Until the 1860s emigration from the Scottish Highlands was an important numerical feature of the Scottish exodus as a whole. In the last four decades of the nineteenth century, however, and thereafter, the contribution of the region as a proportion of the general outflow of Scots fell dramatically as the towns, cities and Lowland countryside became by far the dominant sources of large-scale Scottish movement across the globe. Yet, for a number of years in the later 1840s and early 1850s, the Highland diaspora reached truly unprecedented levels. It is arguable that much of the international mobility of the Scottish people throughout the nineteenth century was led by the search for opportunity overseas. But in that period the great wave of Highland emigrants was primarily driven by subsistence crisis, clearance and peasant expropriation.
The essential background to the exodus was the lethal impact of the potato blight which had earlier devastated Ireland and some other parts of Europe in the years after 1845. The Highland crops succumbed to the disease from the autumn of 1846, one year after the beginning of the Irish tragedy. Press reports from the north and west started to describe the stench of rotting potatoes, the key subsistence crop of the region, throughout the crofting townships, particularly those located in the Hebrides and the coastlands of the western mainland. In that area, with its moderate winters and rainy summers, the climatic conditions were exactly right for the rapid and destructive spread of the fungal disease Phytophthora infestans, to which there was no known antidote at the time. Early estimates for 1846 suggested the potato crop had failed entirely in over 75 per cent of crofting parishes. The newspaper of the Free Church, The Witness, proclaimed in apocalyptic terms: ‘The hand of the Lord has indeed touched us’ and described the calamity ‘unprecedented in the memory of this generation and of many generations gone by, even in any modern periods of our country’s history’.1 Unambiguous signs of famine soon emerged. While burial registers for most Highland areas in the 1840s are few and far between, in those that have survived deaths among the old and the very young rose significantly in late 1846 and the first few months of 1847. The Scotsman in December 1846 described how the numbers dying from dysentery were ‘increasing with fearful rapidity among the cottar class’.2 In the Ross of Mull, government relief officers reported that the mortality rate during the winter months was three times above the average for that time of year. Elsewhere in Harris, South Uist, Barra, Skye, Moidart and Kintail, influenza, typhus and dysentery were also spreading unchecked among the poor. The awful possibility that the Highlands might be engulfed in a human catastrophe of Irish proportions seemed to some observers to be only a matter of time.
But the potential disaster was averted, despite the fact that the potato blight continued to ravage the Highlands to a greater or lesser extent for almost a decade after 1846. By the summer of 1847 death rates had returned to normal levels and the threat of starvation receded. It seemed as if a terrible mortality crisis had been contained. The different experiences of Ireland (where over one million died) and the Highlands in this respect can be explained by a number of influences. An important factor was scale. In Ireland, the blight brought over three million people to the edge of starvation. In the Highlands, on the other hand, around 200,000 were seriously as risk, and this number diminished over time as the crisis increasingly centred on parts of the north-western coastlands, the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland, and the Hebrides. By 1848 only around a quarter (or fewer than 70,000) of the total population of the Highland region remained in need of famine relief.
The map of distress was complex. The southern, central and eastern Highlands did not escape entirely unscathed, but after 1847 relief operations were already being wound down in most of the parishes there, reflecting their more resilient economies. Here were less potato dependency and more reliance on grain and fish; a better ratio of land to population; and developed alternative occupations, such as commercial fishing and linen manufacture, in southern Argyll, Perthshire and eastern Inverness-shire. The concentrated and relatively small-scale nature of the Scottish famine meant that the emergency could be managed more effectively by the relief agencies of the day in contrast to the epochal crisis across the Irish Sea. The Scottish authorities were dealing with many thousands of potential victims, their counterparts in Ireland with millions. The vastly different magnitude of the two famines is best illustrated by the role of government. In Ireland the state, both local and national, was the principal source of relief during the crisis, whereas in the Highlands direct government intervention began in late 1846 and had come to an end by the summer of 1847. Two vessels were stationed as meal depots at Tobermory in Mull and Portree in Skye to sell grain at controlled prices while landowners in the stricken region were able to make application for loans under the Drainage and Public Works Act to provide relief work for the distressed people of their estates.
