To many contemporary observers one of the most perplexing questions about clearances in the Highlands was the apparent failure of the people to show more resolute and widespread resistance to landlord policies of eviction. Even sympathetic supporters of the Gaels were frustrated about what they judged to be the weakness of protest. Hugh Miller, the famous self-taught geologist, wrote angrily in 1840: ‘They [the Irish] are buying guns and will be bye-and-bye shooting magistrates and clergymen by the score; and Parliament will in consequence do a great deal for them. But the poor Highlanders will shoot no-one … and so they will be left to perish unregarded in their hovels.’ One modern scholar raised the question directly: ‘Why didn’t the Scots peasant shoot his landlord?’1 After all, the local sources of law and order in the Highlands seemed weak in the extreme, military force could only be summoned from a distance, and the geography of the Highlands and its scattered population made effective intervention difficult. What added to the puzzle was that the Gaels of the nineteenth century were descendants of the famed warrior race of the clans and in more recent times large numbers saw active and distinguished military service in the many Highland regiments of the period between 1756 and 1815. Tough veteran soldiers skilled in arms and used to violent conflict were common in most crofting communities.
It was significant that during the potato famine in the Highlands of the 1840s, organizers of relief for the stricken region employed the stereotype of a peaceful, submissive and stoical people who, though suffering great adversity, were not willing to break the laws of the land. The argument therefore ran that they were much more deserving of philanthropic support than the murderous peasantry of Ireland. Others asserted from a quite different perspective that the tranquillity of the Highlands was a great boon for investors as the real rental of a large Highland estate in 1830 was worth at least 20 per cent more than the nominal price because it had ‘no Tithes, poor rates or Incendiaries to contend with’.2
It was undeniable that peasant disturbance was more threatening, organized and enduring in parts of Ireland than in Highland Scotland. Every decade between 1760 and 1840 was punctuated by at least one major agrarian rebellion across the Irish Sea. The secret societies of Rightboys, Whiteboys, Oakboys, Peep O’ Day Boys and others were formidable associations. In some chronically disturbed districts, such as Tipperary, Antrim, Kilkenny and Limerick, they survived all efforts over many years by the forces of the crown, police and the judiciary to subdue them. They prided themselves as semi-military formations, bound together by oaths of loyalty and wearing special clothing to mark them out as outlawed subversives in open conflict against lawful authority. One government official, George Cornwall Lewis, described them as ‘protective unions, steadily, determinedly and unscrupulously working at their objects but sleeping in apparent apathy so long as their regulations are not violated’.3 These societies practised systematic intimidation, terrorism and murder on those, including soldiers, police and landowners, whom they believed transgressed the peasant codes of custom.
By contrast with much of rural Ireland, the Scottish Highlands seem a different world. Long after the major evictions there had come to an end, one observer found that crofters on the Gordon estate of South Uist in 1870 were living in such ‘a state of slavish fear’ that, though they had many grievances, they dared not admit them to the factor for fear he might drive them off the land. The same witness also noted how the people of South Harris were so ‘paralysed by terror’ that they were incapable of challenging the will of the landowner and his estate managers. Even during the land agitations of the 1880s, one speaker at a public meeting in Dunvegan, in Skye, openly admitted to his listeners: ‘I am ashamed to confess it that I trembled more before the factor than I did before the Lord of Lords.’4
Much Gaelic poetry, especially that from the 1820s and thereafter, seemed to reflect in its melancholia and nostalgia the weakness of physical resistance to clearance. Sorley MacLean, the greatest Gaelic poet of the twentieth century, was withering in his criticism when he wrote in the 1930s: ‘The Highlanders’ resistance, physical and moral, was bound to be very weak and the poetry of the period reflects this impotence.’5 For MacLean the verses were often ‘the wail of a harassed and dejected people’, such was the sense of hopelessness and despair that ran through so many of them.6
There has been no shortage of historical theories presented to explain the apparent fatalism of the crofting population. In England, too, it was reported that anti-enclosure riots of an earlier era were rare. Yet, as E. P. Thompson argued, this was not because enclosure was acceptable but because ‘people learned early that to riot was hopeless’.7 The same might be said about responses to clearance in the Highlands. Evictions took place under legal warrant and were protected by laws and regulations governing the rights of private property.
