It is not clear exactly what happened. To judge from the draft of a long letter written by William Cullen, shortly to be appointed Professor of Medicine and Smith’s main informant on university matters, the root of the trouble lay in two letters Smith had written to the Duke of Argyll and his guardian, William Smith, the previous Duke’s secretary. It sounds as though Smith had reported that he was a candidate for the professorship and that he wanted to be considered on his merits and not as the Duke’s protégé. However, news of the letter had leaked out. It was now being said that Smith was indeed the Duke’s man and that Thomas Craigie, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, William Leechman, the Professor of Divinity, and some others had only voted for him as a ‘compliment’ to the Duke. Craigie was furious and there was a Faculty row. The Principal, fearing that Argyll would get to hear of it, had asked Smith to confirm what he had written so that he could assure the Duke that his name had not been taken in vain. This time it was Smith, who clearly had a temper, who was outraged, apparently threatening to write to the Duke himself to tell him his own side of the story. Cullen’s instinct had been to reply ‘I beg that for the sake of your quiet and health you would not indulge in any anger or vexation till you are sure of your facts and which you cannot be with regard to our affairs till you are for some time on [our Faculty].’2 That appears to have been an end of the matter.
Smith took up residence in Glasgow in October 1751 in time for the start of the new academic year, probably taking rooms near the College while waiting for a vacant manse in Professors’ Court. Once he was settled he was joined by his mother and his cousin Janet Douglas, who were to keep house for him for the rest of his professorial life. By this time he had taken on his new teaching duties. Thomas Craigie was in poor health and had been given leave to recuperate in Lisbon. His teaching was to be divided between Smith and William Leechman, Leechman lecturing on Ethics and Smith on Natural Jurisprudence and Politics, ‘which it would be most agreeable for me to take upon me to teach’. Craigie was another of Hutcheson’s pupils and his moral philosophy course seems to have been broadly Hutchesonian in character. Smith went out of his way to be accommodating, telling Cullen that he wanted to discuss the curriculum with Craigie before his departure for Lisbon ‘that I might receive his advice about the plan I ought to follow. I would pay great deference to it in every thing, and would follow it implicitly in this, as I shall consider myself as standing in his place and representing him.’3 But the meeting never took place. Craigie died on 27 November, releasing Smith from any obligation to give the sort of course Craigie would have wanted. More importantly, Craigie’s death left Smith his natural successor. He was elected to the Moral Philosophy chair on 22 April 1752. This time there was no malicious gossip and there were no tantrums.
The Glasgow Smith had known as a student was a city whose economy was at a formative stage of its development and with a university that was being remodelled under the watchful eye of the future Duke of Argyll. He returned to a Glasgow whose economy was burgeoning and to a university whose reforms were entering a new phase. The driving force of the city’s economy was still the tobacco trade, which was now expanding at an astonishing rate: 8 million lbs of tobacco had been landed legally in 1741, 13 million in 1745 and 21 million in 1751 – figures which do not begin to take into account the growth of a smuggling trade that remained a thorn in the flesh of Treasury officials in Edinburgh and London. Indeed, so extensive had the Glasgow tobacco trade become by 1751 that the city was importing and re-exporting more than London and the English outports combined, and it was becoming one of the most important entrepôts in trade between the Americas and the Caribbean, and France, north Germany, the Baltic and Russia, shipping and warehousing tobacco and sugar as well as coffee, cheese, ginger, rum, canes, cottons, tar, canvas and gunpowder bound for Europe in exchange for European goods bound for America. It was a trade which flourished because the Act of Union had brought Scottish merchants under the protection of the Navigation Acts, and because the Glaswegians were good at manipulating its provisions in order to restrict foreign competition and enhance their own profits. It was also a trade that was making Glasgow tobacco merchants very rich indeed.
