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MacGREGOR (McGregor), JAMES DRUMMOND, Presbyterian minister, author, and composer; b. December 1759 in Portmore (St Fillans), parish of Comrie, Perthshire, Scotland, second son of James Drummond, farmer and weaver, and Janet Dochert (Dochart); m. 11 May 1796 Ann McKay in Halifax, and they had three sons and three daughters; m. secondly 25 Dec. 1811 in Pictou, N.S., Janet Gordon, widow of the Reverend Peter Gordon, Presbyterian missionary to Prince Edward Island, and niece of Archibald Bruce, minister of the General Associate Hall at Alloa, Scotland, and they had two daughters and one son; d. 3 March 1830 in Pictou.

James MacGregor’s parents belonged to Clan Gregor, which was proscribed after the Highland rebellion of 1715. Upon resettlement elsewhere in the Highlands James’s grandfather took the patronym Drummond of his protector, the Earl of Perth. Although James’s father retained this name, his son resumed the ancient family name in the course of his university years. James was raised in the bosom of the Secession Church, so called because of its origin in Ebenezer Erskine’s separation from the Church of Scotland in 1733, and within its strict anti-burgher wing, which rejected the burghers’ oath required of civic officers. James’s father is said to have been admitted to church communion by Erskine and to have been present when Erskine was expelled from his own church in 1740.

Preparing for the ministry 

James himself was dedicated at baptism to the service of the Lord, a practice common among the Scottish peasantry. He attended grammar schools at Kinkell and Dunblane, and then studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he matriculated in 1779. From 1781 to 1784 he attended the General Associate Hall, the anti-burgher theological college, but was licensed before completing the five-year course. Like many students, James supported himself partly by teaching, for example at Glen Lednock, near Comrie, at Morebattle in southern Scotland, and in Argyll. The Secession Church had few Gaelic-speaking ministers and with his Highland ancestry James began learning the Gaelic language to become one. He made a study of the traditions of his native district, translated the Book of Proverbs into Gaelic, and taught school in the western Highlands. As a probationer he preached widely and some time in 1785 or 1786 was called to Craigdam in Aberdeenshire. The General Associate Synod would not allow him to accept the call. Instead, MacGregor was appointed to Nova Scotia.

In the fall of 1784 the people of Pictou had petitioned for a minister who would preach in both Gaelic and English. They sent their request through two residents of Greenock, Scotland, one of whom had been associated with Pictou from its founding. Upon receipt of the request by way of the Presbytery of Perth, MacGregor put himself in the hands of the synod. Although he had expected assignment to the Highlands, at a meeting on 4 May 1786 the synod unanimously appointed him to Pictou. Ordained by the Presbytery of Glasgow on 31 May, he sailed from Greenock on 3 June for Halifax, where he landed on 11 July.

Early years in Pictou 

Influenced by his own youthful intellectual prowess and the moulding of his mentors, MacGregor brought to Nova Scotia the cultural baggage of his Scottish education. He confronted immediately the fluid North American religious frontier. Within days of his arrival he was invited to join the Presbytery of Truro, then forming among the burgher ministers already settled in the province. The Reverend Daniel Cock of Truro, who had written the Pictou petition, assumed that the new arrival, whatever his Scottish affiliation, would unite with the presbytery in recognition of their common objective of sustaining Presbyterianism in Nova Scotia. MacGregor participated in the meetings and preached to the assembly, but was unable to reconcile himself to the presbytery’s acceptance of Isaac Watts’s psalms, its mode of electing elders, its acquiescence in doctrine which was imputed to be impure, and its insufficiently explicit adoption of the Westminster Confession. Cock knew, as MacGregor did not, that the settlers’ alternatives to the ministrations of a few regularly ordained clergy lay in the occasional religious services provided by enthusiastic itinerants who were casual in both doctrine and church practices. Moreover, the Nova Scotian ministers saw the Scottish divisions within Presbyterianism, shaped by Scotland’s relations of church and state, as irrelevant to Nova Scotia where there was neither a Presbyterian establishment nor a burghers’ oath of office. MacGregor could not, however, in conscience join in presbytery with colleagues who were burghers, not anti-burghers. In his eyes, his affiliation with the Presbytery of Glasgow precluded any other alliance, and he could not trespass upon the moral conviction that separated burghers and anti-burghers in his homeland. This intransigence left him isolated from religious brethren for nearly a decade.

