Another and an important cause of the early appearance of Scots in America was the wars between Scotland and England during the Commonwealth.  Large numbers of Scottish prisoners taken at Dunbar (1650) and at Worcester (1651) were sold into service in the colonies, a shipload arriving in Boston Harbor in 1652 on the ship John and Sara.  The means taken to ameliorate their condition led in 1657 to the foundation of the Scots Charitable Society of Boston—­the earliest known Scottish society in America.  Its foundation may be taken as evidence that there were already prosperous and influential Scots living in Boston at that time.  A list of the passengers of the John and Sara is given in Suffolk Deed Records (bk. 1, pp. 5-6) and in Drake’s The Founders of New England (Boston, 1860, pp. 74-76).  These men, says Boulton, “worked out their terms of servitude at the Lynn iron works and elsewhere, and founded honorable families whose Scotch names appear upon our early records.  No account exists of the Scotch prisoners that were sent to New England in Cromwell’s time; at York in 1650 were the Maxwells, McIntires, and Grants.  The Mackclothlans [i.e., Mac Lachlans], later known as the Claflins, gave a governor to Massachusetts and distinguished merchants to New York City.”

The bitter persecution of Presbyterians during the periods of episcopal rule in the latter half of the seventeenth century also contributed largely to Scottish emigration to the new world.  A Scottish merchant in Boston named Hugh Campbell, obtained permission from the authorities of the Bay State Colony in February 1679-80 to bring in a number of settlers from Scotland and to establish them in the Nepmug country in the vicinity of Springfield, Massachusetts.

So desperate had matters become in Scotland at the beginning of the eighth decade of the seventeenth century that a number of the nobility and gentry determined to settle in New Jersey and the Carolinas.  One of these colonies was founded in New Jersey in 1682 under the management of James Drummond, Earl of Perth, John Drummond, Robert Barclay the Quaker Apologist, David and John Barclay, his brothers, Robert Gordon, Gawen Lawrie, and George Willocks.  In 1684 Gawen Lawrie, who had been for several years previously residing in the colony, was appointed Deputy Governor of the province, and fixed his residence at Elizabeth.  In the same year Perth (so named in honor of the Earl of Perth, one of the principal proprietors, now Perth Amboy) was made the capital of the new Scottish settlement.  During the following century a constant stream of emigrants both from Scotland and from Ulster came to the colony.  One of the principal encouragers of the Scottish colony in New Jersey was George Scot or Scott (d. 1685) of Pitlochrie, who had been repeatedly fined and imprisoned by the Privy Council of Scotland for attending “Conventicles,” as clandestine religious gatherings were then called in Scotland,