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Creswell and Captain Douglas in the Tumult Before the Revolution
Wednesdayy November 30th, 1774. This being the Anniversary of St. Andrew, the titular Saint of the Scotch, was invited to spend the evening with Captn. William
Douglas and a number of other Scotch guests. Have been
genteelly treated and am now going to bed drunk. This is the first time. Thursday, December ist, 1774. Sick with my last night's debauch.
When the English traveller Nicholas Creswell arrived in the American colonies in 1774, he expected opportunity. What he found instead was a land simmering with discontent. Everywhere he went, people spoke openly—recklessly, he thought—about resisting Parliament, defying royal authority, and breaking from the Crown altogether.
Perplexed and increasingly uneasy, Creswell began keeping a diary, recording not only the political agitation around him but the characters he met as he moved through Virginia and the backcountry.
Among those figures was Captain William Douglas, a Scot by birth and a son of the old Ayrshire family of Garrallan. Born before March 1732 to Hugh Douglas of Garrallan and Katherine Hume, William belonged to the same lineage that produced
Patrick Douglas of Garrallan. Like many younger sons of the Scottish landed families, he had crossed the Atlantic in mid‑century, settling first in Maryland and later in Virginia. There he married into local families, raised children, and held rank in the colonial militia—his title of “Captain” reflecting both status and service.
Creswell first encountered him on 30 November 1774, the feast of St Andrew, when he was invited to spend the evening with Douglas and a gathering of fellow Scots. The company was lively, the welcome warm, and the whisky—by Creswell’s own rueful admission—more potent than he was accustomed to.
He recorded the night with characteristic bluntness:
The next morning’s entry is even shorter: he was, he confessed, thoroughly sick from “my last night’s debauch.”
For Creswell, the evening was a lesson in Scottish hospitality; for Douglas, it was simply the continuation of a cultural world he had carried from Ayrshire to the American frontier. The Scots of Virginia and Maryland maintained their networks, their celebrations, and their sense of identity even as the colonies around them lurched toward rebellion.
Creswell would meet Captain Douglas again in later travels, noting further visits and conversations. By then, Douglas was a man firmly rooted in colonial life—married, established, and raising a family that included daughters such as Elizabeth, Catherine, Hannah, Nancy, and Margaret, as well as sons Hugh and Patrick Hume Douglas. He would live to see the Revolution unfold around him, dying in Loudoun County, Virginia, in June 1783, just as the war drew to its close.
For Creswell, however, the memory that endured was that first St Andrew’s Day: an Englishman bewildered by colonial politics, swept into a Scottish celebration, and undone by the conviviality of a Garrallan-born captain whose life had carried him far from Ayrshire but not from the customs of home.
Additionally, Cresswell writes:
I am sorry that Captn. Douglas should be such a dupe to these religious quacks
(Methodists). He
keeps a good table, is a good-natured man, easily led, and
rather unsteady in his religious principles, always glad to see or converse with these Fag-end-of-the-Scripture mongers, and as long as his house is open to them they will haunt him as bad as they tell us the Devil haunts their meetings.
See also:
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Douglas of Garrallan
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