MacGregor’s firm adherence to anti-burgher principles also caused conflict with his parishioners’ expectations. Upon arrival in Pictou, he found no town, no church, no school, and widely scattered settlers. He postponed celebration of the Lord’s Supper for two years while he preached to his parishioners – each sermon four times, in English and in Gaelic at two separate stations – taught in their houses, and catechized them, for he had to assure himself of the sincerity of the celebrants before he admitted them to the communion table. Although his parishioners would gladly have had the burgher ministers join them in the sacrament, MacGregor could not bring himself to invite them. Similarly, he was concerned, in the absence of established congregations, about due ordination of elders, and he was relieved to find among his communicants three who had been regularly ordained in Scotland; he was thus able to form a session and ordain additional elders when required. His tenacity in baptizing only the children of sincere Christians caused the most criticism of his anti-burgher polity. In settlements deprived of religious ordinances, where other ministers regularly baptized upon the presentation of children regardless of parental adherence, MacGregor insisted upon the parents’ knowledge of and commitment to Christian upbringing prior to the baptism.

MacGregor’s early experiences in Nova Scotia confirmed his decision not to join the Presbytery of Truro. Sympathetic to the anti-slavery attitudes emerging in Britain, he put his convictions to practical use by applying £20 of the £27 he received for his first year’s services toward purchasing the freedom of a slave girl from her Nova Scotian master, and he subsequently aided in the release of others. MacGregor extended this commitment when he confronted Cock, who was a slave owner, with the immorality of a Christian’s enslaving God’s children. The publication in Halifax in 1788 of MacGregor’s rebuke to Cock, and the Reverend David Smith’s reply on Cock’s behalf, formalized MacGregor’s split with the Presbytery of Truro.

MacGregor’s conflict with the burgher ministers created tensions within the Presbyterian communities as well. Those discontented with local ministrations sought him out for occasional services, and MacGregor, in his fervour, appears to have encouraged them. In 1793 the Presbytery of Truro summoned him, but its failure to persuade him of the “groundlessness and wrongness of his separation” led to the promulgation of a public warning against him. Accusations in the same year, attributed to MacGregor, that Smith neglected the proper teaching of his congregation at Londonderry were interpreted by the burghers as an attempt to lay the base for the introduction of an anti-burgher minister there, an event that occurred two years later when the Reverend John Brown was settled at Londonderry after Smith’s death. In 1795 MacGregor received his first anti-burgher brethren, Brown and the Reverend Duncan Ross, and on 7 July formed with them the Associate Presbytery of Nova Scotia, more commonly known as the Associate Presbytery of Pictou. The congregational assignments to Ross and Brown were not, however, of MacGregor’s choosing, despite his familiarity with local conditions, and it was not until 1801 that an amicable division of the Pictou settlements was arranged between Ross and MacGregor. The Presbytery of Truro sought communion of the two presbyteries, but, as in MacGregor’s case, the initial period of the new ministers’ residence was not opportune for approaching a closer union.

Supplying the Gospel 

The driving force throughout MacGregor’s life was his dedication to supplying the Gospel to those who did not have it. His acceptance of the posting to Nova Scotia exemplified this commitment. Arriving at Pictou, he found settlers who had lived there for up to 20 years with no religious services except occasional visits from itinerants of various denominations. His scattered parishioners were mostly Highlanders raised in the Church of Scotland and traditionally antagonistic to the Secession Church, but in time they became irrevocably bound to MacGregor. In 1791 immigration brought Roman Catholic Highlanders to Pictou, and MacGregor encouraged his flock to aid them. Within two years of arrival he set out on his first missionary journey – a duty he would perform regularly for more than 30 years through New Brunswick (Miramichi 1797, Saint John River 1805, Passamaquoddy Bay 1815), Prince Edward Island (1791, 1794, 1800, 1806), Cape Breton (1798, 1818), and from Amherst to Sherbrooke in Nova Scotia. In the religious environment of the frontier, he, like New Light, Methodist, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and other Presbyterian preachers, encountered settlements seeking religious services of whatever denomination they could obtain. Responding to this milieu as well as to his ordination instruction “to make Christians, not Seceders,” MacGregor “resolved not to confine [his] visitations to Presbyterians, but to include all, of every denomination, who would make [him] welcome; for [he] viewed them as sheep without a shepherd.”

