Any violent opposition to authorities pursuing removal of tenants under due legal process would sooner or later lead to intervention by the forces of law and order and arrest of the offenders. Resistance must have been thought by many not only pointless but counterproductive. More effective by far, at least for the period of this chapter down to 1815, would be to reject absolutely the new ways in the Highlands by leaving the region. However, both government and the landed class of the north-west and the islands were implacably opposed to emigration in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth. For the former, it meant the loss of a militarily valuable population when Britain was involved in two major wars. For the latter, emigration removed precious manpower from their estates which were needed for kelp burning, fishing and army recruitment. An implicit alliance formed of government strategic concern and landlord vested interest caused emigration to be banned altogether in 1775. Another attempt at prohibition was made in 1786 by Henry Dundas, Scotland’s leading political manager of the day. Later, lobbying by Highland landowners at the height of the kelp boom in the early nineteenth century led to the passing of the Passengers Vessels Act in 1803. The legislation was ostensibly humanitarian in intent as it was purportedly placed on the statute book in order to improve conditions on board ship for passengers in vessels sailing to North America. The real objective, however, was to substantially raise the cost of passage and so deter future emigrants. In some cases fares more than doubled as a result of the legislation. The Act remained on the statute book until it was finally repealed in 1826. Parliament also voted to provide more than half a million pounds for transport projects in the Highlands, including the construction of the Caledonian Canal, connecting northern Scotland from east to west, in order to stem the tide of outflow from the region through the provision of more employment. Despite these measures, however, and in the teeth of landlord opposition, emigration from the western Highlands and Islands reached hitherto unprecedented levels.
Rising emigration was a Britain-wide phenomenon. Numbers were so great in the 1760s that by 1775 as many as 10 per cent of the population of the American colonies over the long period of settlement had arrived there in the previous fifteen years. The humiliating loss of the thirteen colonies in 1783 confirmed in the official mind that an empire of colonization was not a good idea and the effort was redoubled to prevent further movement to the remaining colonies of British North America, later Canada. The provincial governors of Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and Upper Canada were warned by London not to encourage migration from the British homeland.
These instructions may have partially helped to stem the tide. But they did not achieve complete success because, as will be shown later, Highland emigration previously channelled to what was now the United States began to slowly move north and built up new connections after 1783 with Britain’s remaining North American provinces. Indeed, tensions emerged between the interests of London and those of the governors of the under-populated Canadian colonies. Immigrants arriving at their ports were not necessarily turned away or subjected to any significant opposition. For instance, in 1791 the governor of Nova Scotia provided both food and support to 650 West Highland emigrants who had landed at Pictou, in a vain attempt to encourage them to stay on the island and not continue on the journey to their planned destination in North Carolina. Eventually the British government did concede that the emigration policy was failing and tried to compromise by steering settlement towards the Canadian colonies of the Empire rather than to the now independent United States.
Between 1760 and 1815, Highland transatlantic emigration took two forms which were interconnected. The first consisted of the movement of civilian families and the second the settlement of demobilized Highland officers and rank and file who had been allocated American land grants at the end of service after the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the American War of Independence (1776–83). Both emigrant streams were influenced by the attractions of cheap or free land across the Atlantic and given impetus by the economic tensions surfacing in the late-eighteenth-century Highlands. These threatened the grip of the peasantry on the land and their status as full tenants on the estates.
Tracing the migration of Highlanders to North America is not an easy task for the eighteenth century. Apart from the government-inspired Register of Emigrants in the years before the American War of Independence, the numbers involved have to be constructed from stray newspaper reports and some contemporary comments. We do know, however, that before the 1760s small numbers of Gaels, mainly from Argyll, were already moving in family and local parties to North Carolina, Georgia and New York. But it is reckoned that migration was limited to fewer than 3,000 leaving over the half-century from c.1700 to c.1760. Only after the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 did numbers rise to unprecedented levels, with nearly 10,000 emigrants between the early 1760s and 1775. It was the scale of this exodus and its local focus on the western Highlands and Islands which alarmed both landlords and government as to that total needed to be added the significant number of veterans from the Highland regiments who decided to remain and take land in America after demobilization in 1763. The Highland departures accounted for around 60 per cent of all Scottish emigration, though only 40 per cent of the Scottish population lived in the Highland region at the time. Between 1773 and 1776 only London had more emigrants than the Highlands, with the region having at least 18 per cent of all emigrants from Britain, and this from one of the most sparsely populated areas of the United Kingdom. Some contemporaries claimed that a frenzied emigration ‘mania’ had gripped the north of Scotland in these decades.
