Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  The undersigned further declare, that those who voluntarily embarked did so under promise to the effect, that Colonel Gordon would defray their passage to Quebec; that the Government Emigration Agent there would send the whole party free to Upper Canada, where, on arrival the Government Agents would give them work, and furthermore, grant them land on certain conditions.

  The undersigned finally declare, that they are now landed in Quebec so des titute, that if immediate relief be not afforded them and continued until they are settled in employment, the whole will be liable to perish with want.’ 59

  This Canadian criticism was given wider circulation through the publication in Toronto in 1857 of the third edition of Donald McLeod’s anti-clearance polemic, Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland, in which he also drew on an eyewitness account of the Barra evictions:

  The unfeeling and deceitful conduct of those acting for Colonel Gordon … cannot be too strongly censured. The duplicity and art which was used by them in order to entrap the unwary natives is worthy of the craft and cunning of an old slave-trader. Many of the poor people were told in my hearing, that Sir John McNeill would be in Canada before them, where he would have every thing necessary for their comfort prepared for them. Some of the officials signed a document binding themselves to emigrate in order to induce the poor people to give their names; but in spite of all these stratagems many of the people saw through them and refused out and out to go. When the transports anchored in Loch Boysdale the tyrants threw off their mask, and the work of devastation and cruelty commenced. The poor people were commanded to attend a public meeting at Loch Boysdale where the transports lay, and according to the intimation, any one absenting himself from the meeting was to be fined in Two Pounds. At this meeting some of the natives were seized and in spite of their entreaties were sent on board the transports. One stout Highlander, named Angus Johnstone, resisted with such pith that they had to hand-cuff him before he could be mastered; but in consequence of the priest’s interference his manacles were taken off and marched between four officers on board the emigrant vessel. One morning, during the transporting season, we were suddenly awakened by the screams of a young female who had been recaptured in an adjoining house; having escaped after her first apprehension. We all rushed to the door and saw the broken-hearted creature with dishevelled hair and swollen face, dragged away by two constables and a ground officer. Were you to see the racing and chasing of policemen, constables, and ground officers, pursuing the outlawed natives you would think, only for their colour, that you had been by some miracle transported to the banks of the Gambia on the slave-coast of Africa. 60

  By the 1850s the major waves of clearance and emigration were over, but the memory of the Highlanders’ unwilling expatriation was vividly revived within thirty years by a sudden flowering of literary and political interest in the ‘Highland problem’ in the early 1880s. It was spearheaded by Alexander Mackenzie ’s immensely popular History of the Highland Clearances, which articulated the crofters’ grievances during the previous century as a justification for their current attempts to regain their lost lands by means of rent strikes and forcible reoccupation. Enforced emigration was a recurring focus of Mackenzie ’s vituperation, as he catalogued a series of incidents across the Highlands and Islands in which he claimed reluctant emigrants had been tricked or forced into relocating overseas. As many of 5,390 inhabitants of Strathglass and the surrounding area were, we read, ‘driven out of these Highland glens’ and shipped to Pictou, Nova Scotia, between 1801 and 1803, while, in an echo of Donald McLeod’s images of slavery, Mackenzie described how in 1847 many of the famine-stricken tenants of Knoydart had been ‘packed off like so many African slaves’. 61

