery, colonialism and the propagation of white supremacy in America.

Further reading

Buchan, Bruce, “Charting Time and Visualising Race in Europe’s Enlightenment”, Royal Historical Society, 2022. https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/2022/02/09/charting-time-and-visualising-race-in-europes-enlightenment/

Buchan, Bruce, and Silvia Sebastiani, "No distinction of Black or Fair": The Natural History of Race in Adam Ferguson's Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Journal of the History of Ideas, 82:2 (2021): 207-229

Launay, Robert. “Savagery in 18th-Century Scotland: An Intellectual Portrait of Adam Ferguson”. In: Bérose, Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l'anthropologie, Paris, 2021

Roberts, Diane, “The Great-Granddaddy of White Nationalism”, Southern Cultures, 25:3 (2019) https://www.southerncultures.org/article/the-great-granddaddy-of-white-nationalism/

Sebastiani, Silvia. “National Characters and Race: A Scottish Enlightenment Debate”. In: Ahnert, T., Manning, S. (eds) Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011