Highlander in the French-Indian War

Recruitment and Enlistment

Recruit the Highland Lads
– From a recruitment publication, “The New Song”

The 42nd Foot was the first Highland regiment sent to North America during the French-Indian War. When the beating orders first arrived in Ireland in January 1756, the regiment was dispersed in garrison towns and woefully under strength. Orders authorized the commanding officer, Francis Grant, to recruit up to a wartime strength of 1,000 sentinels. He immediately sent the majority of his junior officers, non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and pipers across to Scotland under the command of the regimental second-in-command, Duncan Campbell of Inverawe, to start recruiting the additional 600 private men urgently needed. Once these new companies were fully recruited, dressed, equipped, and given some rudimentary training, they would constitute the 2nd Division and follow on to America after the 1st Division.

Posters and printed notices appeared on tavern walls and in public places throughout Scotland, including this broadside entitled “A New Song” which was published in Edinburgh, claiming:

Lord Loudoun sent to our gracious King
Desiring of His Majesty
For to recruit the Highland Lads
And send them over to North-America?

...Recruit me none but the old Clans,
Camel’s [Campbells], Mackenzy’s, Fraser’s and Grant’s
For they are brought up to the Sword,
Such warlike men Lord Loudoun wants.

This “New Song” would not have made sense to most potential 42nd recruits, as they did not speak the King’s English. No doubt the pamphlet had a Gaelic counterpart, as the song’s message and awkward phrasing strongly indicate it to be a loose translation from the original Gaelic. It was cunningly crafted to appeal to most Highlanders of the day with its call to “the old Clans” and its traditional bardic emphasis on the honor to be accrued in “going for a soldier”.

The promise of using Highland weapons on the king’s enemies was certainly irresistible to some, as the Highland clans were still forbidden to wear the feileadh mór (full plaids, or literally, the “big wrap”) or to carry arms under the Proscription Act put in place after the 1745 Uprising. Only in the king’s service would they be able to don “Bonnets blue, with Sword and pistol and warlike Goods,” and “chace the Indians thro’ the Woods?”

Recruiting was a task easily accomplished and many recruits were impressed from a veritable pool of landless and unemployed laborers. Agriculture was limited in the north of Britain and to make matters worse, the crops had failed two years in a row and famine stalked the Highlands. The 2nd Division, after their review at Glasgow in April 1756, spent another two months training and left Glasgow on June 7, 1756, for Greenock where they embarked the following day. The embarkation return signed by Major Duncan Campbell shows 646 all ranks bound for North America. Aboard were one major, two captains, six lieutenants, nine ensigns, one chaplain, 17 sergeants, two drummers, ten additional drummers (untrained), and 576 recruits. The 1st/42nd Foot, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Grant and comprising five companies of 100, was still at sea and approaching New York, having left Plymouth on April 15, two month’s earlier,

Both divisions of the 42nd Foot arrived too late in America for any serious campaigning and the reunited regiment found itself assigned to winter quarters along the Mohawk River in upstate New York. The bulk of the Highlanders were stationed at Schenectady and as they celebrated their first Hogmanay in the New World, beating orders were issued for two new additional Highland battalions to be raised in Scotland for service in North America.