From 1740–90, the trade was controlled by a group of 163 merchants, knit together by family, money and interest into a series of immensely wealthy syndicates; Alexander Speirs’ business, built up from scratch, was worth £135,000 by the time he was fifty-nine; William Cunninghame was able to lend his brother-in-law more than £150,000 over a ten-year period.4 The effect of these syndicates on the local economy was predictable. Many invested in land in neighbouring counties and built mansions and fanciful pleasure-gardens which often had more to do with conspicuous consumption than the sort of prudent improvements Smith liked to associate with merchant-landownership. Between 1750 and 1775 new public arcades and piazzas were being erected in the city centre and twelve new streets and squares were being developed to cater for a growing population and the increasingly expensive tastes of the tobacco lords. Smith was proud of the new city centre, although it was rash to commend it to Samuel Johnson in 1773. ‘Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?’ the surly sage replied.5 Craft trades flourished along with a rising demand for coaches and sedan chairs, exotic and expensive foods and fashions; the careful Annie Bogle, daughter of one of the richest merchants, reckoned that half of her household’s total expenditure of £931 for the period 1775–80 was spent on luxuries.6 By 1751, the city’s economy was supporting new newspapers, taverns, coffee-houses, public entertainments, raree shows and exhibitions of works of art. It was symptomatic of the general expansion of mercantile wealth in the great trading cities of Britain and France. John Gibson, another of Smith’s pupils, noted the effect of these changes in 1777 in his History of Glasgow, commenting that
Since the year 1750, a total change has been effected, not only in Glasgow but over the whole country around it. Hitherto an attentive industry, and a frugality bordering upon parsimony, had been the general characteristic of the inhabitants of Glasgow: the severity of the ancient manners prevailed in full vigour … An extending commerce and increasing manufactures, joined to frugality and industry, had produced wealth; the establishment of banks had rendered it easy for people possessed of credit to obtain money, the ideas of the public were enlarged, and schemes of trade and improvement were adopted and put in practice, the undertakers of which, in former times, would have been denominated madmen; a new stile was introduced in building, in living, in dress, and in furniture, the conveniences, the elegances of life began to be studied, wheel-carriages were set up; an assembly room and a playhouse were built by subscription.7
In the Wealth of Nations Smith was to argue that the carrying trade was a symptom and not a cause of economic growth, and the least efficient way of using capital to generate employment.8 Although it was undoubtedly true that the tobacco trade fuelled a consumer boom it was also penetrating the subsoil of the city’s economy much more deeply than Smith allowed. Tobacco merchants, with their vast trading interests and their enormous capital resources, were going into businesses such as sugar refining, rope manufacture, iron works, tanneries and the leather business, bottle-making, and the manufacture of stockings and hats. The greatest of all merchants, John Glassford, for example, had interests in brewing, tanning, dyeing, vitriol works and in the great Carron Iron works, as well as in print works and ribbon-making. Men like John Dunlop, whose fathers had already made fortunes in the tobacco trade, turned from overseas trade to mining the coal reserves on their estates. Others moved into banking. As Christopher Smout remarks, it was these merchants who laid the foundation for Glasgow’s reputation as an industrial and financial centre before the boom in cotton and shipbuilding started in the later decades of the century.9 While the profits of the carrying trade may not have created industry they were certainly creating the conditions in which industrial enterprise could and would thrive.
It is tempting to think of the changes which were taking pl
ace in the university in this period as a straightforward response to the cultural needs of a remarkable mercantile community, but they weren’t. As Smith knew very well, the reforms that had begun in the 1720s had been designed to propagate moderate Presbyterianism rather than mercantile enterprise, and although Hutcheson had lectured on the theory of trade as part of his politics course, it was not this but the appointment of the distinguished moderate Presbyterian divine William Leechman to the Divinity chair in 1743 that he regarded as his greatest achievement. For the future, the university’s priorities would lie in fostering legal and medical education and turning these subjects into disciplines which were fit for philosophically minded gentlemen.
