Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  As these examples demonstrate, Scottish involvement in American industry was not confined to investment. While most emigration propaganda was directed at farmers, Scotland in the nineteenth century was increasingly a land of towns and heavy industry, and this was reflected in the occupations and aspirations of many emigrants. Artisan emigration had a long and controversial history. It was the threat to emigrate made by unemployed Paisley weavers in 1773 that caused the Lord Chief Justice, Thomas Miller, to press for the investigation that subsequently led to the Register of Emigrants and to the reinforcement of a ban on artisan emigration that remained on the statute book until 1825. Miller clearly equated emigration with ambition rather than despair. After the conviction of seven of the Paisley weavers who had rioted, he declared that even transportation ‘begins to lose every aspect of punishment’ and expressed the hope that their ‘ideas of migration to America may not become epidemical among the most useful of our people ’. 81 During the nineteenth century, however, Scottish artisans, including many skilled craftsmen, were enticed to the United States by high wages and ‘myriad jobs’ in the rapidly expanding American economy. 82 They were particularly prominent in the textile industry of New England, bringing their skills to specialized gingham weaving and carpet making, as well as hosiery, thread and lace making and jute manufacture. Scottish looms, introduced into Rhode Island in 1817, soon spread throughout New England, and towns like Lowell and Waltham in Massachusetts, Thompsonville in Connecticut and New Ipswich in New Hampshire became virtual enclaves of Scots from the central belt. Paisley, whose weavers established the carpet industry in Lowell as early as 1829, also sent large numbers of emigrants to Newark (New Jersey), Pawtucket (Rhode Island) and Fall River (Massachusetts), where the Paisley firms of Clark, Coats and Kerr respectively established cotton and linen thread factories in the second half of the century. For thirty years Andover in Massachusetts became ‘a second Brechin’, after two emigrants from Angus established a linen factory there in the 1870s, while the entire American jute industry was for long dominated by a mill at Paterson, founded by a group of emigrants from Dundee in 1844. Women as well as men were attracted by the high wages, which at some factories were nearly double those paid in Scotland. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s agents actively recruited skilled Scots women, particularly from Glasgow. In 1869 the Amoskeag Mill in Manchester, New Hampshire, imported fifty Scots women gingham weavers, and up to 300 female weavers were brought to the Holyoke mills in Massachusetts six years later. Even when the Americans had trained up their own, cheaper, labour force by the end of the century, there was still a niche for the Scots, and it was by no means uncommon for Scottish artisans to rise through the ranks to become overseers, superintendents and even proprietors of textile factories throughout New England. 83

  The encouragement offered to textile workers was replicated in other branches of American industry. Opportunities were publicized through the usual public and private channels. Specific openings were advertised in newspapers, while periodicals gave background information and advice. An early issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal carried a series of articles directed at artisans as well as farmers. In 1840 it published a Scottish emigrant’s essay on cotton manufacture in New England, and in 1842 it reviewed A Tradesman’s Travels in the United States and Canada, a Stonehaven wool spinner’s impressions of America gained during a three-year tour. 84 Artisan correspondence is harder to unearth, but several of the thirty-two letters that comprise the correspondence of the Kerr family of Dalry reflect a keen interest in American conditions and prospects, despite the recurring message of Hugh Kerr’s letters that his sons John, a joiner in Illinois, and David, a carpet maker in New York, would do better if they returned to Scotland. 85