These initiatives apart, the main burden of the relief effort was borne by three great charities, the Free Church of Scotland, the Edinburgh Relief Committee and its Glasgow equivalent, which came together in early 1847 to form the Central Board of Management for Highland Relief. The Central Board had the responsibility for relieving destitution until its operations came to an end in 1850. The programme of support went through several phases. First in the field was the Free Church, eager to come to the aid of its numerous loyal congregations in the north-west and the islands. The schooner Breadalbane, built to carry ministers around the Hebrides, was pressed into service to take emergency supplies to the most needy communities. The Free Church was the only active agency during the most critical months of late 1846 and early 1847. Through its superb intelligence network of local ministers it was able to direct aid to those districts where the risk of starvation was greatest. The Free Church’s relief operation was also free of any sectarian bias. Grateful thanks for supplies of grain were received from the Catholic areas of Arisaig and Moidart. Not the least of the Free Church’s contribution was the imaginative plan to transport over 3,000 able-bodied men from the Highlands for temporary work on the Lowland railways.
The Central Board assumed control of relief operations in February 1847 and by the end of that year had established a huge fund for the aid of distress of nearly £210,000 (over £16,000,000 at 2017 values). This was probably the greatest sum ever raised in support of a single charitable cause in nineteenth-century Scotland. With this substantial resource behind it, the Board divided its relief responsibilities into two Sections. Edinburgh was entrusted with Skye, Wester Ross, Orkney, Shetland and the eastern Highlands, while Glasgow took charge of Argyll, western Inverness, the Outer Hebrides and the Inner Hebrides, apart from Skye. The distribution of meal was managed initially under the Sections’ Local Committees, appointed from each parish or district from lists supplied by local clergymen. The objective was only to do enough to prevent absolute starvation and so allowances were limited to only one pound of meal per adult male per day and half of one pound for each woman. In order to ensure that the people were not to be corrupted into the feared state of indolent dependency, anathema to the Victorian mind, these meagre portions would only be provided in return for hard labour. So, in the spring and summer of 1847, gangs of men, women and children could be seen at work all over the western Highlands, the northern isles and the Hebrides at ‘public’ works, laying roads, building walls, digging ditches and constructing piers. Several of these so-called ‘destitution roads’ survive to this day as physical memorials to the greatest human crisis in the modern history of Gaeldom.
The relief effort contained the threat of starvation and the spread of famine-related diseases. In spring 1847, for instance, the Glasgow Section despatched 15,680 bolls of wheatmeal, oatmeal, peasemeal and Indian corn to the distressed districts. But critics in the hierarchy of the Central Board were soon complaining that the Highlanders were being encouraged to rely on ‘pauperizing’ assistance, the so-called ‘labour test’ was often ignored, and the distribution of meal was becoming too lavish. A campaign to establish a more rigorous system of relief started to gain momentum, partly inspired by the belief that destitution was likely to last longer than one season, and so major efforts had to be made to ensure that the Gaels could support themselves in the future. Latent racism now came more to the surface. Vitriolic attacks against the ‘indolent’ Highlander who was being supported by the ‘industrious’ Lowlander began to be published in the pages of the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald and other newspapers. Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, the key figure in the famine relief strategies in Ireland, was now a powerful influence on the men who ran the Central Board. Trevelyan’s position was unequivocal. He regarded both Irish and Highland Celts as profoundly racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It was his confirmed view that the potato famine was the judgement of God on a feckless people. They now had to be taught a crucial moral lesson in order to transform their values that they might be able to support themselves in the future rather than rely on the charity of others. Gratuitous relief was a veritable curse on society; in the words of Trevelyan: ‘Next to allowing the people to die of hunger, the greatest evil that could happen would be their being habituated to depend upon public charity.’3
The outcome was the imposition of the hated ‘destitution test’ throughout the distressed region. By this system of extreme stringency a whole day’s work was required in return for a pound of meal, the theory being that only those facing starvation would accept support on such terms. Trevelyan stressed that ‘pauperism’, or dependency on relief, could be avoided but by insisting that ‘the pound of meal and the task of at least eight hours hard work is the best regime for this moral disease’.4 An elaborate bureaucracy was set up to enforce this more demanding regime, consisting of an inspector-general, resident inspectors, relief officers and work overseers spread throughout all the districts which had been affected by failure of the potatoes. Most of the functionaries were retired or semi-retired naval officers (‘heroes of the quarter-deck’, as one observer put it) who were very experienced in enforcing strict discipline. Meal allowances were now to be issued only once a fortnight in order to impose habits of prudence by teaching the poor to spread their paltry issues of meal over an extended period rather than relying on being fed on a daily basis. Labour books were kept by the overseers in which the hours of work of each recipient were faithfully recorded, the fortnight’s allowance for each family calculated with care and tickets issued for presentation to the meal dealers. The destitution test was resolutely imposed by relief officers who saw it as their duty to teach the people a moral lesson. Not surprisingly, however, it provoked deep hostility. One critic commented acidly that the scheme was ‘starving the poor Highlanders according to the most approved doctrines of political economy … the Highlanders upon grounds of Catholic affinity, were to be starved after the Irish fashion’.5 Free Church ministers protested loudly at the programme of ‘systematized starvation’ which unleashed angry hostility, particularly among the people of Skye and Wester Ross. Nevertheless, the test was enforced through 1848 and into 1849. In essence a great philanthropic endeavour had been transformed into an ideological crusade to reform a population judged to be inadequate and in need of character improvement. It was an extraordinary outcome.