Glasgow’s law and medical professorships had been long-time sinecures, and by coincidence both fell vacant in 1750, at the same time that the Logic and Metaphysics chair fell vacant. Hercules Lindesay was appointed Professor of Civil Law in 1750 and William Cullen was appointed Professor of Medicine in 1751. Both had studied in Edinburgh, both had taught privately in Glasgow for some years. Cullen was a protégé of Henry Home and the Duke of Argyll and it seems reasonable to suppose that Lindesay was appointed with Argyll’s approval. Both were known to Smith, both supported his appointment enthusiastically and both became friends and allies. Intellectually and personally, Cullen was a man after Smith’s own heart. He was interested in the part played by the sentiments in forming the human personality and had a particular interest in their effects on the health of his patients. He was interested in the history of medical systems and the influence they had exercised over medical practice in former ages. He was to develop a curriculum which was notable for what some thought of as its notoriously ‘philosophical’ characteristics. More generally, in the same spirit as Smith, and in the words of his biographer, ‘he carried into his medical lectures the same ideas of a great system of nature, and made his pupils perceive something of that affinity by which, as Cicero observes, all the senses are connected, rendering to each other a mutual illustration and assistance’.10 Unfortunately much less is known about Lindesay, who died suddenly in 1761 having published nothing. James Boswell, who came to study with Smith, attended his lectures and thought him ‘one of the best teachers I ever saw’.11 As an advocate with academic pretensions, the chances are that he knew Home and it would be interesting to know what he thought of Home’s and Smith’s historical jurisprudence. He was enough of a philosopher to be able to give Smith’s lectures on logic and metaphysics in the spring of 1751. What is more, as Professor of Civil Law he lectured on a branch of jurisprudence that was attracting the attention of historically and philosophically minded jurists in Holland and Germany, most notably from Henry and Samuel Cocceii, whose work was to be of some interest to Smith in the 1750s. Were Smith and Lindesay developing complementary philosophical and historical approaches to an important branch of jurisprudence? Certainly that was the approach which was to be developed by Lindesay’s successor, John Millar, Smith’s most intelligent pupil. Smith’s appointment was thus the last in a series designed to expand the range of the curriculum and to develop the distinctive ‘philosophical’ style of teaching which Hutcheson had pioneered and on which Glasgow’s reputation now depended. It was also the most crucial. Hutcheson’s curriculum had confirmed the position of moral philosophy as the apex of the philosophy curriculum and the gateway to Divinity Hall. Smith was now faced with the task of developing a curriculum which would prepare students to enter the lay professions as well as the ministry.
One final problem remained, to fill the Logic and Metaphysics chair Smith had just vacated. It was here that the reforming impulse met its match. Intellectually, Smith had been appointed to the Logic and Metaphysics chair on the strength of lectures which John Millar had thought offered ‘a more interesting and useful’ introduction to philosophy than ‘the logic and metaphysics of the schools’. David Hume was suggested as a suitable replacement by Lindesay, a suggestion which hints at Lindesay’s philosophical orientation and suggests familiarity with the fact that Hume had once proposed to write a fourth book of the Treatise of Human Nature, on criticism. It was also somewhat implausibly rumoured that Edmund Burke, the author of the forthcoming and seminal Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, was interested.12 Smith’s reaction to Hume’s candidature was prudential. He told Cullen ‘I should prefer David Hume to any man for a colleague; but I am afraid the public would not be of my opinion; and the interest of the society will oblige me to have some regard to the opinion of the public.’13 Indeed, when the rumour that Hume was to be a candidate leaked out, the Glasgow Presbytery complained to the Principal, who was even more sensitive to clerical interference in Faculty business than he was to interference by the Duke of Argyll. Apparently he ‘received [the Presbytery] with a hauty air & tossing up his head asked them if they were come to Dictate to the Faculty or come as his brethren. The ministers got not answer. Every body seems to imagine he will not be the man.’14 Nor was he. In the event the chair was filled by James Clow, one of John Loudon’s pupils, who followed in his master’s footsteps by continuing to teach the logic of the Port-Royal, turning the class into what Thomas Reid later described as ‘the drowsy shop of logic and metaphysics’.15 It was not until 1774 when another of Smith’s pupils, George Jardine, succeeded Clow that the logic and metaphysics course was rebuilt on Smithian lines to demonstrate what Jardine described as the progress of ‘intellectual culture’.16 Between 1752 and 1763 Smith would be obliged to teach rhetoric and belles-lettres as a private course to supplement his course in moral philosophy.