  As with farming opportunities, the encouragement did not fall on deaf ears. From papermaking and landscape gardening to steel and shipbuilding, Scots who were initially attracted by lucrative wages often moved into managerial positions after they had proved their worth and imparted their skills. The first American census to report immigrant occupations, in 1870, indicated that 46 per cent of Scots were employed in manufacturing, mechanical and mining jobs, while port records suggest that building trades workers and miners were the two most prominent groups of skilled Scots. 86 The 1860s saw a significant influx of Scottish colliers, particularly to mines west of the Allegheny Mountains, lured across the Atlantic by high wages, quick, cheap steerage passages in the new steamships and the personal recommendations of Alexander McDonald, the Scottish miners’ union leader, who paid three visits to the USA in order to investigate opportunities for his members. McDonald’s two brothers were making good wages at mines in Ohio and Illinois, many acquaintances in the USA had also done well, and he claimed to keep his finger on the pulse of events across the Atlantic by taking thirty American newspapers a week. McDonald, who in the 1860s acted as an agent for at least one American mining company, in Virginia, publicized opportunities in the Glasgow Sentinel and encouraged colliers in the west of Scotland to form local district emigration committees, paying 6d per week to fund the emigration of members whose names would be pulled out of a hat. In 1865, when the scheme was at its height, parties of miners and their families left the Clyde in groups of about 100, and when McDonald visited pithead towns after the Civil War he found significant numbers of his fellow countrymen — 7,000 in Maryland, 3,000 in Pennsylvania, 2,000 in Illinois and ‘large colonies’ in Ohio.

  A civilized society

  While material gain was clearly the driving force for many emigrants, it does not fully explain the persistent tendency of Scots to seek out and settle alongside their fellow countrymen in Ontario, Otago and many places in between. The importance of family, friends and community has been woven into virtually every example used in this chapter — not surprisingly, for most emigrants needed to be reassured, not only of better working conditions, remuneration and prospects, but also that they would not be cutting themselves adrift from all the familiar and comforting associations of home. Such concern was evident in the 1770s, both among those emigrants whose motives, they told customs officers, included family reunions and the farmers who banded together in local associations like the Inchinnan Company. Half a century later, similar priorities were addressed in the colonization schemes that brought Lowland weavers and Highland crofters to the Ottawa Valley and the Eastern Townships respectively, emerging even more directly in the informal colonies of Aberdeenshire Scots established at Bon Accord and Tilbury East in Southern Ontario.

  When George Elmslie was sent out on his reconnaissance mission, he was instructed not only to choose a fertile, well-watered tract of land but also to ensure that religious and educational facilities were available within a ‘reasonable distance ’. He took due account of his associates’ wishes in his choice of settlement, for Bon Accord was adjacent to Fergus, where in 1834 Adam Fergusson’s plans to establish a church and school were already well advanced. But surely the most striking feature of the Bon Accord community was the way in which the settlers ‘came in parties, relatives and friends following each other at intervals, and all from Aberdeenshire’. 87 Many emigrant parties were made up of extended family groups, and the community was progressively augmented by secondary emigration on the part of people whose family, neighbours or business associates had preceded them to Nichol. Their favourable private reports of its social, as well as its economic, assets were reinforced by the Aberdeen Herald’s public endorsement of Nichol on the grounds of its ‘pleasing and select’ society, a recommendation based simply on the fact that so many of the settlers had been known to each other in Scotland; new arrivals could therefore feel confident that a bridgehead had been established and they were not coming to an entirely alien land. 88 The social cement provided by chain migration was equally evident at Tilbury East, and clearly helped to persuade Charles Farquharson to take the plunge. As he wrote to his brother-in-law a year before he emigrated:

  Some people say that you can not have the same comf
orts in Canada, being a new country, as with us. But I can not see why you would not, being in pretty well peopled place near railroads, near Church and School, and good communications everywhere … And I am sure that I would have your experience and good advice as far as you could, for our comfort and well being, if you and we are all spared to meet. 89

  Across the border, the anticipation of familiar faces and an orderly society was as important to Scots emigrants to Ohio and Iowa as was the promise of land, while in the industrial arena, colliers, granite cutters and other artisans commonly banded together for mutual support, both in travelling and in their search for employment. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Leslie brothers and their friends staffed their sheep-farming enterprises by offering not just economic incentives but also the prospect of something of a ‘home from home’, a policy that was beneficial to both employers and employees.