Although Presbyterians were the largest religious group in the province and many sought Presbyterian leadership, there were few Presbyterian clergy in Nova Scotia. Upon arrival MacGregor was one of only five. Generally the Scottish churches of the 18th century lacked interest in pursuing missionary activities, and the absence of a missionary body such as the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel seriously hampered the extension of Presbyterianism. As a result MacGregor became a focal point of appeals to Scotland for ministers to settle in Maritime communities. His first letters home bespoke his isolation and entreated friends and synod appointees to join him in his labours; congregational petitions, beginning with that of Amherst in 1788, followed. The failure of both friends and synod nominees to come to Nova Scotia led to discouragement in settlements for which MacGregor had sought ministers. In his impassioned Letter . . . to the General Associate Synod, written in September 1792, he responded in a mixture of pleas of need, betrayed faith, and overt criticism of ministerial lukewarmness and selfishness. The arrival of Brown and Ross in 1795 broke MacGregor’s isolation but did not restore his belief in Scottish capacity to supply North American demands.

If clergy sufficient to meet the region’s religious wants could not be induced to come, other means of spreading the word could be pursued. MacGregor sought aid from the international religious bodies, of which his continuing correspondence with Scotland kept him aware and in which he took a most active personal interest. As early as 1807 he was in correspondence with the British and Foreign Bible Society and received from it the following year English and Gaelic bibles and testaments, for sale or free distribution at his discretion. He contributed to it financially and as a Gaelic scholar, and he also reviewed translations of English works to be published by the society. As secretary of the Pictou branch from 1813 to 1826, he collected and remitted contributions to aid in spreading the Gospel where it was little known; it is said that he was the branch. Alone in the province, his society remained unaffiliated with the Nova Scotia branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In part because of his personal commitment and in part because of the large Highland population in his region, MacGregor was also a keen member of the Gaelic School Society, founded in Edinburgh in 1811. It was active primarily in the Highlands, and MacGregor’s involvement reflected his lifelong devotion to the people of his homeland and his continuing communication with Scottish religious and educational movements. He also organized local contributions to the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews and to the Baptist mission in Burma. In Pictou he promoted Sunday schools – another British-initiated effort to give children a knowledge of the Bible – penny-a-week societies, and a domestic missionary society instituted by the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia.

In addition to translations of works from English to Gaelic, MacGregor wrote original works in Gaelic, primarily a series of spiritual songs published under the title Dain a chomhnadh crabhuidh. Inspired by the loneliness of the North American forests he traversed and by the works of such Scottish evangelical poets as Dugald Buchanan, which had been written to the tunes of familiar Highland songs, MacGregor completed about 25 long sacred poems. Their subjects are the central Christian doctrines such as faith, the Gospel, the Last Judgement, and the Résurrection, set forth simply not only for his Highland parishioners but also for the evangelizing of the Scottish North, where the tradition of reciting hymns for spiritual experience remained strong. MacGregor’s study of the Scottish secular poets Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Alexander MacDonald in the course of preparing his poems and his choice of secular tunes raised aspersions on his religious principles in Pictou, but his Dain became widely renowned in the Highlands. MacGregor gave the copyright of his work to the Glasgow Tract Society on the condition that the society would be diligent in circulating it. At least seven editions were published between 1819 and 1870, but only one, that of 1861, in North America; both additional poems and excerpts from the Dain were published in later collections of Gaelic verse. On the basis of his poems MacGregor has been acclaimed “the apostle of Pictou” and the first Gaelic bard in Canada.

Synod and academy

As MacGregor continued his work in Nova Scotia, he like other ministers moved from an initial adherence to Scottish denominationalism to a more ecumenical view of Presbyterianism. When the Presbytery of Pictou was formed, it followed the example of Truro and defined no doctrinal standards subordinate to the Westminster Confession, MacGregor having come to see in nine years the fruitlessness of seeking strict adherence to Scottish anti-burgher polity. As he explained to a colleague in Scotland, “You would see such a mixture of people here from different nations as throws the state of the church back as far as the days of John Knox.” The contemplation of union among all Presbyterian ministers in the province by 1814 reflected this reality. The objectives of a union, as MacGregor saw them, were to provide a more extensive plan for perpetuating Presbyterianism, and especially to provide for training a native ministry. In 1816 the presbyteries of Pictou and Truro cooperated in sending to the St Marys River region two missionaries, of whom MacGregor was one. Although he was not a member of the committee appointed to define the terms of union, he was a strong supporter of the intent, and when the synod was formally created at Truro in July 1817 as the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia, he was chosen its first moderator. In a synod dominated by the Pictou ministers, MacGregor was active on a variety of committees from 1817 to 1825, including that discussing “ways and means for promoting religion,” and he attended every synod meeting except the one prior to his death. MacGregor participated as well in some informal attempts to obtain recognition of the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia by the Church of Scotland, but through Scottish denominational intransigence these came to naught.