These professorial appointments were part of a wider attempt by the professors and their patrons to extend the intellectual reach of the College and to redefine its place in the cultural life of the city and the nation. In 1754, in a remarkable move in which Smith must have been involved, the university printers, Robert and Andrew Foulis, were given permission to open what proved to be a moderately successful Academy of the Fine Arts, to train apprentices in painting, drawing, engraving and modelling, on the grounds that ‘a seat of the Sciences and Belles Lettres is the perfect nursery for the Fine Arts. The University of Glasgow who are sensible of the intrinsic value of the Fine Arts, and the excellent uses to which they may be made subservient, both moral and political, would be a proper society to have the Academy under their inspection, and to produce a noble and useful institution.’17 In 1755 the brothers went even further, arranging an enormous exhibition of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures, mostly copied from the great masters, for sale to the Glasgow public. Prices ranged from £70 for a copy of the Duke of Hamilton’s vast painting of ‘The Convention at Somerset House’ and £52. 10/- for a copy of Rubens’ ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’, to more modest copies of landscapes, classical scenes and portraits by Poussin, Raphael and Titian. There was even a bas-relief of Francis Hutcheson on sale for 2/6 plaster and 7/6 wax. If this was an attempt to demonstrate that the fine arts were worthy of the patronage of a university and a wealthy mercantile elite, it was even more significant that the senate should have discussed and ‘carried forward’ a plan in which Smith is likely to have been involved, for an Academy of Dancing, Fencing and Riding to provide gentlemen with the means of completing their social education, and doubtless to attract to the university the gentlemanly clientele on which Edinburgh was beginning to build its reputation.18
This attempt to extend the social and cultural reach of the university was only moderately successful. To be sure, Leechman, Cullen and Smith himself would have some success in attracting international and well-born students. But the College never managed to fight off the competition for foreign and gentlemanly students from Edinburgh. Edinburgh’s law and medical faculties were larger than Glasgow’s and the medical professors were able to draw on the resources of the Royal Infirmary to provide clinical teaching; it is striking that William Cullen and Joseph Black, two of the greatest professors of medicine, were lured to the lusher pastures of E
dinburgh from Glasgow in 1756 and 1766 respectively. And although Smith was to resist Hume’s suggestion that he apply for the chair of Public Law at Edinburgh in 1758, and although his fame as a teacher did much to confirm Glasgow’s enviable reputation as ‘one of the most famous and illustrious’ universities in Europe, as one foreign observer put it,19 it was to be Edinburgh and the moral philosophy curricula developed in the later decades of the century by Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart which were to capture the lucrative and prestigious market of noble and gentle students from Scotland and abroad. In the last resort, Glasgow University was too isolated from the polite, gentlemanly, professional world of Edinburgh to compete effectively for a prestigious clientele.
Thus Glasgow’s enlightenment continued to develop along somewhat different lines to Edinburgh’s. Although the cultural space between town and gown in Edinburgh was being bridged by the network of intellectual clubs and societies that cross-fertilized the city’s academic and civic culture. Glasgow had few such clubs and those it did have conveyed rather different messages about cultural relations between academia and the city to those of the capital. In Smith’s day, there were only three clubs of any note, to all of which he belonged. Professor Robert Simson’s well-established, convivial Friday Club was a largely professorial club whose donnish culture he clearly enjoyed. The popular Hodge-Podge Club, founded in the early 1750s, began as a literary society but soon lapsed into a drinking club. The Literary Society, which was founded in January 1752 by a group of professors that included Smith and Cullen, comes over as an attempt to provide the city with a club that was roughly analogous to Edinburgh’s Philosophical Society, in the sense of providing a forum for the professors which would link the culture of the university to that of the city, the country and the wider world. Some of its early members like Robert Bogle, William Crawford and John Graham of Douglastown were merchants, and visits from the Edinburgh literati were rare but not unknown – Adam Ferguson and Sir John Dalrymple are both known to have attended and David Hume was to provide chapters of the first volume of his History of England for discussion. Indeed one of the first papers given to the society, on 23 January 1752, was Smith’s ‘Account of some of Mr David Hume’s Essays on Commerce’ from his forthcoming Political Discourses. However, most of the society’s members were professors and it is hard to resist the conclusion that, like the Friday Club, the society remained a largely professorial gathering, another extension of collegiate life, another institution which helped to ensure that the city’s enlightenment would remain as it had begun, a movement largely confined to the college and its professors.
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