The migrations fell away during the American War and when it came to an end their orientation changed from the USA to British North America. Loyalists left the infant republic in large numbers for the remaining imperial territories to the north. One estimate has it that Scots, who had provoked considerable enmity for a number of reasons from American patriots, may have comprised one in five of the 30,000 loyalists who fled north. Nova Scotia was a favoured area of resettlement for Highlanders from North Carolina, while Scottish refugees from New York, many of them recent emigrants from Glengarry in western Inverness-shire, tended to make for what would become eastern Upper Canada. Even during the war, Scots families from the Mohawk Valley in New York had gone in order to avoid the vengeance of the Americans. The conflict in that area had descended into a bloody and very violent guerrilla war with savage reprisals and counter-reprisals on both sides. Highlanders had won a fearsome reputation both for their ferocity and as first-rate frontier guerrillas. It would have been suicidal for them to remain among their former enemies when peace was declared. Instead, they and the disbanded soldiers of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York and the Royal Highland Emigrant Regiment sought refuge across the border in Canada. The Roman Catholic Macdonnels and their kinfolk formed a new community on the north bank of the St Lawrence River west of Montreal. One migrant wrote to her family back in Scotland that the ‘McDonalds hope to found in the new land a new Glengarry’.1 The name stuck and, over the following decades, the district attracted numerous emigrants from the western mainland of the Highlands and the neighbouring islands.
Canada and the maritime colonies now virtually completely supplanted the USA as places of settlement for the Gaels. Scottish transatlantic emigration after 1783 was very much Highland in origin, though the individualized and almost invisible movement to the USA left little record and its scale has almost certainly been underestimated. Around 14,000 emigrants may have left Scotland for British North America between 1776 and 1815 and probably as many as nine out of ten of them could have come from the Highlands. But the annual level of emigration was significantly lower than the early 1770s, almost certainly due to the immense disruption caused to the traditional migrant routes by war and the subsequent Loyalist diaspora. Remarkably, however, the connections with the Canadian areas of settlement were soon renewed, which was powerful evidence of the dense network of communications which now spanned the Atlantic and linked communities in the wilderness areas of the New World with those of their kindred and friends in remote parts of the Highlands.
Each of the new Canadian settlements became a strong magnet for people from the coastlands and glens of Gaeldom. Small colonies from the Uists and Glenfinnan were to be found on Prince Edward Island, while Pictou, Nova Scotia, was settled mainly from Ross-shire. In five large emigrations between 1785 and 1793, people from Glengarry, Knoydart, Morar and Glenelg in western Inverness sailed to join their families and friends in the new Highland settlement of Glengarry County in western Quebec. Over 1,200 made the transatlantic crossing in these years, around 40 per cent of the entire migrant stream from the Highlands over the period. It was inevitable, therefore, that these concentrated settlements, often located in isolated districts, would become enduring outposts of Gaelic culture for several generations to come.
