Tartan Day: Canada, the US Senate and 6 April

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The resolutions and proclamations are documented. The influence of the Declaration of Arbroath on the American Declaration of Independence is a disputed claim and is labelled accordingly.

Canadian beginnings

established Tartan Day began in Canada. The anthropologist Celeste Ray, introducing Transatlantic Scots (2005), credits Jean Watson of Nova Scotia with a personal campaign for a day honouring Scots' contribution to Canadian history. The Federation of Scottish Clans in Nova Scotia first celebrated it in 1986, and the province ratified it in 1987. Ontario followed in 1991 and New Brunswick in 1993. The historian Edward J. Cowan, in his chapter of the same book, adds that the Clans and Scottish Societies of Canada (CASSOC) took the idea up, with help from the Scottish Studies Foundation, and that by 2004 every province except Newfoundland observed it, Quebec for the first time that year. In 2010 the Canadian government declared 6 April National Tartan Day.

shared Cowan, who took part in the Canadian campaign, insists it had no political agenda: Canada had no declaration of independence to compare with Arbroath, and nobody's politics or birth certificate was checked. Australia and New Zealand also keep a Tartan Day, but on 1 July, the anniversary of the 1782 repeal of the ban on Highland dress.

From Canada to Washington

established Cowan traces the American adoption to a meeting at Sarasota, Florida, in March 1996, where representatives of the Caledonian Foundation met Neil Fraser, a past chairman of CASSOC. The Americans were taken with the idea, and Fraser is reported to have explained that 1 July, Canada Day, would not suit the Canadians. Had the date moved, Cowan observes, the link with Arbroath, and the whole argument about the two declarations, would never have arisen. Several states proclaimed Tartan Days first: Tennessee in 1996 and North Carolina in 1997, when Governor James Hunt claimed that his state had more people of Scottish heritage than any other state or country, Scotland included.

established In 1997 Senator Trent Lott announced from the Senate floor that Tartan Day would be observed across the country. The first national observance, on 6 April 1997, was arranged by the bodies of what became the Scottish Coalition, nine national organisations including the Council of Scottish Clans and Associations, the Association of St Andrew Societies, the American-Scottish Foundation and the Scottish-American Military Society. On 20 March 1998 Lott presented Senate Resolution 155, which designated 6 April as National Tartan Day "to recognize the outstanding achievements and contributions made by Scottish Americans". It called the Declaration of Arbroath the Scottish Declaration of Independence, said the American Declaration was modelled on it, and claimed that almost half the signers of 1776 were of Scottish descent. Cowan notes that Duncan Bruce's The Mark of the Scots (1996), the fullest source for such claims, counts 21 of the 56 signers, about 38 per cent. The House of Representatives approved the day on 9 March 2005, and presidents have issued proclamations.

The Declaration of Arbroath

established The date was chosen because the Declaration of Arbroath is dated 6 April 1320. It was a letter from Scottish nobles to Pope John XXII asking him to recognise Robert the Bruce as king and Scotland as independent, and it contains the famous line that "as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule". Cowan notes that it went out in the names of forty-four individually named nobles, barons and freeholders and the community of the realm; Ray counts the seals of eight earls and thirty-one barons.

shared Why 6 April? Cowan offers an answer. Easter fell on 30 March in 1320, so 6 April was Quasimodo or Low Sunday, a week after Easter, when the Mass reading (1 Peter 2) speaks of obedience and of strayed sheep returning to their shepherd. He argues that the date signalled penitence to a pope who had kept the Scottish king excommunicated for years. It is an interpretation, though a carefully argued one.

established The name "Scottish Declaration of Independence" was itself borrowed from 1776. Cowan traces it to local champions of Arbroath, such as J. M. M'Bain in 1897 and J. Brodie in a pamphlet of 1904, rather than to professional historians, who took little interest until the 650th anniversary in 1970, when the Scottish Record Office issued a facsimile. The Burns Federation had already sent a reproduction to every Scottish secondary school and teacher training college in 1949.

