In 1928, an American delegate stood before the Church of Scotland General Assembly and asserted that ‘wherever a great piece of work is being done a Scot is at the back of it, and whenever there is an ecclesiastical dispute a Scot is at the bottom of it’. A century prior to this speech, a missionary described as a man of ‘inflexible firmness not inferior to John Knox himself’, made his way across the Atlantic. Reverend Dr Thomas McCulloch, who had been sent to Nova Scotia on behalf of the Anti-burgher Secession Synod, was convinced by Reverend James MacGregor, of the General Associate Presbytery, along with the town's influential merchant, Edward Mortimer, to join them in Pictou, Nova Scotia. While much is known about McCulloch's educational work, less attention has been paid to the ways in which his political activism and Scottish Presbyterian background informed his relationships within the colony. Events in Pictou County, located in eastern Nova Scotia, offer an important insight into the strains of sectarianism transported by Scottish migrants and reflect the way in which Scottish religious identity was exhibited in a British colonial context.4 This chapter explores how McCulloch applied a politico-religious approach to his struggle to secure permanent pecuniary aid for Pictou Academy on the same basis as the colony's first institution of higher learning, King's College. While McCulloch's institution was intended to be the colony's first non-sectarian institute of higher education, the Pictou Academy was an institution closely aligned with dissenting Presbyterianism, and King's College was the design of established Anglicanism. As a consequence, both were deliberate attempts to impose religious ideology upon Nova Scotia's emerging educational landscape. The Academy debate, however, extended far beyond this, and represented the beginning of party politics in Nova Scotia.

The formation of a Scottish Diasporic identity has attracted significant interest from academic researchers and from the wider public, but a less well understood aspect of Scottish settlement is just how influential Presbyterian dissenters were to the development of colonial politics. Nova Scotia presents an important opportunity to explore this theme, particularly in relation to how far Scottish dissenting politics shaped strategies for securing equal consideration for non-conforming Protestants: the Church of England was established by law in Nova Scotia and enjoyed privileges that McCulloch believed to be undue.