This was not a flight of the very poor or the dispossessed because migration by sea followed by resettlement across the Atlantic had costs. Emigration assisted by landowners, which became more common from the 1820s, was out of the question in this earlier period for the reasons already discussed. Indeed, landlords were so implacably opposed to the departures that in mainland west Inverness during the 1790s they were even prepared to place evictions on hold for a time because the recruitment of soldiers from their estates was providing such attractive returns. McDonnell of Glengarry offered his old followers a reduction in rental of 10 per cent if they promised to stay. The offer was rejected. The irony, of course, was that it was the policies of the landowners which prompted large-scale emigration in the first place. There were only two ‘assisted’ emigrations before 1815. One was the support that the tiny Catholic Church in Scotland gave to its adherents in South Uist because it feared Presbyterian proselytism in the southern Hebrides. A second was the formation of a fencible regiment for defence of Canada which was established in order to steer the exodus away from the United States by promising free land to soldiers and their families. The total recruited with dependants eventually reached 2,100 people. The poor could, of course, seek to cross the Atlantic by obtaining passage as indentured servants. In this system, the costs of the voyage were paid in advance by masters in the colonies in return for a period of bonded service. Data on how far that means of emigration was popular only exist in the customs returns for the peak movement years of 1774–5. They reveal that only 150 of the nearly 3,000 Scots documented in the records then travelled on an indentured passage and the majority of them were from the Lowlands.
The evidence from other sources is conclusive that it was mainly those tenants with some resources from the middling ranks of Highland society who made up the majority of the emigrant parties. These people had enough livestock to sell off to release cash to support the costs of the voyage and resettlement. One reason why the renewal of emigration reached a new peak in 1801–2 was that cattle fetched good prices in those years enabling them to be converted into good returns. The social composition of emigrant parties from western Inverness-shire to Glengarry County in Canada seems to have been fairly typical of the generality:
three out of five emigrants were farmers, one out of eight was a craftsman and one out of four was a labourer or servant … the emigrants are described as ‘the principal tenants’, the better-off tenants, or (later) ‘the best part of the dregs … of the commoners’. Clansmen of middling status and resources – tenants and craftsmen – therefore dominate the emigrant parties but some poorer members of the community also left.2
The main outlines of the sequence of emigration from the Highlands in this period are not in dispute. But the reasons why so many people from this region of Scotland should seek to leave in such large numbers are far from clear and are disputed by scholars. Certainly a new transport infrastructure for mass emigration from northern Scotland was in place by the second half of the eighteenth century. Also, the growth of Highland communities in North Carolina, Georgia and New York from the 1730s had laid the foundation for ‘chain migration’ or the development of a long-term connection between places in the Highlands and North America. The commercial relationship between Scotland and North America was also revolutionized by the remarkable success of Glasgow in the transatlantic tobacco trade from the 1730s. The American trades helped to provide the transport for large-scale emigration from Scotland as most Highland communities were within relatively easy travelling distance of the Clyde ports and vessels were also often chartered from there to sail to the northern sea lochs to pick up emigration parties from there. It was, for instance, the growing trade in Canadian timber to Scotland in the early nineteenth century which partially helped to offset the impact of the Passenger Vessels Act of 1803 on emigration. The British timber market’s demand for Canadian lumber radically increased as a result of wartime needs. The trade needed large vessels but they had low freights on the outward journey and the emigrant traffic to Upper Canada and the maritime provinces was therefore an effective means of utilizing surplus capacity and cutting costs.
The Highlands at all social levels had also become less insular by the later eighteenth century. Extensive recruitment of Gaels to the army in the three wars between 1757 and 1815 must have accustomed Highland society to greater mobility. This was even more likely when the government started to pay off officers and men from the army in colonial land rather than cash; in turn, these military settlements soon acted as magnets to kinsfolk at home. A key element in this Highland emigration was also the leadership provided to many emigrant parties by fir-tacsa, tacksmen or lesser gentry, who had either acquired land in, or had become familiar with, the transatlantic colonies, as a result of their service as officers in the British army.
All these influences facilitated mass emigration, but they could not in themselves cause it to happen. In the age before the steamship, transatlantic migration by sail was usually tantamount to permanent exile. Most of North America still remained a wilderness to Europeans, an alien land thought to be peopled by wild savages living in impenetrable forests. Few therefore embarked willingly on the long transatlantic voyage because of the well-publicized risks and dangers unless they had reasons for doing so because of pressing circumstances at home. In the search for direct causation, contemporary commentators and later scholars have addressed both the impact of conditions in the Highlands and the pull from opportunities in North America.