It is also sometimes suggested that the collective psyche of the Gael had been destroyed at Culloden and by the reign of state terror and the full-blooded attack on clan culture which followed that final and devastating defeat of Jacobitism. Others contend that the people were ‘thoroughly perplexed, demoralized and disorientated’ by the metamorphosis of the clan gentry into commercial landlords.8 It was not an alien class of landowners who were in the main responsible for the evictions but the descendants of clan chiefs to whom the ancestors of the people had given allegiance for centuries. This, so it is argued, left the people not only leaderless but broken in spirit. So, as the old warrior spirit was crushed, the people sank into fatalism, a process then hastened by the enormous appeal of evangelical Protestantism which completed the transformation of a martial society into a timorous and God-fearing crofting community. Remarkably, as late as 1884, the Royal Commission on the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands could report that despite all that had gone before in the region ‘there is still on the side of the poor much reverence for the owner of the soil’.9 That statement implied that many Gaels were still unable to sever their links with past loyalties and recognize themselves instead as a coherent class with rights and interests independent of their landlords. Sorley MacLean made a broadly similar point when discussing aspects of the poetry of the clearance era. He asserted that only rarely did landlords attract direct censure on account of their policies of eviction. MacLean described instead ‘the absurd tendency to blame the factor more than the landowner and the continued belief that if proprietors knew of the behaviour of their managers injustices would be rectified’.10
There is now much more scholarly understanding of the constraints on rural protest, not simply in the Scottish Highlands, but in societies of a similar kind elsewhere. Studies of peasant revolts in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe have detected common patterns. Small farmers in general were usually slow to engage in collective protest and when they did so found it difficult to maintain their campaigns until their objectives had been achieved. As one scholar has it: ‘the powerless are easy victims’.11 Protest undertaken by those in a position of weakness was usually doomed to failure as only those who possessed some degree of tactical control over their own resources had the capacity for effective resistance:
The poor peasant or the landless labourer who depends on a landlord for the larger part of their livelihood, or the totality of it, has no tactical power: he is completely within the power domain of his lord or employer. Poor peasants and landless labourers, therefore, are unlikely to pursue the course of rebellion, unless they are able to rely on some external power to challenge the power which constrains them.12
Consider then the condition of the Highland people during the Age of Clearances. They were certainly mainly devoid of power as land which provided their source of subsistence was held only at the will of proprietors. Landlords could also rely on the support of the legal authorities and, if necessary, the police or military, at the behest of local sheriffs, to maintain order. Especially after 1815, any residual power the people might have possessed as a labour force needed for kelp burning and herring fishing vanished as those by-employments collapsed or stagnated in the 1810s and 1820s. Crofters and cottars were by then judged to be a ‘redundant’ population whose small possessions obstructed the ongoing expansion of profitable sheep farming. Any possibility of effective collective resistance across the Highlands was also made difficult because the small communities were widely dispersed, land transport was poor, and towns which might have acted as centres of organization and dissemination of opinion were few and far between.
External support for the plight of the people before the 1870s did come from a few writers and pamphleteers but none of them had any real political clout. The spiritual leaders of Gaeldom usually counselled restraint and moderation, and while some did speak out in defence of the dispossessed, any breaking of the law or violent resistance to civil authority was usually frowned upon. This response was not necessarily the result of some collaborative conspiracy with landlordism. Ministers were very aware that those who engaged in civil unrest were certain to be dealt with very severely by the courts. Imprisonment of the breadwinning menfolk could only compound the misery of their abandoned families while they served long sentences in gaol. Naturally, too, the clergy were wont to see injustice from a spiritual perspective. For instance, in its submission to the Napier Commission, the Free Church of Scotland, to which the vast majority of the West Highland and Hebridean crofters had rallied after the Disruption of 1843, asserted that it was wrong to try to prevent suffering by sinning. This life was ‘a glen of tears’ which had to be endured with courage and patience, though, in the end, justice and salvation would be meted out in eternity to both the bad and the good on earth.
