Arthur St. Clair

Born on this day in 1734 in Edinburgh, Scotland during the tumultuous days of the final Jacobite Rising and the Tartan Suppression, Arthur St. Clair (1734-1818) was the only president of the United States born and bred on foreign soil. Though most of his family and friends abandoned their devastated homeland in the years following the Battle of Culloden—after which nearly a third of the land was depopulated through emigration to America—he stayed behind to learn the ways of the hated Hanoverian English in the Royal Navy. His plan was to learn of the enemy’s military might in order to fight another day.

During the global conflict of the Seven Years War—generally known as the French and Indian War—he was stationed in the American theater. Afterward, he decided to settle in Pennsylvania where many of his kin had established themselves. His civic-mindedness quickly became apparent: he helped to organize both the New Jersey and the Pennsylvania militias, led the Continental Army’s Canadian expedition, and was elected Congress. His long years of training in the enemy camp were finally paying off.

He was elected President in 1787—and he served from February 2 of that year until January 21 of the next. Following his term of duty in the highest office in the land, he became the first Governor of the Northwest Territory and the founder of Cincinnati.

Though he briefly supported the idea of creating a constitutional monarchy under the Stuart’s Bonnie Prince Charlie, he eventually became a strident Anti-Federalist—believing that the proposed federal constitution could someday allow for the intrusion of government into virtually every sphere and aspect of life. He even predicted that under the vastly expanded centralized power of the state the taxing powers of bureaucrats and other unelected officials might eventually be able to confiscate as much as a quarter of the income of the citizens—a notion that seemed laughable at the time but that has proven to be ominously modest in light of our current governmental leviathan.

St. Clair lived to see the hated English tyrants who destroyed his homeland defeated. But he despaired that his adopted home might actually create similar tyrannies and impose them upon themselves.