However, the reasons why the Highlands did not starve were wider and deeper than the relief effort itself. Many landowners were active, at least for a period, in supporting the inhabitants of their estates in the early years of the crisis. For instance, only 14 per cent of all west Highland proprietors were censured by government officials for negligence, though in some other cases pressure had to be brought to bear to ensure that landowners met their obligations. In later years, as described below, estate policy in general became much less benevolent and more coercive. Civil servants even contrasted the positive role of Scottish proprietors with the indifference of many of their counterparts across the Irish Sea. A prime factor in the Scottish case was that many landlords had the financial resources to provide support to their small tenants. As described in Chapter 10, in the early nineteenth century there had been a great transfer of estates from the indebted hereditary landlord class of the region to new owners who were often rich tycoons from outside the Highlands. Over three quarters of all estates in the famine zone had been acquired by merchants, bankers, lawyers, financiers and industrialists by the 1840s. The affluent were attracted to the Highlands for sport, recreation, the romantic allure of the region and, not least, a basic desire for territorial acquisition. Typical of the breed was the new owner of Barra and South Uist, Colonel John Gordon, dubbed ‘the richest commoner in Scotland’, and Sir James Matheson, proprietor of Lewis and partner in the China opium house of Jardine, Matheson and Co. The economic muscle of this élite was able to complement and support the relief programmes of government and the charities, at least in the first years of the disaster.
The different stages of economic development of Ireland and Scotland were also of crucial importance. The Scottish famine took place in a rich industrialized society with much higher per capita wealth than Ireland. The proof was the army of Irish immigrants which had been drawn by this, settling in the western Lowlands from the late eighteenth century. Scotland had a dynamic industrial economy which offered a range of jobs in general and casual labouring to temporary and permanent migrants from the Highlands. Agricultural work, especially at the harvest, the fisheries, domestic service, building, dock labouring and railway navvying were just some of the outlets available in the booming southern economy. By the 1840s, temporary migration had become a very well-developed feature of Highland life. Not only did it provide a stream of income from the Lowlands but the peak months for seasonal movement, May to September, were also the times of maximum pressure on food resources when the old grain and potato harvests were running out and the new had still to be gathered.
These migration networks were of key importance during the potato famine. The years 1846 and 1847 were by happy coincidence a phase of vigorous development in the Lowland economy, stimulated in large part by the greatest railway construction boom of the nineteenth century. As a result there was an unprecedented demand for labourers, but employment in fishing and agriculture, both traditional outlets for Highland seasonal migrants, was also very buoyant. The combination of a very active labour market in the south and the unremitting pressure of destitution in the north prompted a great stream of people from the stricken region. In a sense, however, and despite the acute distress suffered by the poor, these first two years of the Great Highland Famine can be considered the relative quiet before the real social storm. A wave of widespread clearances and compulsory programmes of emigration were soon to be unleashed on the impoverished communities of Gaeldom.