The clergy of all denominations tended therefore to be generally a force for peace and social stability rather than potential leaders of communal insurrection. But active collaboration by ministers with estate managers in order to facilitate evictions was not as common as sometimes supposed, even if they had been appointed to their parishes through landlord patronage. In the case of the Sutherland estate, for example, Patrick Sellar wrote: ‘I do not exaggerate the matter when I say that during the Riots no minister settled by the proprietors stirred one inch to support the law.’13 He added that in only one instance did a member of the clergy ‘exhort his flock to peace and to commune with us’.14 Some of the Lowland press, like the North British Daily Mail and The Witness, the journal of the Free Church, could be counted on to show sympathy and were often deeply critical of landlordism. But no convincing intellectual challenge was mounted to the economic principles which underpinned the removals. Most mainstream opinion in Scotland before the second half of the nineteenth century held to the view that clearances were a necessary evil, an unfortunate but inevitable cost of agrarian progress.15
However, some interpretations of so-called Highland passivity are problematic. For instance, to use the history of Irish rural unrest as a comparator with the Highlands is to follow a false analytical trail. The scale and intensity of agrarian terrorism in Ireland was exceptional, not only within the British Isles but also across most of Western Europe, because of the very unusual nature of the political and religious circumstances in that country. The Irish state apparatus was monopolized by Protestants but the vast majority of the rural population in the central and southern regions of the country were Catholic and the penal laws assumed all of them were potentially disaffected to the state. For some peasant communities these religious fissures helped to establish a collective bond of union among the Catholic poor, an ideological cohesion, which helped to mobilize peasant movements. The Irish landed class was also alien in terms of both religion and ethnicity. Therefore the élites did not possess the hegemonic authority or the networks of social influence in the localities of the kind enjoyed by their counterparts across the Irish Sea. In mainland Britain rural stability mainly rested not on draconian law enforcement or military force but on many generations of family lordship, influence and assured hierarchy among the population. The Highlands should therefore be best compared not with Ireland but with the more representative experiences of the rural Lowlands and the English countryside.
Between 1760 and 1830 the dispossession of small tenants and cottars in the Lowlands, as argued previously, was a silent process which did not trigger overt opposition. However, modern scholarship has now shown that contemporaries may have significantly underestimated the extent and range of disturbance in the Highlands. Especially in the early stages of the expansion of sheep farming in the later eighteenth century, farmers from the Lowlands and Border country coming on to estates to consider their potential for sheep rearing were often set upon violently and given a bloody send-off. The clandestine stealing, maiming, mutilation and slaughter of sheep by night were, for obvious reasons, relatively risk-free and were the most popular forms of intimidation and retribution visited on the flockmasters. Anonymous letters sent to the families of sheep farmers threatening violent revenge were also common. In the 1810s sheep thefts on the Sutherland estate rose to around 1,500 animals a year and led to the formation of a protective organization, the Sutherland Association against Felony. But the poverty of the people ensured that these defensive measures were usually ineffective. As the Rev. Norman MacLeod recorded of Skye in 1841: ‘The flocks of the large sheep farmers are annually thinned by those who feel the pinching of famine; and to such an extent is this system carried on that it has led to the proposal of establishing a rural police throughout the island.16 Again, on the MacLeod estate on the same island, inflammatory notices were posted on the doors of churches which caused numerous sheep to be mutilated or killed. From other districts came reports of petty violence and simmering hatred of sheep farmers.
Yet, even if the vast majority of evictions passed off peacefully with little dissent or opposition, resistance did take place in some cases with sporadic but repeated incidents of protest. Thus far modern research has documented at least fifty such episodes, but that figure is almost certainly an underestimate because most of those which have been recorded to date only came to public notice because they attracted the attention of the contemporary press. However, from the known examples of opposition, the leading historian of the Highland disturbances has constructed the following useful typology:
From the many examples of obstruction and resistance emerges an almost stylised mode of action. Typically the anti-eviction episode followed a pattern in these four stages:
– The local law officer or the landlord’s agent would attempt to serve the summons of removal on a village. The first time he might simply be turned away. The second time he would be subjected to petty humiliation, usually at the hands of the womenfolk of the village. They might seize his papers and burn them under his nose. Sometimes the officer was stripped naked and chased off the land – or even pushed out to sea in an open boat without oars.