Some argue that the increasing volume of emigration reflected the pressure of rising population, which led, in turn, to an outflow of ‘surplus’ peasants and their families. This is a hypothesis which at first glance has much to commend it. As noted in earlier chapters, numbers did increase substantially in northern Scotland in the later eighteenth century, the Highland economy was indeed poor and underdeveloped, and, when the emigration of Highland people is examined down to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Malthusian explanation does have real force. Population loss in the long run was inevitable because the economy proved incapable over time of generating an adequate level of employment for those who lived in the region.
However, the picture in the earlier period between 1760 and 1815 is considerably more complex and it is by no means certain that the demographic explanation is entirely satisfactory. There are several problems. First, though numbers were increasing, economic activity was also expanding. There were indeed difficult years, such as 1772–3, 1782–3 and 1801–2, which were brought about by partial harvest failure and so triggered emigration. In addition, the vast majority of the population continued to eke out an existence at, or only marginally above, subsistence level. Nevertheless, in these decades, there was also an increase in employment, especially in the western Highlands and Islands, where most emigrants came from, in kelp manufacture, fishing, illicit whisky making, the seasonal migrant economy in the Lowlands and, above all, military service. Landlord correspondence in these years actually reveals a fear of labour shortage on some estates, a concern which explains why most lairds were resolutely opposed to emigration. Second, as discussed earlier, the majority of those in the emigrant parties were not the very poorest or those closest to the margins but tenant families who had enough resources to meet the costs of emigration and resettlement.
A more convincing explanation can be found in a study of nine emigrant parties bound for Upper Canada between 1773 and 1802 from Glengarry and Glen Morriston, Knoydart, Eigg and the west coast, Loch Arkaigside, Glenelg and Lochiel which argues that ‘economic transformation was the key underlying cause … in this period’.3 Where evidence is available, it shows that nine out of ten of those who left did so in family groups. Women formed between 44 and 51 per cent of the adults while children under the age of thirteen were at least 27 per cent on average and up to almost 50 per cent of passengers in half of these sailings to Canada. The average family size ranged from 4.6 to 5.7 people. Overwhelmingly, the emigrants came from contiguous districts and drew on extended networks of family and association. A community exodus of this kind confirmed ‘the emigrants’ total rejection of the place offered them in the transformed Highlands’.4 In other words, their decision to leave was a forced choice. The people would doubtless have preferred to stay but escalating rentals and the fact or threat of eviction made that impossible in their eyes. They specifically complained not of over-population but of losing their land to incomers who would break up the traditional bailes and merge the lands into single, large pastoral farms.
It is important to recognize, however, that the people do not seem to have been opposed to all the new ways per se. An increase in trading activity had been a fact of life in the Highlands since the seventeenth century and, later, when settled in Canada, the emigrants became fully involved in commerce in their new homes. Rather, they appear to have strongly resented the increased share of their meagre incomes which they now had to devote to paying increased rent, the threat of eviction from their holdings, and the fear of being consigned to the function and status of quasi-labourers in small crofts. There were other options available to them in addition to that of emigration, including fishing, crofting or even movement for wage labour to the cities of the Lowlands. They chose Canada because it satisfied the peasant aspiration for land and since emigration allowed the whole community to remain together as a functioning social entity. In essence, therefore, mass emigration represented a radical opposition to how Highland society was changing in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Yet, as an exercise in collective self-help it was a time-limited strategy. Most of those who remained after 1815 suffered the full impact of the postwar collapse in incomes and increasing encroachment of sheep on land occupied by their cattle stocks. Few had the resources by that time to follow the example of those who had been fortunate enough to go before in earlier decades.
