The short answer is no, but we should define your meaning of 'significant' and also how committed and/or effective any still-smoldering veins of Jacobitism were thirty years after Culloden. In other words, did some North American colonists or exiled/transported Jacobites (or the children of either) still toast the Stuarts and talk more freely about dynastic rights than they might have done while still residing in Britain? Yes, instances of this are likely. But were there intact communities of generational Jacobites still active in the colonies by 1776, and did their hopes for regnal reconciliation seriously influence their motivations to take part in the American Revolution? I have not seen any compelling evidence of this being the case.

In contrast, an appreciable factor of 'Scottish rehabilitation' in the latter part of the eighteenth century was the integration of Highland troops into the British army, and many ex-Jacobites and their descendants fought together with their old rivals in both the French & Indian War and the Revolution. Some of these soldiers were recruited as punishment for seditious behavior during the Forty-five, but many more voluntarily joined as a consequence of institutional integration schemes and seeking career opportunities for young men both within and outwith the Scottish Highlands.

Ideological traditions of Jacobitism and powerful living memories of that traumatic civil war in Britain were passed down through families and social networks into the early nineteenth century, but most scholars agree that any real threat of political or martial Jacobitism ended in 1759 at Quiberon Bay. Without fortified and realistic schemes to entertain a restoration from thousands of miles away from the Three Kingdoms, nor the finances or personnel to plan and carry it out, Jacobite sentiment in the New World would have been more difficult to seed and proselytize.

To dig deeper into the question, your best bet is to have a look at what a few particular scholars have already written on the subject. There is a good chance that the primary sources listed in their bibliographies would inform you of further places to look if you would like to know more. Specifically, I can recommend the following as being particularly relevant:

• Andrew Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715-1815 (Tuckwell, 2000).

• Matthew P. Dziennik, The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in British America (Yale, 2015).

• David Parrish, Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, 1688–1727 (Boydell & Brewer, 2017).

• Doron Zimmermann, The Jacobite Movement in Scotland and Exile, 1746-1759 (Palgrave, 2003).

• Jerry Bannister & Liam Riordan, The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012).

• Harry T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution (Longman, 1998).

My MSc supervisor from many years ago, Alex Murdoch, has written extensively on Scottish emigration to North Carolina and other colonies in the wake of the Jacobite risings. I would highly recommend following up on his work. Kimberly B. Sherman is also currently working on Scottish colonial communities in America after Culloden, and she is a great person to follow.

Hoping this has been of some small help to you!

With best wishes,

Dr Darren S. Layne
Creator and Curator
The Jacobite Database of 1745