  The theme of enforced emigration espoused by Mackenzie and other protagonists of the Gaelic literary revival was reinforced when the government, alarmed at the escalating land war, appointed a Royal Commission in 1883 to enquire into the condition of crofters and cottars. Grasping the unprecedented opportunity of the Napier Commission to voice their grievances, assisted by radical land reformers like Alexander Mackenzie, and emboldened by the support of the Gaelic literarymovement, crofter-witnesses drew heavily on oral tradition to construct a picture of landlord betrayal, eviction and enforced exile over a century and more. John Mackay of Kilpheder in South Uist recalled the well-publicized evictions of 1851, when he had seen ‘a policeman chasing a man down the machair towards Askernish to catch him in order to send him on board an emigrant ship lying in Loch Boysdale ’, while John Morrison of North Uist remembered that ‘many were compelled to emigrate ’ from Sollas. Only 17 per cent of those selected for emigration by Sir James Matheson in 1851 had been willing to leave Lewis, although over 2,000 were eventually shipped out, with 1,180 summonses of removal being issued between 1849 and 1851. As the Reverend Angus Maciver told the Napier Commission, ‘Some say it was voluntary. But there was a great deal of forcing and these people were sent away very much against their will. That is very well known and people present know that perfectly well. Of course, they were not taken in hand by the policemen and all that, but they were in arrears, and had to go, and remonstrated against going.’ 62 These images were reinforced by the Reverend Alexander Mackintosh of Daliburgh, South Uist, who claimed that ‘of the crofters removed many were, against their wishes…forcibly put on board emigrant vessels and transported to North America’. In his opinion, forced emigration was responsible for much of the current unrest and land hunger in the Highlands, and he was one of several witnesseswho urged the commissioners to tackle the region’s ongoing demographic problems by redistributing land rather than expelling people. 63 The commissioners, however, were swayed by the estate managements’ claims of continuing overpopulation, and in 1884 accordingly recommended a measure of ‘properly conducted’ state-aided emigration as an ‘indispensable remedy’ for the region’s problems. For once the government,which throughout the century had been so loath to respond to pleas for state-aided emigration, was spurred into action out of concern at continuing social and economic tension in the Hebrides, and in 1888 it allocated £10,000 towards the settlement of 100 crofting families from Lewis, Harris and North Uist on prairie homesteads at Killarney in Manitoba and Saltcoats in the North West Territories. The various interested parties were represented by an emigration boardwhich administered the scheme and tried, unsuccessfully, to collect the settlers’ repayments over an eight-year period from 1892. 64

  Agricultural adversity: abandoning the rural lowlands

  Much emigration from the north and west Highlands was provoked by unsuccessful attempts to reorientate the economy, particularly in response to acute subsistence crises in the 1830s and 1840s. But dramatic images of evicted Highlanders dragged aboard emigrant ships have tended to obscure a persistent exodus from the rural Lowlands that also stemmed in part from the dislocating effects of agricultural restructuring. Since the eighteenth century the commercialization of farming had on the one hand improved yields and profits, but on the other eroded the expectations of farm servants and small tenants throughout much of Lowland Scotland. Changes included a greater variety of crops, farmed in scientific rotation on land which was efficiently drained, artificially fertilized and worked with new, labour-saving implements. While East Lothian became Scotland’s girnel, selective stock-breeding schemes, made possible by systematic enclosure policies, improved feeding regimes and better communications, saw the emergence of the north-east as a beef cattle centre and the southwest as a dairying region. High prices until the 1860s made it worthwhile for farmers to invest in improvements, and the amount of land under cultivation was extended by constant reclamation, with consolidation of farms as bigger units were created in a bid to maximize efficiency.

  Such changes demanded significant adjustments in rural communities, reshaping the social as well as the physical structure of the Lowlands and producing both winners and losers. Yet there was no single template and regional variations created a complex tenurial tapestry in
which rural populations were both anchored and uprooted. In the dairying districts of Ayrshire, Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire, where tenancies were reconfigured rather than transformed, small family farms were retained and the population remained stable, while in the north-east the need for land reclamation produced fragmentation of holdings and created an army of crofters. The hill country of the Borders, however, experienced levels of depopulation comparable to the Highland experience and the rich grain-farming lands of the Lothians, along with areas like Fife and Kinross, saw a clear shift towards consolidation.

  Those who stood to benefit most from the new economic order were the proprietors and the developing élite of capitalist tenant farmers, men who had the resources necessary for profitable investment in expensive development of their land. Other farmers were less sanguine about the benefits of nineteen-year leases, which, while granting them some security of tenure, offered none of the independence and status they craved. Central to their sense of insecurity was the fear of eviction. A tenant’s fortunes depended on the whim of his landlord, exercised through his right to terminate tenure without explanation. A capricious landlord might evict tenants who held political or religious opinions with which he disagreed. In the 1840s Free Church tenants allegedly suffered disproportionately from consolidation of farms, and in 1872 the Liberal Unitarian George Hope lost the lease of his farm of Fenton Barns in East Lothian after he had stood against his landlord in a local election. 65 But even if landlords were fair and just in their dealings with tenants, agricultural developments in themselves were a cause of concern. Not only were the terms of leases made more exacting, as well as being more strictly enforced; the increased rent of a renewed lease, perhaps for a consolidated farm, might be beyond the means of sitting tenants, as many landlords abandoned patriarchial attitudes in favour of economic criteria. The traditional nineteen-year lease was reckoned to give a tenant insufficient time to recover his capital and interest, let alone reap any personal profit for his labour, before a new lease was imposed at a higher rent, sometimes with very little warning.