The history of the emigrant Gael before 1815 is often in dramatic contrast to the much gloomier narrative of later times. For a start, the emigration parties left in the teeth of opposition from both the state and the overwhelming majority of landowners. They also for the most part achieved success. Virgin forest was cleared and by the end of the 1780s the settlements in Glengarry were already dotted with small log cabins built in tiny clearings. The emigrants had obtained what they sought: land, freedom from landlord oppression, the reconstitution of networks of family and friends, and the perpetuation of their traditional culture. The potential catastrophic loss of land and social disruption in Scotland had been avoided through the decision to emigrate. Several of these new Gaelic settlements flourished. By 1832, for instance, the population of Glengarry in Upper Canada had climbed to 8,500 and doubled again to 17,596 twenty years later. The vast majority of them were Scottish Gaels or their descendants.
More highly publicized was the Earl of Selkirk’s settlement at Baldoon (named after his family estate in Wigtownshire) on Prince Edward Island. Nearly 1,000 Highlanders left for the area in 1803–4 under his tutelage. But the territory for colonization had been selected unwisely. The marshlands bred malarial mosquitoes, which soon spread disease of epidemic proportions. Baldoon languished until the war of 1812, when it was finally overrun by invading American forces. Selkirk’s Red River settlement in Upper Canada did much better. But these colonizations did not bring easy or sudden riches. The Highland districts were often isolated and located on marginal arable land. But they did provide a new security at a modest standard of living, which for the most part was accepted by communities habituated in the old country to even lower levels of comfort.
Only through exploring the scattered evidence of correspondence, oral tradition, song and poetry can we obtain a more realistic picture of the actual mindset of these emigrant parties. The very fact of the continuous stream of people who left for the new settlements over many years suggests an optimism and a strong faith in the benefits of emigration. Surviving poetry is equally positive. A strong theme running through the verse is that of liberation from servility, akin to the exodus from Egypt of the Israelites under Moses. Some songs do reveal sorrow at leaving home and the fracturing of ancient connections with beloved landscapes, family and friends. But linked with this is often a sense of excitement as the bards contemplate a new life across the ocean. The mood is captured well in ‘Fair is the Place’ by Micheil Mór MacDhómhnaill’s (Michael McDonald, c.1745–1815) after his arrival in Prince Edward Island in 1772:
O, ‘S àlainn an T-àite A, ‘s àlainn an t-àite Th’ agam ‘n cois na tràghad ‘N uair thig e gu bhith ‘g àiteach ann Leis a’ chrann, leis a’ chrann, O. Ni mi ‘n t-aran leis na gearrain ‘S an crodh-bainne chuir mu’n bhaile; ‘S cha bhi annas oirnn ‘s an earrach, Chuirinn geall, chuirinn geall. O, ‘s fraoidhneasach, daoimeanach, Glan mar sholus choinnlean, Am gradan le chuid shoillseanach Annas gach allt, anns gach allt, O. Mear ri mire, leum na linne |
Fair is the Place Fair is the place I have here by the sea, when it comes time to till it with the plough. I shall make bread-land with horses and put the cows to graze; we shall not be in want in spring, I wager. Sparkling, diamond-like, clear as candle-light, is the salmon with his brilliance, in every stream, Merrily sporting, leaping from the pool |
Rory Roy Mackenzie (1755–?) was one of the Earl of Selkirk’s colonists who first owned land in Prince Edward Island before migrating subsequently to Pictou. ‘An Imrich’ (‘The Emigration’), was composed as he prepared to leave Scotland. He laments the new economic order in the Highlands but looks forward to better times across the Atlantic:
