‘Remember Me to All the Members of the Whin Bush Club’: Dr. Alexander Hamilton and the Scottish Tavern Club in America

In 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton famously set off on a multimonth ‘itinerarium’ across British America’s eastern colonies. Only one year later, the Scottish immigrant founded his notorious ‘Tuesday Club’ in his new home of Annapolis, Maryland. This article links these two major events in Hamilton’s life to demonstrate how this homesick Scottish-born physician viewed his multimonth itinerarium as a last-ditch effort to find, or ‘re-create,’ his idealized version of the Scottish-style tavern club in America. Ultimately, Hamilton’s tour, during which he regularly lodged in American taverns, convinced him of three things. First, the American colonies harboured just enough genteel, British-born, or educated men to constitute a Scottish-style tavern club. Second, Hamilton himself was the ideal candidate to introduce such a club into the ‘wilds’ of America. Third, this endeavour simply could not occur in America’s taverns, as Hamilton’s itinerarium solidified his belief that to truly realize a healthy Scottish-style tavern club in Annapolis, he must do so without taverns, which he now considered nests of debauchery, ignorance, and class levelling. Consequently, Hamilton formed the Annapolis ‘Tuesday Club,’ a deliberate re-creation (‘transmigration’ in his words) of his beloved Edinburgh Whin-Bush Club without the tavern space. In the end, Hamilton’s arduous journey to ‘transmigrate’ the Whin-Bush Club to America reveals perhaps more about his conceit and festering anti-American bias than it does about the true nature of Scottish club society or colonial American tavern culture.