  Discontent was not confined to tenant farmers. Although a tight labour market offered ready employment at good wages to farm labourers and servants, their status and prospects were threatened by consolidation, which deprived them of the treasured opportunity to graduate from wage labour to tenancy. Particularly in north-east Scotland, most farmers recruited their servants from the families of local smallholders, but very few of these men regarded farm service as a permanent career. Most aspired either to take over the family holding or to lease a croft of their own, a realistic ambition in the days when farmers were anxious to reclaim waste land through granting peripheral crofts on ‘improving’ leases, but a pipedream by the 1840s, when increasing pressure of population was curtailing their access to land and promoting mobility. In that era landlords were impelled not only by farming considerations but also by the fear that a new poor law would require them to support paupers on their estates. Their reaction was both to reduce the number of smallholdings whose tenants they regarded as potential paupers and to refuse cottage accommodation to married farm workers, who were required to board their dependants in a nearby town, while they themselves were housed communally on the farm, in a steading or bothy.

  Demographic pressure, the curtailment of opportunities and the threat and reality of landlessness in a context of impartible inheritance inevitably strained relationships between farmers and servants. As the big farmers grew richer, their expectations and experiences became ever more divorced from the smaller farmers and labourers with whom they had been closely associated in the earlier stages of improvement. As tenants and sub-tenants sank to the position of landless labourers, a social as well as an economic wedge was driven between them and the more successful farmers. A ploughman who could in earlier days look forward to the prospect of working his own holding allegedly had, by 1851, ‘nothing before him but a life of drudgery and an old age of poverty’ and consequently lost all pride in himself and his work. 66 He, and others, were also much more likely to move regularly from job to job and area to area. Such mobility was exacerbated both by the harnessing of accommodation to employment and by the biannual feeing markets, when farmers, instead of re-engaging their existing workforce privately, went to market to hire strangers on the strength of mere outward appearance.

  Such discontented restlessness was easily converted into emigration. Many emigrants referred in their letters to the disillusionment they had felt as their prospects of independence were eroded and their expectations of equal treatment were overturned. Surveys such as the censuses of 1831 and 1841, the New Statistical Account of the late 1830s and early 1840s and the 1844 Report on the Scottish Poor Laws all agreed that the depopulation of the rural Lowlands was attributable mainly to the consolidation of farms and the eradication of small-holdings. In the southern uplands, where the encroachment of commercial sheep farming had since the eighteenth century reduced arable cultivation and displaced the local population in a manner reminiscent of the Highlands, emigration seems to have been a common response to economic and social dislocation. In 1818 Alex Gordon, the Steward Depute of Kirkcudbrightshire, petitioned the Colonial Department to grant an assisted passage to Canada to a former tenant, William Bell, and his family, who had fallen on hard times after moving to an estate which had come under the management of rack-renting trustees. Further east, Samuel Porteous, of Whitton, near Jedburgh, implored the Colonial Secretary to assist the emigration of three families who, as a result of ‘this distressing crisis’, were likely to come on to the poor rates and who were pained that ‘instead of being usefull to ourselves we should in the prime of our lives be a burden to our country’. And from the Dumfries-shire parish of Hutton and Corrie, according to the New Statistical Account, emigration had taken place because of ‘pecuniary distress’ arising from low farm wages and profits, although there is also contemporary evidence that ‘unwanted radical sentiment was exported to Upper Canada’, at least in the 1820s. 67