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Ma ‘s e Selkirk na bàighe Tha ri àite thoirt dhuinn, Tha mi deònach, le m’ phàisdean, Dhol gun dàil air na tuinn. Siud an imrich tha feumail Dhol ‘nar leum as an tìr s’ Do dh’America chraobhach, ‘S am bi saors’ agus sìth. Faigh an nall dhuinn am botul, Thoir dhuinn deoch as mu’n cuairt; ‘S mise a’ fear a tha deònach A’dhol a sheòladh a’ chuain; A’dhol a dh’ionnsaidh an àite Gus ‘n do bhard am mòr-shluagh; A’dhol gu Eilein Naomh Màiri, ‘S cha bhi màl ‘ga thoirt bhuainn. A dheagh Aonghais Mhic-Amhlaidh, Tha mi ‘n geall ort ro mhòr, Bho’n a sgrìobh thu na briathran ‘Us an gnìomh le do mheòir, Gu’n grad chuir thu gu’r n-ionnsaidh Long Ghallda nan seòl, ‘Us ruith-chuip air a clàraibh Thar nam bàrc-thonn le treòir. Seo a’ bhliadhna tha sàraicht’ Do dh’fhear gun àiteach, gun sunnd, ‘N uair théid càch ‘s a’ mhìos Mhàrta Ris an àiteach le sùrd. Tha luchd-riaghlaidh an àite Nis ‘gar n-àicheadh gu dlùth, ‘S gur h-e an stiùuir a thoirt an iar dhi Nì as ciataiche dhuinn. ‘N àite dhaoine bhios ann, Gu’m bi Albainn an tràth sin ‘S i ‘na fàsaich do ‘n Fhraing. ‘N uair thig Bonipart’ stràiceil Le làimh làidir an nall, Bidh na cìobairean truagh dheth ‘Us cha chruaidh leinn an call. ‘S mo ghuidhe ma sheòlas sinn Gu’n deònaichear dhuinn Gu’m bi ‘n Tì uile ghràs-mhor Dh’ oidhch’ ‘s a’ là air ar stiùir, Gu ar gleidheadh ‘s ar teàrnadh Bho gach gàbhadh ‘us cùis, ‘S gu ar tabhairt làn sàbhailt Do thìr àghmhor na mùirn. Gheibh sinn fearann ‘us àiteach Anns no fàsaichean thall; Bidh na coillteau ‘gan rùsgadh Ged bhiodh cùinneadh orinn gann. ‘N dràsd s’ ann tha sinn ‘nar crùban ‘M bothain ùdlaidh gun taing, ‘Us na bailtean fo chaoraich Aig luchd-maoine gun dàimh. |
The Emigration If it be the benign Selkirk who will grant us a place, with my children I am eager to sail without delay. It is necessary to emigrate, to leave this land immediately, and go to wooded America where there will be freedom and peace. Bring us the bottle, pass a drink around to us; I am most eager to set sail across the sea, and to go to the place from which many have embarked; to go to St Mary’s Isle, and no rents will be exacted from us. Now, worthy Angus Macaulay, I will wager that since you wrote the instructions and their terms with your own hands, you will soon send us a foreign vessel, foam on her deck, rushing powerfully over the waves. This is a taxing year for one without a dwelling, without cheer, when in March others go to their ploughing eagerly. The overlords here reject us completely. To turn the rudder westward is the most sensible course for us. If it be sheep-walks which will replace men, Scotland will then become a wasteland for France. When the arrogant Bonaparte comes with his heavy hand, the shepherds will be badly off, and we will not grieve for them. It is my wish, if we sail, that it may be granted us that the all merciful one guide us night and day, to save us and protect us from every peril and need, and to bring us safely to the land of good cheer. We shall get land and a home in the wilderness yonder; the forests will be cleared though money will be scarce. Now we are cramped in gloomy huts without recompense, and the fields are occupied by sheep owned by the unfriendly rich. |
The final song comes from Anna Gillis of Morar, who sailed from Greenock to Quebec in 1786 with 500 others to settle eventually in Glengarry County. ‘Canada Ard’ or ‘Upper Canada’ reflects her views of the new colony and contains a tribute to Father Alexander (Scotus) MacDonnell, who accompanied the Knoydart emigrants of 1786 and continued to act as their pastor, leader and counsellor in Glengarry:
The labour of carving out new communities from wilderness must have been hard, demanding, exhausting and often discouraging. But the Highland pioneers of this era had a number of advantages which at least helped successful settlement in British North America to progress. The imperial state may have been hostile for a time to the idea of populating Canada but it did recognize the responsibility to those families who had sacrificed a great deal in their loyalty to the crown before 1783. Thus, in June 1784, government bateaux carried Loyalists from their refugee camps in Quebec to the new townships, where they not only received land in the better areas but also provisions for two years, clothing, tools, some livestock and household plenishings which enabled a good start to be made in building homes and clearing land. All this then lowered the threshold of risk for later migrants, who could also hope for food and help in the crucial early years of resettlement. Moreover, the provincial governments had a different agenda from London. They saw colonization as a means of expansion and development and some governors took the view that the martial traditions of the Highlanders would also fashion a robust defensive barrier against attempted armed incursions from the USA. The result was that the local governments were often more than willing to assist with provisions and transport within Canada from the port of disembarkation to areas of resettlement. This was done in Quebec for emigrants from the Island of Eigg in 1790, in Nova Scotia in 1791 and again in Quebec in 1794.
