Jane Dudgeon, of Liberty Hall, near Gladsmuir, in Haddingtonshire. After attending successively a preparatory school, Edinburgh High School, and Perth Academy, James worked as a boy on his father's farm. When the farm was abandoned, he was put to business for a time in Edinburgh. From 1850 to 1852 and 1854 to 1856 he was at Edinburgh University, spending the intervening two years (1852-4) at St. Andrews. He took the arts course, but mainly interested himself in science. His study of botany yielded two short treatises : 'A Synopsis of Structural and Physiological Botany, presenting an Outline of the Forms and Functions of Vegetable Life'(n.d.), and 'Botanical Diagrams' (1857), both of which were long in use as school and college text-books.
From 1855 to 1859 Stewart studied theology at New College, Edinburgh. The summer session of 1858 was passed at the University of Erlangen, and at the close he made a tour through Europe, including Greece and Turkey. Later, he visited North America, crossing to the Pacific coast. In 1859 he began the study of medicine at Edinburgh University.
Meanwhile in 1857 Stewart came under the spell of David Livingstone [q. v.], who as then revisiting Scotland. In 1860 he announced to the foreign missions committee of the Free Church of Scotland his intention of establishing a mission in Central Africa. He was told that a separate fund, independently administered, was needful. Accordingly he formed an influential committee, at whose request he went to Central Africa to make inquiries. With Mrs. Livingstone, who was rejoining her husband, he sailed from Southampton on 6 July 1861, and reaching Cape Town on 13 Aug., he arrived on 9 March 1862 at Livingstone's headquarters at Shupanga. There for four busy months he often acted as both doctor and chaplain. Deciding to push into the interior, he, with only one white man,, a member of the Universities' Mission, explored on foot the highland lake region on both sides of the Shire and the district now covered by the Blantyre Mission. He returned, after many perilous adventures, to Shupanga on 25 Sept. 1862, and, a fortnight later, started to explore the Zambesi. Reaching Shupanga again on New Year's Day 1863, he was in Scotland in the autumn. The special mission committee in Edinburgh, on receiving his report in November, declined immediate action. The Royal Geographical Society, which elected him (1866) an honorary fellow, acknowledged that his travels had helped to extend British territory and to undermine the slave traffic.
Stewart's interrupted medical studies were resumed at Glasgow University in 1864 and completed in 1866, when he received the degrees of M.B. and CM., with special distinction in surgery, materia medica, and forensic medicine. At the end of 1866 he returned to Africa, reaching, on 2 Jan. 1867, Lovedale, near the eastern boundary of Cape Colony, 700 miles northeast of Cape Town. In 1870 Stewart became principal of the Lovedale Missionary Institute, which was founded in 1841 by the Glasgow Missionary Society for the training of native evangelists. Under Stewart's supervision the institute greatly extended its operations. Though supported financially by the Free Church of Scotland (now the United Free Church), Lovedale, under Stewart's rule, became a non-sectarian centre of religious, educational, industrial, and medical activity. Lovedale, owing to Stewart's efforts, is now recognised as one of the foremost educational missions in the world, and its methods have been widely adopted.
In 1870 Stewart co-operated in the establishment of a mission at Umsinga in Natal as a memorial to the Hon. James Gordon, brother of the seventh earl of Aberdeen, and in 1875 he founded the Blythswood Mission Institute, Transkei, which was opened in July 1877 with accommodation for 120 native and thirty European boarders, and quickly proved a powerful civilising agency.
On 18 April 1874, while at home for the purpose of raising money for Lovedale and Blythswood, he attended Livingstone's burial in Westminster Abbey, and soon reopened the question of establishing a mission in that part of Africa associated with Livingstone's name. In May he brought his proposal before the general assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, urging the foundation of a mission town to be called Livingstonia. 10,000l. was soon raised, a small steamer, the Ilala, was built, and an advance party which made its way to Lake Nyasa in 1875 founded Livingstonia near Cape Maclear at the southern end of Lake Nyasa. Next year, on 21 Oct., Stewart arrived and chose a new site at Bandawe, 200 miles farther north, on the western side of the lake. He spent fifteen months in organising the settlement. Meanwhile he and Dr. Robert Laws explored Lake Nyasa, which they found to