  Propagandists were ever ready to exploit the familiarity factor, not least in Canada, where they could draw on a consistent tradition of Scottish settlement going back to the eighteenth century. The concerns of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were addressed by a smattering of publications in their own language, notably Robert MacDougall’s 1841 guidebook, Ceann-Iuil an Fhir-Imrich do dh’America Mu-Thuath (The Emigrant’s Guide to North America) and the perodical Cuairtear nan Gleann (Traveller/Sojourner of the Glens). The latter was established and edited by the Reverend Norman McLeod, popularly known as ‘Caraid nan Gaidheal’ (Friend of the Gaels). Published monthly in Kingston, Ontario, between 1840 and 1843 and sold for 6d, Cuairtear aimed to make information on the British colonies available to Gaelic speakers, for many of whom the prospect of retaining their language and culture was a key ingredient in the decision to emigrate. ‘Cha ’n eil teagamh nach bi Ghàilig ann an ùine ghoirid air a labhairt ann an America mu-thuath le barrachd dhaoine na th’ann an Gàidhealtachd na h-Alba’ (Doubtless Gaelic will soon be spoken by more people in North America than it will in the Highlands of Scotland), they were assured in an article in 1840 which stressed that Highland emigrants to Canada could effortlessly resume their old way of life among like-minded fellow countrymen. 90 Cuairtear, like many of the English-language periodicals and guidebooks, also repeatedly described North America as ‘dùthaich an duine bhochd’ (country for the poor man), while New Zealand and Australia — with the exception of Van Diemen’s Land — were equally recommended as places where Highland emigrants could make more money than their erstwhile landlords.

  Although New Zealand attracted a significant number of Highlanders, not least to the ‘Normanite’ settlement at Waipu, 91 its appeal as a Utopian Scotland in the southern hemisphere was probably more influential in a Lowland context. It was the South Island province of Otago, centred on Dunedin (New Edin-burgh) that was most explicitly recommended to Scots in these terms. Developed by the Free Church of Scotland as a Presbyterian colony in the 1840s, Otago enticed emigrants, particularly families, with promises of a well-ordered Christian society, good educational facilities and an unambiguously Scottish culture, in which old friendships could be renewed and new ones forged. Since 80 per cent of those arriving in the province between 1848 and 1860 were Scots-born, the promoters and pioneers clearly succeeded in laying the foundations of a distinctively Scottish colony, although one English commentator claimed this demonstrated an unattractive clannishness:

  4. Pewter communion token from Otago, New Zealand.

  This is the youngest province but one in the colony; the first settlement was planted in 1848 by an association of the members of the Free Kirk of Scotland. Scotch ‘nationality’ is as much cultivated, we fear, as some other products of the ‘Land of Cakes,’ and the emigrants from the northern portion of our island seem determined to maintain in New Zealand the same position relatively to their English fellow-colonists as in Great Britain. They have taken possession of one of the extremities, and that the coldest, of the country; and, unless they are greatly misrepresented, they manifest an unmistakeable desire to keep it entirely to themselves. 92

  Not every memory of home was a fond one to be re-created. Since taxes, tithes and the tugging of forelocks featured prominently among emigrants’ grievances with life in Scotland, they were likely to be attracted to destinations where economic independence and familiar faces could be combined with social equality. ‘You must know we are not here as in Scotland; we are respected as gentlemen, and styled Mr by the best gentlemen in the country, and invited to dinner with them at any time’: so claimed a ploughman from Forgue in Aberdeenshire who in 1837 joined a party of twelve families going to the ‘predominantly Scottish settlement’ at Altamont in Jamaica. During 1836 and 1837 around 180 people emigrated from west Aberdeenshire to Altamont and Middlesex townships, in a chain movement that was facilitated by an enthusiastic agent, James Barclay of Auchterless, as well as the Jamaican Assembly’s assisted passage and settlement scheme and the positive comments of emigrants, whose correspondence was quoted in the Scottish press. 93 Similar sentiments were expressed by a number of the Lewis emigrants in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, including Donald McLean of Lingwick, who in 1851 assured his correspondent in Lewis that, as well as high wages on the railroad, ‘labourers in this country get bed and board as good as the common gentleman in your country’. 94