The benevolence of urban philanthropists and several Highland magnates in providing support for the stricken population in 1846–7 cannot be denied. However, voices of disquiet and criticism started to reach a peak from 1848 onwards. In part this was because the Scottish economy was plunged into a deep industrial recession in that year. The depression was accompanied by serious cholera epidemics in some of the larger Lowland towns. Donor fatigue started to set in, not least because the question was now raised of why the Gaels should be offered such ‘generous’ support while many industrial communities suffered extreme privation with only limited help. The Scottish Poor Law reform of 1845 had set its face against relief for the able-bodied unemployed and, as a result, countless families were now sinking into miserable destitution in the manufacturing areas.
The Central Board’s attempts to use its resources to invest in economic improvement in the western Highlands and Islands had also proven fruitless. The Scotsman editorials thundered that the charity of industrious, hard-working Lowlanders had been wasted to support ‘Celtic laziness’.6 On some of the great estates of the Highlands, where large sums had been spent on both famine relief and public works, the impact on long-term improvement was indeed slight. Sir James Matheson had provided over £107,000 in the island of Lewis between 1845 and 1850, or some £68,000 more than the revenue derived from his estate over that period. Similarly, between 1846 and 1850 £7,900 was spent on the Tiree and Ross of Mull properties by the Duke of Argyll on famine support together with other road and agricultural improvements. Expenditure on this scale helped to maintain the people, but, to the critics, the continuance of the crisis into its third and fourth years, despite such levels of funding, seemed to confirm that deployment of resources alone, however great they were, could not solve a problem now deemed to be chronic and deeply entrenched in the very fabric and values of Highland society.
The decision of the Central Board to give notice of the termination of its activities in 1850 finally concentrated minds. For the old and infirm, the only alternative was the Poor Law, which, of course, meant a considerable hike in the costs to local ratepayers. Ominously, numbers on the local poor rolls did rise dramatically from the early months of 1850. Then, an even more worrying scenario began to emerge. It was rumoured that, with the winding up of the operations of the Central Board, the government was contemplating the introduction of ‘an able-bodied poor law’ to combat the threat of starvation and the continued serious destitution in the Highlands. Such a decision would have given all those suffering from destitution the legal right to claim relief. One observer alleged that such measures ‘were being talked of in high quarters as a remedy for the grievances’ of the Highlands.7 If implemented, a drastic increase in poor rates would have had a serious impact on the financial position of some proprietors. Strategies on several estates now started to move away from containment of the crisis to systematic dispersal of the people through mass eviction and forced emigration. Contemporaries argued that ‘the terror of the poor rates’ and ‘the retribution of the poor’ were the fundamental reasons for the harsh measures which would now have to be implemented.8 From his vantage point in Whitehall, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who still continued to maintain a keen interest in Highland affairs, agreed that the possibility of a sharp rise in the poor rates ‘would give a motive for eviction stronger than any which has yet operated’.9
It did not help that in these shifting political circumstances the price of black cattle, the main source of income for crofters, fell on average by more than 50 per cent between 1846 and 1852. The spiralling increases in tenant arrears could not be halted or reversed in such market conditions. Ironically, during the same period prices for both Cheviot and Blackface sheep, which had fluctuated earlier, now recovered and rose on an upward curve from the later 1840s until the early 1860s. Market forces were therefore strongly dictating investment in sheep walks and, with it, policies of clearance of small tenants and cottars, as the most secure route back to financial stability.
Another factor was likely to have a key influence on the unfolding trauma afflicting the people. Some large Highland estates which were insolvent but not yet sold off were managed by trustees for creditors of the owner. They included the lands of Walter Frederick Campbell, proprietor of most of Islay; Norman MacLeod of MacLeod and Lord Macdonald in Skye and North Uist; Sir James Riddell (Ardnamurchan); Macdonnel of Glengarry (Knoydart); and Maclaine of Lochbuie (Mull), among others. Administration of lands under trust was much more rigorous in law than where a solvent proprietor had personal freedom of action. When a voluntary trust was established, the trustee, normally an Edinburgh accountant or lawyer, possessed all powers of decision making and the owners had to relinquish control over the entire estate. In law, the single responsibility of the trustee was to make funds available to begin repayment of creditors, organize the property to make possible its sale in whole or in part to pay debts, and maintain the revenue stream at a sufficient level to cover public burdens, interest payments and the costs of management. In addition, when an estate was managed under a judicial trust, the trustee was exempted from any law requiring the use of estate revenues for the relief of the poor.