Did Arbroath inspire 1776?

shared The Senate resolution stated that the American Declaration of Independence "was modeled on" the Declaration of Arbroath. Historians have found no direct evidence that Thomas Jefferson or the other drafters used it; the ideas in the American Declaration came mainly from English and Enlightenment political thought. The two Scottish scholars who address the claim in Transatlantic Scots differ in tone. The literary historian Andrew Hook sets the resolution beside Garry Wills's contested argument in Inventing America (1978) that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers shaped Jefferson's draft: Wills's case rests on evidence, whereas the resolution's view "has no scholarly basis at all". Hook reads it as the latest form of an old filiopietism that traces every good thing in American life to Scots, and recalls his own view, set out in Scotland and America 1750–1835 (1975), that Scots as a group "tended overwhelmingly" to side with the Loyalists. That is Hook's reading of the contemporary evidence, not a count, and some prominent Scots, such as John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration, backed independence. He also notes that Jefferson's draft had attacked the king for sending Scottish and other foreign mercenaries.

shared Cowan is more open. He finds the parallels between the two documents superficial and coincidental rather than substantive, but notes that the Arbroath letter had been printed at least fourteen times before 1776, and that the two Scots-born signers, John Witherspoon and James Wilson, were proud Scots who almost certainly knew of it. Wilson wrote of a liberty Americans would not lose but with their lives, which echoes Arbroath's freedom passage, yet both draw on the Roman historian Sallust, whom Scottish schoolboys read, so the echo proves nothing. Cowan concludes that a real influence should have left more trace, and that for sceptics like himself the case remains open.

Celebrations

established The New York Tartan Day Parade has been held since 1999, with thousands of pipers and drummers in some years; Ray notes some ten thousand marching through New York in 2002. Tartan Week events take place in New York and other cities, and the Scottish Government has used Tartan Week to promote Scotland in North America. Local events vary widely. The St Andrew's Society of Baltimore declared April 1999 a Scottish-American History and Heritage Month, and on Tartan Day 2003 Ray attended a Kirkin' of the Tartan at the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Cowan lists bonnie knees contests, golf tournaments and kilted balloon teams, but also school programmes on Scottish history, literature and the Scottish Parliament, and fundraising for university scholarships.

established The day reached Scotland itself in 2004, when the Angus Ahead campaign staged events at Arbroath and Carnoustie, including a pageant at Arbroath Abbey, billed as a homecoming for North Americans. Cowan notes that the Scottish Executive stayed away; its ministers preferred New York and Washington. France also marked the day that year.

A row across the Atlantic

shared At first Scots seemed bemused, Ray writes, but journalists and critics soon questioned the flamboyance and the motives. The geographer Euan Hague (2002) called Tartan Day an invented tradition built on a questionable genealogical appeal and a history centred on European men. The journalist Neal Ascherson saw behind it "a web of nonsense about the past of Scotland", and the historian Michael Fry mocked the Senate chaplain, Lloyd John Ogilvie, for leading shouts of "Freedom" on the Capitol steps in 2001. Cowan accepts that much of Lott's history was invention. He reports that Lott, accepting the American-Scottish Foundation's Wallace Award in 2000, named Mel Gibson's Braveheart as a major influence on his thinking, and suspects the resolution owed more to the film and to a right-wing vision of a "Celtic" South than to King Robert.

shared Hook goes further, noting that the Alabama-based Society of Southern Scots, which promoted the resolution, listed the neo-Confederate League of the South among its affiliates, alongside the Scottish National Party and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Ray, by contrast, warns that British journalists have made a genre of linking the heritage movement to white supremacists, and that such people neither organise nor represent the hundreds of thousands who take part. Cowan met many American supporters who said they had no time for Lott's politics but were glad to use his interest to win official recognition.

shared Cowan's own advice is that Scots should stop feeling responsible. Tartan Day was invented by Canadians and adopted by Americans, who are as free as anyone to make their own traditions; in his experience American audiences know Braveheart is a film and are happy to be corrected. Diaspora Scots answered the critics too. In 2004 The Scotsman printed a letter from Robert More of the Clan Muir Society in Coos Bay, Oregon: "We couldn't care less if Scottish politicians want to join the fun." The same April, Scottish papers made much of a public spat between Sir Sean Connery and First Minister Jack McConnell, whose designer kilt by Howie Nicholsby upset traditionalists at home.