  While colonial destinations like Canada were frequently commended for their classlessness, the United States was the most obvious choice on these grounds, at least for commentators who viewed egalitarianism as a blessing rather than a curse. In 1822 Highlanders were alerted to the attractions of Ohio in a Gaelic poster which assured them that ‘the tenantry are the gentlemen of the country. They pay no rent and there is no restriction on hunting…they are not prevented fromcuttingwood or fromfishing.’ 95 Adecade later, two Aberdeenshire farmers, whose letters were quoted in Counsel for Emigrants, recommended Michigan as a suitable destination for Scots who wished to ‘throw aside a load of pride … and that eager desire to rise in the world’ and come to a country where no one would despise them. One of the correspondents, who owned a productive farm in a growing settlement, was unequivocal in his preference for American democ-racy:

  To all lovers of gold and silver, of fine clothes, and high pretensions, who expect to make a fortune, and drive their carriage, have servants in waiting, and their neighbours to take off their hats to them, I say, once for all, keep away, far away, from America and the Americans. If you wish to enjoy equality, social and intelligent neighbours, with independence from all supercilious and browbeating superiors, independence from cares and poverty, I would say come here. 96

  Some commentators, including the Chambers brothers, were at pains to deny allegations that American society was unrefined and irreligious, pointing out that books, periodicals and newspapers were cheap and readily available, and there was no lack of churches or preachers representing a wide range of denominations. 97

  Conclusion

  Scots were lured overseas by a variety of economic, social and cultural inducements. Building on solid eighteenth-century foundations, the recurring promise of independence through landownership was a powerful magnet, particularly to those whose security and prospects had been eroded by the commercialization of farming in Scotland. For a substantial minority with capital to spare, foreign fields offered an attractive opportunity for the investment of both financial and human resources, while the artisans produced by Scotland’s increasingly urbanized, industrialized society sought higher wages and better working conditions overseas, especially in the factories, mines and workshops of the United States. For many, the anticipated neighbourliness, cooperation and familiarity of an established Scottish settlement were incentives just as important as material gain and the absence of domineering landlords, and clearly influenced their choice of destination. Throughout the nineteenth century the bulk of the guidebooks, periodicals and newspapers which poured forth an unremitting torrent of advice and encouragement generally tried to steer emigrants in the direction of Canada, although i
t is possible to chart changing policies and fashions in destinations through a study of emigration propaganda. But despite the prominence and supportive influence of these sources of information, they were, as Charlotte Erickson has pointed out, ‘much more noisy and conspicuous than effective in prodding prospective immigrants to particular destinations’. 98 The most effective encouragement undoubtedly came from the satisfied emigrant’s private letter home, particularly if it contained a remittance or a prepaid ticket to galvanize an apathetic or indecisive correspondent. But for emigrants who lacked overseas contacts, professional emigration agents might well be instrumental in the decision-making process, offering practical, on-the-spot but often controversial advice in an increasingly competitive, confusing and cut-throat market.

  4

  THE RECRUITMENT BUSINESS

  ‘I encountered, while endeavouring to carry out the objects of my mission, the bitterest and most persistent hostility from landed proprietors, large farmers and generally employers of skilled and unskilled labour.’ 1

  Emigration agents could provoke a variety of sentiments. Indeed, in the long-running, complex and often contentious saga of Scottish emigration, one of the most consistent, enigmatic and controversial characters has always been the emigration agent. Before, throughout and beyond the nineteenth century he — and occasionally she — appeared in a variety of guises and employed a range of strategies to stimulate, steer and sustain emigration to a host of destinations. In pursuit of these objectives, many of the agents made powerful enemies as well as grateful friends, for their activities often addressed the very core of the perennial debate on the ethics and expediency of emigration. Although personal persuasion was always the most influential stimulus to emigration, the integral role of agents in the recruitment and settlement process should not be underestimated, particularly with the evolution of a network of professional agencies in the second half of the nineteenth century.