Not surprisingly, therefore, most trustees found it difficult to avoid the removal of crofters and cottars as the conversion of lands to profitable sheep farming was the surest and quickest method of maximizing income. As one contemporary newspaper put it: ‘When the lands are heavily mortgaged, the obvious though harsh resource is dispossessing the small tenants, to make room for a better class able to pay rent. This task generally devolves on south country managers or trustees, who look only to money returns, and who cannot sympathize with the peculiar situations and feelings of the Highland population.’10 A similar comment came from Professor John Stuart Blackie, an influential advocate of the rights of the Gael, some years later: ‘A trustee on a bankrupt’s estate … cannot afford to be generous: women may weep and widows may starve; the trustee must alone attend to the interest of the creditors.’11 Significantly, historians have noted that some of the most heartless evictions of these years, like those in North Uist and Knoydart, took place on lands managed by trustees.
In the gathering storm, a deep conflict of values and ideologies surfaced and became as relevant as economics and law to the final outcome for the people. Lowland attitudes to the Highlands in the Victorian era were profoundly ambivalent and varied in tone and emphasis over time. On the one hand, by the 1840s, the development of romantic Highlandism had made the region a fashionable tourist destination for the élites of British society. Also, the Highlands had become famed as the kindergarten of the kilted regiments which had brought glory to Scotland and helped increase the standing of the nation within the Union and Empire. But there was also a darker side to Lowland perceptions which became increasingly influential. One of the first works arguing for the intrinsic inferiority of the Celtic race was John Pinkerton’s Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, published many years before in 1787. He scorned the Celtic peoples as the aborigines of Europe who were being inevitably displaced by superior Anglo-Saxon Teutonic peoples. The Celts were therefore in mass retreat to the very fringes of European civilization in Ireland and northern Scotland. Pinkerton considered that the expected final disappearance of the Celtic races was evidenced by the nature of their poetry and song, which was ‘wholly melancholic’ as might be expected of ‘a weak and dispirited people’. The culture of Lowland Scotland by contrast was ‘replete with that warm alacrity of mind, cheerful courage and quick wisdom which attend superior talents’.12 The correspondence of Patrick Sellar, the notorious land manager of the Duke of Sutherland and afterwards a sheep farmer, suggests that his attitude may have been influenced by the writings of the Pinkerton genre. He too was wont to describe the Gaels as ‘aborigines’.
Pinkerton’s analysis was founded on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment belief that different races developed over time at different stages. The new science of anthropology was also interested in the classification of race and the ways in which the Enlightenment idea of man as the product of his environment could best be understood. Even if the views of Pinkerton and his ilk were shared by only a small intellectual minority in the eighteenth century, they still helped to lay one of the key foundations for the later flourishing of racist thought, particularly the assumption that the Celt was unambiguously inferior to the Anglo-Saxon. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century in Scotland, this distinction came to be seen by some as the mark of a profound racial division between the Highlands and the Lowlands.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, race became an even more popular part of medical and scientific research. George Combe’s The Constitution of Man (1828) was one of the bestsellers of the age and was followed by Robert Knox’s ‘mono-maniacally racialist and virulently anti-Celticist volume’, The Races of Men (1850). Knox, one of Edinburgh’s leading medical teachers and anatomists, had moved south to London in the wake of his notorious connection to the Burke and Hare murders in the capital in 1828. The Teutonic–Celtic distinction was becoming further refined, the former associated with industriousness, a strong work ethic, ambition and enterprise, the latter with indolence, sloth and dependency. The remarkable advances which had been made in commerce, industry and agriculture were surely proof positive of the strong and energetic racial attributes of the Lowland population. On the other hand, the economic failures of the Highlands should be primarily explained in terms of Celtic inadequacy.
The famine crisis made these views even more influential. The two most important Scottish newspapers of the time, the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, began to give their support, as did the main Highland journal, the Inverness Courier, an organ which was traditionally sympathetic to landlordism. In their columns the new orthodoxy of the famine experience from 1847–8 onwards was reiterated time and again, and often in the most vitriolic terms. The Gael was by nature indolent, and his innate laziness had been fortified by the liberal distribution of charity from the pockets of hardworking Lowlanders. The failure of the Highland economy to recover despite such massive dispensation of aid was therefore absolute confirmation of the racial inferiority of the population of the region.