– A posse of constables led by a Sheriff and his assistants would arrive, often very early in the morning. Real resistance would follow: they would be assaulted with volleys of stones and sticks from a massed group of the common people. In the front line of the latter were, invariably, the women and boys, making most noise and taking the worst injuries. Sometimes men were reported at the front – often dressed as women. But most of the menfolk were to the rear, apparently as a second line of defence. The resistance was usually sufficiently vociferous and violent to push back the posse. Meanwhile, the common people might have made an appeal to some distant authority: the Prince Regent, the press, local worthies or even the landlord.
– Higher legal authorities would be alerted: the Solicitor General, or the Lord Advocate, or perhaps the Home Office. Repeatedly the local landowners, in an advanced state of panic, would attribute the disturbances to agitators with suspected connections with ‘Radicalism’. Sometimes there was inflated talk of a ‘Northern Rebellion’ which helped persuade the authorities that military intervention was required – from Inverness, Fort William, Aberdeen or Glasgow.
– The news of impending military intervention was usually enough of itself to lead to a collapse of the resistance. Troops intervened on at least ten occasions but were never actually engaged in physical hostilities. The termination of resistance was frequently facilitated by the mediation of the local minister who produced a face-saving formula for the people. It generally took the form of a delay of removal, but rarely did anything to prevent the eventual clearance. Most of these incidents show the marks of desperation among the people – unpreparedness, absence of arms, lack of coordination, no clear leadership and the final collapse in the face of military intervention.17
One of the best documented of these episodes took place on the Argyllshire estate of Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch. He and his family were natives of the county and had made an immense fortune in the sugar and slave trades of the Caribbean. At the height of the potato famine in June 1848, Malcolm attempted to remove the small tenants of the township of Arichonan in North Knapdale, Argyll. At the first attempt to enforce the notices of eviction, the sheriff officer, factor and other employees of the estate were resisted with considerable violence and the attempt at removal collapsed in ignominy.
A month later another effort was made. This time the party numbered thirty-eight men, including a police escort. Even then the people seem not to have been intimidated: ‘a mob of great number of evil disposed persons did then and there riotously and tumultuously assemble with the “common purpose” of opposing the eviction’, as the report preserved in Justiciary Court Records described the incident.18 The authorities were routed once again and forced to release the prisoners they had already taken during the action. Significantly, too, the inhabitants of Arichonan were helped by crofters and cottars from elsewhere in the neighbourhood in their struggle to resist dispossession.
Subsequently, charges were brought against fifteen individuals ‘for mobbing and rioting, obstructing and deforcing [preventing with force an officer of the law doing his duty] and assaulting officers’. Most were tenants and a few others were cottars. Five of the fifteen were women. All the accused, except for one man who was exonerated, each received sentences of eight months’ imprisonment.
The high profile of women in the Arichonan incident is intriguing; indeed, some have suggested that Highland riots were in effect women’s riots. In a representative sample of thirty clearance and patronage disputes across the Highland region, women were involved in nineteen and in many of them they often took the lead while the menfolk at first held back. This was true of a series of disturbances at Culrain in 1820; Gruids in 1821; Durness in 1841; Sollas in 1849; Greenyards in 1854; Knockam and Elphim in 1852; and Coigach in 1852. Sometimes men appeared as transvestites, dressed in female clothing. The proactive role of women in peasant resistance was not unique to the Highlands. It was also an integral part of popular insurrectionism in Ireland, England, Holland, France and elsewhere. Wives and mothers were at the heart of the home and their determination to defend it and their families to the bitter end is hardly surprising. The loss of earnings of the menfolk by reason of arrest and imprisonment could condemn wives and children to a life of penury. Court records suggest there was a belief among the people that women would not experience prosecution and even if they did were likely to be treated more leniently by the judiciary. Men generally did tend to receive longer sentences, but there is no evidence that the authorities were unwilling to prosecute women with the full force of the law. If the military was summoned to help crush riotous behaviour they may initially have been surprised to be confronted by serried ranks of females pitching stones and screaming curses at them. But that did not prevent soldiers using rifle butts and even bayonets against women if those tactics were thought necessary in order to arrest them.