In cases where support was not forthcoming, Scottish merchant houses in Montreal, Halifax and Quebec commonly subscribed substantial sums to assist indigent passengers on arrival. Eventually, even the British government conceded that emigration could not be prevented and so should be directed if possible towards the British colonies. The outbreak of war with the USA in 1812 and the attempted American invasion of Canada concentrated the minds of London politicians and encouraged them to support the settlement of loyal Highlanders to bolster the colony’s defences. Thus in 1815 a scheme was established to offer 2,000 free passages to Canada with bedding and rations. In a sense, however, the state had been at the heart of the emigration process long before this because only government could provide land, the vital basis of settlement. For most of the period of this chapter, crown land in Canada was available in theory at least as a free grant. Concessions were usually 200 acres per recipient and, in the early years to 1797, even survey fees were covered by the state. Thereafter, however, full fees were levied on new settlers who often had to rent land initially or even share for a time with relatives who already possessed holdings.
The social composition of the emigrant parties was also a critical factor in adaptation to the colonial environment. This was usually a movement of entire communities, often several hundred strong. The people left as the families of those who had lived together for generations in the same Highland townships. There were large numbers of women and children who were fundamental if the new communities overseas were to grow and thrive. For instance, the emigration led by Archibald McMillan of Murlaggan from the Cameron country along Loch Arkaig in 1802 included some 448 people. Young children made up 32 per cent of the group and women over twelve years of age more than a half. Similarly, three vessels sailed from the small Scottish port of Duchainas in 1790 carrying 405 passengers from adjacent areas of Roman Catholic loyalty on the coastal mainland of Inverness-shire and the neighbouring islands. Among them were 111 heads of families and only twenty-five passengers travelled independently. Most crucially of all, family heads in virtually all the groups analysed were rent-paying tenants, the middle rank of Highland society. As long as they could keep their holdings intact until departure, they would hope to gain by selling cattle stocks as prices rose, cover the costs of the voyage and still have enough left over to help with resettlement in Canada.
Leadership was also vital to plan the ventures effectively, hire ships and then manage the complexities of land allocation in the colonies. For all this, the emigrants relied on their traditional leaders. In the Catholic districts, some were priests, such as the aforementioned Father Alexander MacDonnell, Maighstir Alasdair. Leaders were also drawn from the gentlemen of the clans, the Daoine-Uaisle, or clan gentry, fir-tacsa, and prominent tenants. These men had the necessary contacts, financial resources and often knowledge of colonial conditions. Several were half-pay army officers who had seen active service in the colonies. Above all, the leadership was held in respect by the people, an important advantage when difficult decisions had to be made. Their responsibilities did not end when the emigrants landed. In some districts, such as Glengarry County, leaders of the emigrant parties managed to secure positions as land surveyors and members of the land boards, where they were able to act as mediators between local crown officers and the people. Like the mass of emigrants they too had a basic stake in the success of colonization. The gentry of the clans were being squeezed out by the loss of favourable leases, the splitting of their holdings to accommodate crofting townships and the loss of traditional status in the community. Emigration not only offered them economic independence through landownership but perpetuated the social leadership they had possessed in clanship. Canada also held out the prospect of financial gain through populating their colonial properties with subtenants in the familiar manner practised in the Highlands for generations. Against this background, it is scarcely surprising that the survival and growth of these new settlements depended to a significant extent on the retention of conservative values and traditional social hierarchies.