Coincidentally, too, the 1840s were, in the view of one historian, ‘a watershed in the surging growth of Anglo-Saxonism’, as ideas of Teutonic greatness developed by comparative philologists were combined with notions of Caucasian superiority in the work of those interested in the science of man.13 In Scotland these perspectives were often analysed in territorial and ethnic terms. The London Times despatched a special commissioner to the north to investigate why Britain, a country so pre-eminent and advanced, could possibly contain within its borders an area of such profound poverty and threatened starvation. His explanation was also couched in terms of racial differentiation. The journalist was very keen to stress that not all of the north of Scotland was afflicted by the disease of moral inadequacy. In parts of the region, ‘the Danish or Norwegian race’ of Aberdeen, Caithness, Shetland and Orkney was thriving because they were accustomed to hard work in a challenging climate and terrain. In a physical sense, they could also be clearly identified by their fair hair and blue eyes. Despite the bleak and inhospitable environment in which they lived, there was no famine in these areas. By contrast, in the neighbouring county of Sutherland, the land of the Celt, poverty was endemic, the turf huts were filthy and filled with smoke, and the failure of the potatoes was catastrophic. The inference was clear. The famine was not the result of biology or economics. Fundamentally, it came about because of racial differences of character, values and attitudes.
What had emerged therefore by 1848/9 were irreconcilable differences between the traditional values of the people and the prevailing ideologies of much contemporary capitalism, improvement and Victorian social morality. Those who subscribed to them seemed to have little comprehension of the Highland labour cycle which meant great effort in spring, summer and autumn but much less work during the winter months. These seasonal rhythms were intrinsic to a pastoral economy, subsistence agriculture and the climatic challenges of daily life in the western Highlands and Islands. But to many outside they conflicted with the Victorian belief in the moral and material value of regular and disciplined toil. Also offensive to this mentality was the traditionalist expectation of the Celt that his social superiors had the responsibility to offer support in times of need. It was a conflict of two world views but in which only those who were committed to the virtues of self-help, independence and initiative had the monopoly of power and authority. For, unlike the pattern in Lowland rural society, where rulers and ruled shared broadly similar sets of social and cultural expectations, the Highland experience seems more akin to one of colonial dominion imposed on the region by outside influences:
Colonialism is a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported majority) and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonised people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonised population, the colonisers are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to rule.14
Of course, there is no exact fit between this definition and the course of nineteenth-century Highland history. The Gaels were not being dominated by a foreign power. But there are several aspects of their experience which suggest the impact of internal colonialism on Gaeldom. By the early Victorian era most estates were being sold off to affluent southerners, the élite of big farmers was mainly recruited from outside the Highlands and the ideology of those in authority over the people, whether they were natives from Gaeldom or elsewhere, was shaped by an ethos of market capitalism ultimately derived from the Lowland and wider British experience. Some thinkers in the Lowland citadels of learning during the Scottish Enlightenment had also posited a stage theory of development by arguing that humans evolved from barbarity to eventual civility over different phases of time. This concept did not automatically lead to the racialized differentiation of Celts and Anglo-Saxons but did provide a foundation for Victorian intellectuals to do so in later years.
Apart from landowners, their factors, and the Lowland accountants and lawyers who became trustees of insolvent estates, the key players in the unfolding scenario were two public officials, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir John McNeil. Both had had a major influence on the policies of the Central Board and even when its operations ceased in 1850 maintained a strong interest in Highland affairs. It was McNeil’s Report to the Board of Supervision in Scotland, published in 1851, which finally and authoritatively discredited charitable relief as a solution to the Highland problem and presented a powerful case for large-scale emigration of the ‘surplus’ population as the only possible way forward. The Report led to the passage of the Emigration Advances Act of 1851, which provided loans at low interest to those proprietors willing to ‘encourage’ emigration from their estates. This legislation can be seen as a catalytic factor triggering a major increase in clearance and ‘compulsory’ emigration. Both McNeil and Trevelyan became deeply involved in the foundation and then the management of the Highland and Island Emigration Society, which supported an exodus of nearly 5,000 people to Australia between 1851 and 1856. Trevelyan was the chairman and the principal influence on the Society, while McNeil was his trusted lieutenant.