The example of Arichonan was fairly typical of the Highland riots. Violence was employed in the resistance, the forces of law and order were rebuffed for a time, but eventually the perpetrators were arrested and imprisoned. One exception to the rule was the attempted clearance of Coigach in Wester Ross in 1852–3. The officer who attempted to serve the eviction papers was stripped by the womenfolk and despatched almost naked in a boat across the loch. Six constables were then ordered to the district but were again given short shrift by angry women. The dispute lasted for over two years. Eventually the people were allowed to remain as the proprietor began to fear the bad publicity that might ensue if he called in the military to carry out a forced eviction. Coigach may have been one sign of changing times and of growing sympathy for the plight of the crofting communities outside the Highlands.
Another important advance in the assessment of protest has been exploration of the oral tradition, by studying the fragments of Gaelic poetry which have survived. Verse and song were the main vehicles of public expression and can provide a fascinating insight into the emotional world of the people. As noted earlier, some poetry of the time tended to convey depression and hopelessness. But other parts of the genre are much more robust and express feelings of rage, anger and eagerness for revenge on the perpetrators of clearance. Also, contrary to the opinion expressed by some writers, the verse does occasionally condemn landlords as well as their factors by name. Satirical poetry, in particular, that which belongs to the poetic tradition of aoir, or vituperation and condemnation, can be especially venomous.19 Two examples are given below:
The well-known aphorism of the French historian Pierre Goubert that ‘No peasant willingly surrenders land, be it only half a furrow’ is a reminder that violent response to eviction was not unique to the Highlands.20 But hostility to dispossession there seems to have been motivated not simply by fear of the loss of subsistence but by strongly held beliefs in rights to land. This was the repeated claim throughout the poetry of the clearances and was also a salient feature of the evidence given by crofter witnesses to the Napier Commission in 1882–3. Of principal importance in this respect was, as discussed earlier in the book, the concept of duthchas. The term has several meanings but they included the belief in the hereditary right of possession to land. It was not a legal concept but one based on custom and derived from the old clan tradition of land given in return for service. Occupation of a holding therefore was seen as being justifiable in moral terms and was in explicit conflict with the legal rights of private property in land. The Napier Commission recognized the inevitable conflict between the two concepts:
The opinion was often expressed before us that the small tenantry of the Highlands have an inherited inalienable title to security of tenure in their possessions while rent and service are duly rendered which is an impression indigenous to the country though it has never been sanctioned by legal recognition, and has long been repudiated by the actions of the proprietors.21
The Earl of Selkirk, who organized several emigration schemes to Canada from the Highlands, had made a similar point seventy years before:
According to the ideas handed down to them from their ancestors, and long prevalent among high and low throughout the Highlands, they were only defending their rights and resisting a ruinous unjust and tyrannical encroachment on their property.22 [my italics]
Patrick Sellar, one of the managers of the Sutherland estate in the early nineteenth century and notorious for being charged with culpable homicide during an eviction, came up against these beliefs in the clearance of the Strath of Kildonan in 1812. The delivery of notices to quit their holdings triggered open opposition from the people. A petition from the tenants denied that they were in any way motivated by radical politics, as some might have suspected at the time. Instead, they contended that ‘Mr Young [Sellar’s fellow manager] would give us the first offer of our present possessions or provide us with such larach [holdings] that we may have some Hill Grass as the Highlanders mostly depends on the Hill Grass.’ Sellar, who was a native of Lowland Morayshire, was astonished to learn that the tenants claimed ‘they were entitled to keep possession of their Grounds and would allow no shepherd to come to the country’. Another observer at the time described how the Kildonan people had ‘so much of the old Highland Spirit as to think the land their own’.23
The durability of these beliefs in the right to land was remarkable. As late as 1954 the Royal Commission on Crofting Conditions of that year noted:
they have the feeling that the croft, its land, its houses are their own. They have gathered its stones and reared its buildings and occupied it as their own all their days.