The leading objective in forming the synod, in the eyes of the Pictou ministers, was to establish a college to train Nova Scotians for the Presbyterian ministry so that the church would no longer be reliant upon the meagre supply of clergymen from the Scottish synods. This concern was directly linked to the larger aim of providing Nova Scotian Presbyterians as well as dissenters with educational opportunities beyond those of the grammar school since religious tests, introduced in 1803, had effectively excluded non-Anglicans from King’s College at Windsor, the only institute of higher learning in the province. MacGregor’s life exemplifies the devoted relationship between education and religion that characterizes Scottish Presbyterianism, and he was an ardent supporter of this cause as well as of its obdurate promoter, the Reverend Thomas McCulloch*. In 1805, MacGregor was active in soliciting subscriptions for a society to support formation of an institution for training young men for the ministry. When the idea was renewed in 1814, he was again a leader in its promotion, and he was a trustee from Pictou Academy’s initiation in 1815 until his death, the most generous subscriber to the academy after merchant Edward Mortimer*, and an active worker for its success. In support of the academy he preached, sought contributions, and occasionally penned some of the flood of appeals for recognition, legal status, books, and funds which were directed, starting in 1815, to the provincial government, the lieutenant governor, local congregations, newspapers, the Scottish synod, and such international bodies as the London Missionary Society. In one such appeal, prepared by McCulloch, University of Glasgow honorary degrees were sought for four warm political friends of Pictou Academy and for MacGregor; he was, as a result, awarded a dd in 1822.

Struggle  

In the 1820s the well-rooted Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia and newly arrived Church of Scotland ministers clashed head-on in Pictou and in the wider provincial sphere over the local education and ordination of Presbyterian clergy. In the bitter struggle to protect Pictou Academy against the aspersions of the Church of Scotland and its missionary wing, the Glasgow Colonial Society, MacGregor’s passionate adherence to the purposes of the institution in offering a college education and theological training for Nova Scotians was driven by his 40 years of appeals to Scotland for ministers to serve in the colony. In the wider scope of this strife, MacGregor was threatened with prosecution in 1825 by Church of Scotland stalwart the Reverend George Burns of Saint John, N.B., for having performed a marriage for a farmer 20 years earlier in contravention of the New Brunswick marriage law.

The politico-religious struggle over Pictou Academy that incited Nova Scotians from 1815 to the mid 1830s was the leading component of a larger movement in the province to establish the rights of non-Anglican denominations. The Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia, steered by McCulloch, gave leadership in the endeavour. One focus of this activity was the Church of England’s claim, as the established church, to its exclusive right to marry by licence, it alone having traditionally issued such papers. MacGregor had himself been married in Halifax in 1796 by licence rather than, as was required by ecclesiastical and civil law in Scotland, after the publication of banns, and he was severely criticized by his parishioners and ministerial brethren for such irregular procedure. In practice, marriage licences had been widely distributed for many years to ministers and justices of the peace, and as the right to their use became a principle with the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia, MacGregor also undoubtedly married by licence when so requested. In 1832 legislation was passed which allowed non-Anglican clergy to marry by licence.

Besides seeking legal status for interdenominational use of marriage licences, the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia undertook to bring all non-Anglican Protestants in the province into common communication. Beginning in 1819, its representatives sought cooperation with Methodist and Baptist preachers. MacGregor supported such collaboration, including the attempt to formalize common interests through a board, but he took little direct role in the promotion of the board except in 1825 during the absence in Scotland of McCulloch, who was its driving force.

The rite of baptism

The mid 1820s also saw discussion of another sort among non-Anglican Protestants. Beginning in 1822, Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian ministers in Nova Scotia carried on an active newspaper and pamphlet controversy over the rite of baptism, the point of disagreement being whether it should be performed by sprinkling or immersion. MacGregor had investigated this subject when still a theological student and had at that time favourably impressed a hearer by his preaching on it. He put the arguments in favour of paedobaptism to paper, possibly while he was still in Scotland, and circulated them privately during the Nova Scotian debate. He is said to have contributed to the treatise that appeared under Duncan Ross’s name in 1825, but his own essay does not appear to have been published in his lifetime.

“A guide to baptism” was not MacGregor’s first doctrinal work. In 1800 his “Essay on the duration and character of the millenial age of the church” had been published in the Christian Magazine (Edinburgh). “A defence of the religious imprecations and denunciations of God’s wrath, contained in the Book of Psalms, against the enemies of the Gospel,” also not published in MacGregor’s lifetime, defended the use of the Old Testament Psalms in the face of prevalent criticism and preference for the hymns of Isaac Watts. MacGregor also wrote occasionally for the press, both on religious subjects such as the British and Foreign Bible Society and on broad topics such as improvements to transportation in the province.