By 1850, Trevelyan himself had become convinced that mass emigration, including, if warranted, the use of coercion, was the only corrective for the deep-seated social ills of the Highlands. The failures of charity and relief had already inflicted moral damage on the population: ‘The only immediate remedy for the present state of things is Emigration, and the people will never emigrate while they are supported at home at other people’s expense. This mistaken humanity has converted the people … from the clergy downwards into a Mendicant Community.’15 He proposed instead a grandiose programme to ‘emigrate’ 30,000–40,000 of the people of the western Highlands and Islands. ‘A national effort’ would be necessary in order to rid the land of ‘the surviving Irish and Scotch Celts’. The exodus might then allow for the settlement of racially superior peoples of Teutonic stock in the districts from which the Gaels had been removed. Trevelyan welcomed ‘the prospects of flights of Germans settling here in increasing number – an orderly, moral, industrious and frugal people, less foreign to us than the Irish or Scotch Celt, a congenial element which will readily assimilate with our body politic’.16 The Scotsman was in full agreement with the diagnosis that expulsion was now the only recourse: ‘Collective emigration is, therefore, the removal of a diseased and damaged part of our population. It is a relief to the rest of the population to be rid of this part.’17
Over the two decades from 1841 to 1861 many west Highland parishes experienced an unprecedented fall in population, primarily caused by large-scale emigration. Uig in Lewis lost almost a half of its total population, the island of Jura nearly a third, several parishes in Skye a quarter or more, and Barra a third. In the whole of the region covering the west coast north of Ardnamurchan and the Inner and Outer Hebrides, the total population decline averaged around 30 per cent. It was by far the greatest volume of emigration in such a short period, not only in the nineteenth-century Highlands, but in the modern history of Scottish Gaeldom. Over 10,000 emigrants were ‘assisted’ to move to Canada, mainly from four great landed estates, those of the Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland, John Gordon of Cluny and Sir James Matheson. A further 5,000 left for Australia under the auspices of the Highland and Island Emigration Society. But these are the emigrants who can be accounted for because they were supported by landlords or charities and so feature in contemporary documentation. The trails of the many who moved overseas by other means have left little trace in the historical record and remain anonymous within the overall statistical evidence. We do know, however, that the exodus of this period was principally from the Hebrides, and especially from the islands which had suffered most during the potato famine, particularly Lewis, North Uist, South Uist, Barra, Tiree, Mull and Skye.
But the famine clearances were not exclusive to those locations. Research has confirmed they took place in twenty-two Highland parishes with a population in all of nearly 77,000. Some of them were on the western mainland and the Inner Hebrides. For example, between 1847 and 1851 the Lowland lawyer F. W. Clark, the new proprietor of the island of Ulva, off Mull, cut the population back from 500 to 150 souls through a systematic process of eviction. At Knoydart, in western mainland Inverness-shire, a series of particularly brutal removals reduced the numbers on the estate from 600 to little more than seventy over a five-year period.
Coercion was employed widely and systematically. The officials of the estates reckoned that it was the poorest who were most reluctant to move, even though they were in the most desperate circumstances of all. The mechanism employed to ensure that they went came to be described as ‘compulsory emigration’. Families were offered the bleak choice between outright eviction or removal together with assistance to take ship across the Atlantic with costs of passage covered by proprietors. As the Chamberlain for the Matheson estate, in Lewis, put it in April 1851: ‘none could be called to emigrate and they need not go unless they please but all who were two years and upwards in arrears would be deprived of their land at Whitsunday … the proprietor can do with his land as he pleases’.18 Thirty years later a Church of Scotland minister from Lewis recalled:
Some people say it was voluntary. But there was a great deal of forcing and these people were sent very much against their will. That is very well known and people present know that perfectly well. Of course, they were not taken in hand by the police and all that, but they were in arrears and had to go, and remonstrated against going.19
The Chamberlain, John Munro Mackenzie, and his sub-factors had carried out a thorough examination of the condition and prospects for each tenant in all the Lewis crofting townships. The exercise identified around 2,500 men, women and children designated for emigration. However, of the first 1,512 selected, only forty-five were willing to take up the estate’s offer of support for the voyage to Canada. But by 1855 Mackenzie had virtually reached his target of 2,500 men women and children through a combination of threats of eviction, confiscation of cattle stocks from those in rent arrears and the suspension of famine relief.