They have received it from their ancestors who won it from the wilderness and they cherish the hope they will transmit it to the generations to come.
Whatever the legal theory they feel it to be their own.24
The most successful example of defiance against landlord authority in the Victorian Highlands before the 1880s was not in the secular sphere or in resistance to clearance but in the religious sphere and was occasioned by the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843. The long-running controversy over landed rights of patronage had been a source of tension and protest in the parishes of Scotland since the early decades of the eighteenth century. The evangelical wing of the established church had always been in strident opposition to lay patronage as in their view it conferred arrogant and unacceptable secular authority over Christ’s kingdom on earth. By the 1830s the tide of opinion in the General Assembly was running very favourably for the evangelicals and they determined to rid the church once and for all of this historic grievance. The growing crisis came to a head in 1842 when the Assembly passed the Claim of Right which proclaimed that only Jesus Christ had headship of the Church of Scotland and to recognize any other authority in its governance was tantamount to heretical rejection of His Divine supremacy. The Prime Minister, Robert Peel, in early 1843 summarily rejected the Claim as totally unacceptable because it could only lead to clerical tyranny over the state.
The evangelicals considered that they now had little choice but to break from the established church. Therefore on 18 May 1843, the first day of the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh, the retiring Moderator read out a long statement denouncing the British state for infringing the spiritual independence of the national Church of Scotland. He laid the paper on the table and then left the Assembly, followed en masse into the street by all his fellow evangelical ministers and elders. Later, they formally constituted themselves as the ‘Free Protesting Church of Scotland’ and signed the Deed of Demission by which over 450 clergy resigned from the establishment and surrendered their churches, manses and incomes in a remarkable demonstration of the power of religious principle and commitment.
This historic decision had major implications for the people of the western Highlands and Islands. By the time of the Disruption the region had become a stronghold of popular and enthusiastic evangelicalism with a history of intense and deeply emotional religious revivals. There was also a recent history of public and violent opposition by congregations to ministers settled on them by landlord patrons who were not only considered more restrained and moderate in their beliefs but were also sometimes viewed as clerical creatures of landlordism. Indeed, it is possible to detect a people’s church already emerging out of the established order in parts of the Highlands before the Church of Scotland finally fractured in 1843. A key factor in this development was the influence of Na Daoine, translated as ‘The Men’. They were lay preachers, so called to distinguish them from the ordained clergy, a spiritual élite, drawn mainly from better-off crofting and tradesman families, with powerful personal charisma, deep religious piety, detailed knowledge of the scriptures and, above all, an ability to blend the appeal of Christian spirituality with Gaelic tradition and imagery.
Their message gave hope of salvation in the next world and some consolation in the present to those suffering from the economic convulsions which gripped the western Highlands. Christian conversion was only possible through complete submission to the Will of God and a refusal to accept suffering was to question that divine authority. Evangelical teaching therefore provided a certainty amid the trauma of tumultuous social change and at the same time the promise of eternal reward in heaven for those who lived good and holy lives despite the travails they experienced on earth.
It came as little surprise then that when the new Free Church was founded it generated widespread and enthusiastic support among crofters and cottars. Even before it was established in 1843 the evangelical leadership in the Lowlands had been preparing the ground. Pamphlets and broadsheets in Gaelic were widely circulated. Delegations toured the region to seek popular support and ministers of an evangelical persuasion were urged to prepare their congregations for the coming crisis. When the schism finally came, entire districts quickly separated from the established church, and ‘The Men’, together with the large numbers of people whom they had influenced, collectively joined the Free Church. The religious division soon hardened into class division. The new church was no friend of landlords whose rights of patronage the evangelicals had challenged for generations. For their part, landowners, big farmers, factors and merchants mainly continued to adhere to the Auld Kirk, the established Church of Scotland. Many of them felt that the people had carried out an unprecedented act of collective defiance against their social superiors. For some time afterwards landlords organized a campaign of harassment and obstruction against the Free Church which normally took the form of refusing sites on their estates for church buildings. One magnate, Sir James Riddell, proprietor of Ardnamurchan, publicly and bitterly denounced those who had broken off from the establishment and asserted that if the crofters had shown such defiance in the religious sphere there was every chance that before too long they would also be likely to challenge the powers that be in the secular sphere.