Establishing a home and developing the land  

While some Scottish congregations regarded a minister’s farming and acquisition of land as indulgent worldliness, MacGregor’s farming at Pictou was a necessity born out of the inability of his flock to pay regularly even the modest stipend he was promised. In 1799, for example, he received only £50, all in kind, currency being at times virtually unknown. When MacGregor married in 1796, he settled on the west side of the East River of Pictou. Two years later he bought 150 acres for £200, and in 1810 he obtained a confirming grant of the additional 450 acres he had improved. Unlike Anglican and some dissenting clergymen, MacGregor did not receive a glebe as the first permanent minister in the settlement, although Cock held such land at Truro and McCulloch obtained the glebe for Pictou town. On his land MacGregor reportedly built the first frame house on the East River and, as his family grew, the first brick house in eastern Nova Scotia, with bricks imported from Scotland. In farming for his family’s subsistence he apparently used skills learned at his family home in Scotland.

MacGregor was a strong promoter of scientific agriculture in Nova Scotia. He was secretary of the East River, Pictou Agricultural Society throughout its existence from 1820 to 1825, and his regular reports to John Young*, secretary of the Central Board of Agriculture in Halifax, detail his experiments, such as the use of lime and coal ash to fertilize crops, and his successes in the form of prizes at the society’s annual competitions for oats, turnips, barley, potatoes, wheat, lime, and the best ram. His labours provided a model for his neighbours, who were not experienced in agriculture and, as MacGregor explained, would adopt new schemes only when they had been proved effective. After the seeds sent by the Central Board turned out to be smutty, MacGregor advised Young of their deleterious impact on the society: membership had fallen away, and “some think the whole bustle about agriculture is a contrivance to pick poor people’s pockets.” Recognizing the potential of the society, however, MacGregor remarked, “No one knows how long we would have followed the example of our grandfathers, had we been left to continue on without a stimulus,” and with its encouragement many improvements, including better equipment, were introduced. Nevertheless, only a small proportion of the farmers of the region were members of the society. In 1825, when the Central Board and its annual prizes to stimulate experiments and competition were abolished, MacGregor noted that agriculture in Pictou needed continued encouragement to keep it creeping forward. His own farming was soon to be drastically reduced by the sale of his land to Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell of London as part of the launching of the coal-mining operations of the General Mining Association in 1827. At the time of his death he owned only three cows, a horse, and a plough and cart.

MacGregor was one of the first Pictonians recorded to have found and used the coal under his property. A coal fire was burning in his house when he entertained the candidates for the 1799 provincial election, in which rural Nova Scotia made its first significant inroads on the Halifax-dominated House of Assembly. As minerals were a crown resource, MacGregor obtained a licence from Lieutenant Governor Sir John Wentworth* to mine the coal on his land. He was one of several Pictonians who heated their houses from such backyard operations and who were prosecuted in 1822 for raising coals from their lands in contravention of the monopolistic lease on coal mines held by Edward Mortimer’s successors. About 1820 MacGregor experimented with burning hydrogen from the coal deposits for light in his house, but he was unable to establish an operating system because he could not afford the purifying apparatus and the piping necessary for safety and transmission.

Assessment 

MacGregor was a large man, six feet tall, and with a gift for conversation. In his mature years he was known for his patience, his tolerance, and his conciliatory manner, which contrasted with the fiery adherence to principle of his early years in Nova Scotia. His ardent Christian zeal remained unchanged, but found new expression. In 1824 a cancer was successfully removed from his lip, but in February 1828 he suffered a severe stroke which resulted in paralysis on his right side and some loss of memory. Another stroke, just over two years later, was fatal.

The surviving remains of MacGregor’s autobiography and writings, published by a sympathetic editor, have made him renowned for undergoing hardships of Herculean proportions on the Nova Scotian frontier – the physical hazards and deprivations of his journeyings, the tribulations caused by his disputatious parishioners, and the “almost superhuman exertions” of his pastoral labours. He was the model clergyman depicted in McCulloch’s novel William and Melville. The Anglican minister John Inglis* described him in 1811 as “a venerable man of great simplicity in manner, but well informed and very useful among his congregation who seem to respect him highly,” and the Novascotian, or Colonial Herald of Halifax summed up at his death: “If he met a believer, he joined him as a traveller journeying on the same road, to the same country, and was happy that they had been brought together. If he found an unfortunate brother who needed consolation, he . . . administered to him the comfort of the Gospel.”

Susan Buggey