  While the Duke of Buccleuch’s factor was happy to see the departure of ‘discontented radicals’, his view was not shared by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who deplored the loss of ‘brave and intelligent Borderers [who] rush from their native country, all with symptoms of reckless despair’. 68 In the north-east too there was widespread criticism of the way in which rack-renting, engrossment of farms and the loss of independence were driving the most enterprising tenants and farm servants overseas. A tract of 1837 placed the blame firmly at the landlords’ door. After describing the plight of tenants, ‘torn an’ rackit in body an’ mind, squeezing oot o’t tither enormous rent, an’ hardly makin’ a sober livin’ efter an a’, it went on to predict an increase in the number of emigrants who were already leaving ‘in awfu’ droves’:

  This state o’ things canna gae on unco lang as it’s deein, or I’se be boon for’t, them ’at his still a twa three notes tae the fore ’ill e ’en try an’ better their sitiva-tion, by emigratin’ tae the Canadas or some ither quarter … The spunky, inter-prisin’, an’ industrious bleds o’ oor kwintry, will they sit, do their lordships think, an’ be crushed tae the earth, year after year, scrapin’ thegither the tither terrible rent, fan they can live in comfort, an’ be lairds themsels, on the ither side o’ the Attalantic? 69

  Similar sentiments were expressed, albeit in rather different style, by the editor of the Aberdeen Herald. Commenting in 1852 on recent correspondence about the causes of vagrancy in rural communities, he claimed that consolidation of farms was destroying the backbone of rural society by driving farm servants off the land:

  They were honest, plain, industrious men, who looked forward to the day when they or their sons would be able to get larger and larger farms as their honest savings increased. These men, in many cases, have been obliged, along with their families, to take refuge in our towns, or have emigrated to countries where their skill and industry will be more highly appreciated. And a farm servant, who may have sav
ed fifty or sixty pounds, can get no small farm upon which he might lay out his little capital. His only refuge is a foreign land; and thus it is that our very best agricultural labourers are driven from the country by the folly of a ‘penny wise and pound foolish’ landocracy. 70

  Some time later the editor of the same newspaper blamed emigration on the appalling living conditions endured by farm servants:

  It is clear that the cold and damp bothy — without a fire till the men light it … with the single dish unwashed from term to term — with stepping stones to walk over pools of water and mud to bed — and with the everlasting meal and milk from Whitsunday to Martinmas, and from Martinmas to Whitsunday, will not induce our young ploughmen to remain at home and give up their chance of comfort, if not wealth, in America or Australia. 71

  Shifting the surplus population: depression and emigration, 1880—1914

  Disgruntled Lowland agriculturists, even those who were evicted, were clearly in a different category from starving Highlanders. Their emigration was influenced more by overseas opportunities than by domestic hardships and provoked concern, not relief, among contemporaries. Towards the end of the century, however, a widespread farming depression shifted the perspective in a more negative direction. As foreign competition in the form of cheap cereals from the American Midwest flooded the British market, prices fell dramatically, at least in the wheat-growing Lothians. Unjust game laws and a series of bad seasons compounded the farmers’ problems, and many farmers and farm servants, discouraged by ‘high rents and wet seasons’, cut their losses by emigrating. 72 Once again, however, there was considerable regional and sectoral variation. Overall the Scottish agricultural community, with its emphasis on mixed farming, was much more resilient than its English counterpart, and in many areas emigration was still a consequence of rising expectations rather than redundancy. Far from reducing expenditure by economizing on labour, farmers often had to raise wages in an attempt to retain a workforce that was haemorrhaging from the land, convinced that higher status, better opportunities and a more comfortable lifestyle could be enjoyed in the towns or overseas. The trend was acknowledged by a Board of Agriculture report in 1906 on the reasons for the decline in Britain’s farming population, which, alongside mechanization, poor accommodation and the attractions of urban life, cited, particularly in Scotland, ‘the absence of an incentive to remain on the land and of any reasonable prospect of advancement in life ’. 73 When A. D. Hall toured the agricultural areas of Britain on behalf of The Times in 1912, he confirmed that ‘the great emigration to Canada’ that was still taking place from Aberdeenshire in particular was due primarily to the onerous and unrewarding nature of smallholding in the region, as well as the inferior accommodation available for farm workers, who, as in earlier decades, often emigrated when they married rather than face the problem of finding a cottage at home. 74