It was to be another forty years before any such challenge did emerge in the crofting districts so one has to be cautious about drawing a simple cause-and-effect relationship between the Disruption of 1843 and the successful agitations over land reform which surfaced in the 1880s. Nevertheless, the popularity of the Free Church was yet another great breach in the relationship between élites and people in the western Highlands. Some have also suggested that 1843 and the aftermath was a collective victory for the interests of crofters over landlords which generated a stronger sense of community among the people. Members of the Free Church throughout Scotland were also committed supporters of the Liberal Party and they soon began to develop an interest in the plight of their co-religionaries in the Highlands which was to prove a key source of influential political support during the Crofters’ War of the 1880s.
There is, however, another side to the issue of the relationship between the people of Gaeldom and evangelical religion which makes the discussion more complex. During the period of trauma and famine as the policy of clearance changed from resettlement to expulsion between the 1820s and 1850s it can also be plausibly argued that the religious transformation of that time helped to contain violent protest and peasant unrest. The people were probably already disorientated since for the most part the promoters of the revolution in land holding were their own hereditary leaders. In Highland Scotland, much of the population must have been in a condition of psychological confusion as the families of the old clan élites began to enforce widespread dispossession of peasant communities. In such a time of social convulsion, religious certainties could provide some comfort.
This had a number of facets. Patient acceptance of suffering was nothing less than pious submission to God’s plan. During the potato famine, the Edinburgh Gaelic Schools Society stated: ‘for He hath said I will never leave thee nor forsake thee. It is this word that your teachers are, day and night, occupied in dispensing to the starving families of the Highland and Islands.’25 The proper response to suffering was the examination of conscience as a precondition to repentance. The experience of tragedy in this world could be explained as the result of personal wickedness and so those who were the victims of disaster might themselves be the causes of their own misfortune. This was the reaction, for example, of the people of Glencalvie in Strathconan who were obliged to seek refuge in the church at Croick in 1845 after being evicted from their lands. They scrawled a message on the windowsill of the kirk where they sought shelter that their plight was a dreadful punishment for sin. Also, the mighty who had inflicted pain would not go unpunished. But retribution belonged to God, not man; in one sermon the Rev. John Sinclair, minister of Bruan in Caithness, made the point explicitly: ‘It is true that we often see the wicked enjoy much comfort and worldly ease, and the Godly chastened every morning; but this is a dreadful rest to the former and a blessed chastisement to the latter.’26 The doctrines of Calvinism therefore gave spiritual certainty during the transition from clanship to clearance as the evangelicals concentrated the minds and emotions of the people on a highly personal struggle for grace and election. The miseries of this life were not therefore simply to be endured but were in themselves a necessary agony for those who wished to attain eternal salvation in the next.
This compelling set of beliefs had important implications for the response of the Highland population to the impact of dispossession. Resistance to clearance did take place but was still limited in relation to the overall scale of dislocation. But the beliefs disseminated with such emotional fervour by the missionaries and ‘The Men’ must have buttressed other forces making for stability and further diluted influences making for resistance. The evangelical gospel was not a theology of social justice but a faith designed to promote personal spiritual growth and commitment. It offered solace and the certainty of punishment for the oppressor, not by man but by God, and so deflected opposition in this life to the other side of the grave. The vision that suffering had to be endured as a necessary preparation for salvation was an obvious constraint on insurrection, and it was hardly surprising that the poet Mary MacPherson of Skye eloquently condemned evangelical preachers for their indifference to the poor conditions in which the people lived. Their concern with spiritual challenges and the eternal verities took precedence over mere secular problems.