The two great obstacles to Highland emigration between 1760 and 1815 were government prohibition and the impact of war. In both the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, civilian migration across the Atlantic fell away to very low levels. In the years of temporary cessation of conflict, however, such as after the Peace of Amiens in 1802, emigration returned quickly to prewar levels. Paradoxically, however, it was the colonial wars which gave some Gaels an effective way around government controls. The state had introduced during the Seven Years War a system of paying off demobilized soldiers with grants of colonial land. The policy was refined and expanded during the two subsequent conflicts of the later eighteenth century. It seemed a very sensible strategy. Dividing lots from the abundant empty lands of North America was an economical way of laying off troops, and thereafter they could also be used as a reserve army garrisoning at no cost those frontier areas threatened by the French or the newly independent Americans. As Chapter 11 showed, the scale of military recruitment in the Highlands was massive. Many of those who joined the colours never returned home when peace came in 1763 and 1783 but took advantage of the land settlement policies in America. In effect, they had exploited the opportunities for cheap state-subsidized emigration and the offer of free grants of land. Key aspects of government policy, preventing emigration, raising recruits in Scotland and paying them off in colonial land, were now in direct conflict with one another. As the leading authority on the subject has put it, through army recruitment, the Gaels were essentially being offered ‘a free ticket across the Atlantic’.5
The militarization of the Highlands and the system of soldier demobilization had a number of effects on emigration. The most obvious is that a headcount solely of civilian migrants considerably underestimates the scale of the departures. A proclamation of 1763 awarded captains 3,000 acres of land, subaltern officers 2,000 and rank and file fifty acres each. As a result, 27,000 acres in New York colony were divided among the officers and non-commissioned officers of the 42nd and 77th Highland regiments. The grievous losses they had sustained in battle cannot alone account for the fact that only one in five men returned to the Highlands in the years of peace. Perhaps emigration through the medium of army service became even greater after the American War came to an end in 1783, because the terms of land grants provided by then were even more generous and included veterans’ dependants. To take but one example, the demobilization of four battalions in what was later to become Upper Canada resulted in awards totalling 256,000 acres to 3,642 former soldiers and their families, numbering 1,056 women and children. It was scarcely surprising that these concentrations of Highlanders in North America soon became demographic and cultural points of connection, in turn drawing more kinfolk, friends and associates from the old country.
Emigration through military service was depicted in correspondence from soldiers as a route to advancement. A piper from Fraser of Lovat’s 71st Highland Regiment wrote home in euphoric terms in 1778: ‘I am as well as ever I was in my life, my pay is as good as one shilling and six pence per day and I hope my fortune within two years will be as good that I will have 200 acres of free land of my own in this country … if it had not been for this war this is the best country in the world.’6 The contemporary commentator on Highland affairs John Knox noted how the military settlements acted as potent inducements for further emigration. Ex-soldiers who had acquired land settlements ‘were desirous that their kindred and friends should come and partake of their good fortune’.7 The movement from Eigg and Arisaig to Canada in 1790, for instance, was specifically linked to opportunities to join relatives and friends and secure crown lands close to the original military settlements. This type of chain migration was facilitated by the emergence of a corps of entrepreneurs, enterprising half-pay army officers, often former Highland tacksmen, who came back home to recruit and organize emigrant parties. They understood that the land they had acquired across the Atlantic would be of little value if they could not settle it with people to work their properties and pay them rents. Contrary to some of the racial prejudice emanating later from some circles in the Lowlands, the Highlands was plainly not a society devoid of commercial acumen and enterprise.