Heritage, descent and "roots" tourism

shared Tartan Day belongs to a longer history of descendants asserting a Scottishness their emigrant ancestors may have expressed differently. The historian Angela McCarthy notes that in the Highland settlement of Waipu in New Zealand, the first settlers expressed their identity through religion, language and community; only later generations, from the 1870s, made "a self-conscious acquisition and assertion" of Scottishness through names, Scottish reading, visible display and Caledonian Games. In the United States, research by the anthropologist Celeste Ray links the popularity of the Scottish heritage movement in the American South to a southern regional identity, with the lost cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie made to mirror the defeat of the Confederacy.

established Organised return visits are older than Tartan Day too. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Scottish Americans travelled through Scotland for about a month at a time in tours connected with the Order of Scottish Clans in America, and Australian Scots and Scots in England made similar trips. McCarthy notes that more recent descendants explain their visits by a romanticised landscape and culture and "a sense of homelessness". She also warns against treating supposedly Scottish virtues (education, hard work, loyalty, family) as uniquely Scottish: the sociologist Mary C. Waters found that Americans of many ethnic backgrounds claimed the same values for their own group.

shared It is no accident that the day began in Nova Scotia. The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), notes that the province had long recognised the commercial value of its Scottish connections and, in the 1930s depression under Premier Angus L. Macdonald, began promoting a tartan image of itself for tourists, in a phrase she borrows from Edward J. Cowan, "parading its Scottishness". She argues that romantic Highland imagery, popularised by Walter Scott and Edwin Landseer, meant even more abroad than at home, in a Scotland where four-fifths of people lived in the Lowland towns. Harper also contrasts Scottish and Irish diasporas: the Scots' national and clan societies were mostly social, often élite clubs, rather than political pressure groups, which helps explain why Scottish heritage days in North America are celebrations of descent rather than vehicles for grievance.

• Tartan Day began in Nova Scotia.
• The US Senate declared Tartan Day in 1998.
• 6 April is the date of the Declaration of Arbroath.
• New York has held a Tartan Day Parade since 1999.
• The claim that Arbroath inspired 1776 is disputed.
• In 1320, 6 April was Low Sunday, a week after Easter; Edward J. Cowan argues the date was chosen to signal penitence to the Pope.
• The Declaration of Arbroath was first called Scotland's "Declaration of Independence" around 1900, a name borrowed from the American document.
• Australia and New Zealand keep Tartan Day on 1 July, not 6 April.
• The Canadians refused to move the date to 1 July, which is Canada Day, so the link with Arbroath survived.

• Disputed: The Declaration of Arbroath inspired the American Declaration of Independence. The Senate resolution says the American Declaration was "modeled on" the Arbroath letter, but historians have found no direct evidence that Jefferson or the other drafters used it. Edward J. Cowan finds the parallels superficial and calls the case unproven, while Andrew Hook says the claim "has no scholarly basis at all".
• Myth: Tartan Day began in the United States. It began in Canada. Jean Watson of Nova Scotia campaigned for it, the Federation of Scottish Clans in Nova Scotia first celebrated it in 1986, and Nova Scotia ratified it in 1987. Americans adopted the idea from 1996.
• Myth: Almost half the signers of 1776 were of Scottish descent. The Senate resolution claimed this, but the highest count, Duncan Bruce's, is 21 of the 56 signers, about 38 per cent.
• Disputed: What Tartan Day stands for. It was invented by Canadians and adopted by Americans, and Cowan argues it should be judged as a North American celebration, not a Scottish one. Critics in Scotland mocked its history. Hook notes that a group promoting the resolution listed the neo-Confederate League of the South among its affiliates, while Celeste Ray warns that such groups neither organise nor represent the hundreds of thousands who take part. Cowan met many American supporters who had no time for Senator Lott's politics.