Biography

He was born in the parish of Dailly

Dailly

Dailly is a village in South Ayrshire, Scotland. It is located on the Water of Girvan, south of Maybole, and east of Old Dailly. "New Dailly", as it was originally known, was laid out in the 1760s as a coal-mining village...

, in Ayrshire

Ayrshire

Ayrshire is a registration county, and former administrative county in south-west Scotland, United Kingdom, located on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. Its principal towns include Ayr, Kilmarnock and Irvine. The town of Troon on the coast has hosted the British Open Golf Championship twice in the...

, 5 April 1792. After a fair education, he became in turn a clerk in Glasgow

Glasgow

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...

, a landscape gardener in his native district, and a clerk in the Register House, Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

. For a short time he was amanuensis to Dugald Stewart. In 1822, being then ten years married to his cousin, Ainslie emigrated to America, where he continued to live with varied fortune for the rest of his days, paying a short visit to Scotland in 1864. He was attracted, on going to the New World, by Robert Owen

Robert Owen

Robert Owen was a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement.Owen's philosophy was based on three intellectual pillars:...

's social system at New Harmony, Indiana

New Harmony, Indiana

New Harmony is a historic town on the Wabash River in Harmony Township, Posey County, Indiana, United States. It lies north of Mount Vernon, the county seat. The population was 916 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Evansville metropolitan area. Many of the old Harmonist buildings still stand...

; but after a short trial he connected himself with a firm of brewers, and his name is associated with the establishment of various breweries, mills, and factories in the Western States. He died at Louisville

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

, 11 March 1878. Ainslie's best known book originated, by its title, what is now an accepted descriptive name for the part of Scotland associated with Burns. It is ‘A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns’ (1820), and consists of a narrative interspersed with sprightly lyrics. A collection of the poet's Scottish songs and ballads (of which the most popular is ‘The Rover of Loch Ryan’) appeared in New York in 1855. Ainslie is one of the group of minor Scottish singers represented in ‘Whistle Binkie’ (Glasgow, 1853).