So it was that a huge increase in clearance throughout the region became linked with a dramatic expansion of emigration. In early 1848, William Skene, Secretary of the Edinburgh Section of the Central Board, had predicted that the termination of relief operation proposed for 1850 would immediately cause ‘a very great and very extensive “Highland Clearing” ’.20 He was soon to be proven correct. Of the Summonses or Writs of Removal granted at Tobermory Sheriff Court on Mull, a mere handful were awarded to proprietors in 1846 and 1847. But over 81 per cent of those issued between 1846 and 1852 were granted between 1848 and 1852. This was the typical pattern elsewhere. The processes of coercion reached unprecedented levels as the intensity and scale of clearance became evident. Between 1848 and 1851, Sir James Matheson in Lewis obtained no fewer than 1,367 summonses of removal against his tenants. In some districts in Skye it was said that eviction had become so widespread that men feared to leave their families to go south to work for the season. The highly experienced government official, lugubriously named Sir Edward Pine Coffin, who had experience of famine relief in Mexico and Ireland as well as Highland Scotland, was so alarmed that he expressed himself in unusually colourful prose. Coffin condemned the landed classes for seeking to bring about ‘the extermination of the population’ and asserted that eviction was now so rampant it would lead to ‘the unsettling of the foundations of the social system’ and so ‘the enforced depopulation of the Highlands’.21
According to contemporary reports and evidence later given to the Napier Commission in the 1880s, some of the most brutal ‘compulsory emigrations’ took place on the island estates of John Gordon of Cluny in Barra, Benbecula and South Uist. Gordon, of Cluny Castle in Aberdeenshire, reputed to be the wealthiest commoner in Scotland at the time, had bought the properties from the insolvent hereditary owners, the MacNeills of Barra. He was a former military officer, but his wealth came from the rich farming lands of the north-east and six slave plantations in the Caribbean which he had inherited from his father and an uncle. Between 1848 and 1851 the Gordon estates shipped off almost 3,000 destitute tenant and cottar families across the Atlantic to the port of Quebec. It was alleged that those who resisted were forced on to the emigrant vessels. Their very poor and weak condition on arrival was condemned and reported back to London in angry prose by immigration officials.
Three key sources provide insights into how the managers of Highland estates went about the business of removal and compulsory emigration. The first is the report by Thomas Goldie Dickson, a trustee of the Ardnamurchan Estate of Sir James Riddell, written in 1852; secondly, the diary of John Munro Mackenzie, for 1851; and, thirdly, the correspondence of John Campbell of Ardmore, Chamberlain of the Duke of Argyll’s lands in Tiree and the Ross of Mull.22
A striking feature in all three cases was the careful investigations carried out of the lives and personal circumstances of the people before any action was taken. The economic conditions of each tenant and his capacity to pay rent were of paramount concern but they were by no means the only evidence to be scrutinized before decisions on which families to evict were made. Character, age and health were among the other key matters which were given considerable weight. Each household was visited and detailed enumerations were collected. On the basis of these facts, the futures of whole families and communities were decided. The poorest were always the main targets. The Duke of Argyll put the issue in plain terms in a note to his Chamberlain in spring, 1851: ‘I wish to send out those whom we would be obliged to feed if they stayed at home – to get rid of that class is the object’23 (underlined in source). He had earlier issued John Campbell with instructions to eradicate and ‘emigrate’ crofters paying below £10 rental as well as all cottar families on the Mull lands. On Lewis a special feature of the clearance programme was the emptying of those townships formerly involved in the now-redundant kelp manufacture and, at the same time, the building up of other communities on the island which were committed to the more profitable fishing economy.
But decisions were not simply based on disinterested economic calculation. Ideologies, values and attitudes were also part of the equation. Some Lowland trustees, lawyers and accountants, in particular, came north with a set of social and moral prejudices about the racial inferiority of the Gael which undoubtedly influenced their thinking on who should go and who might be allowed to stay. One of the leading accountants of the day, George Auldjo Jamieson, in an address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, had noted the contrast between the Saxon race of the Lowlands, which he lauded as the land of independence and progress, as opposed to the Gaelic Highlands, inhabited by a Celtic race corrupted by dependence on charity and backwardness. It was also significant that in 1851 Sir James Matheson advised the Canadian immigration authorities in Quebec in advance of the arrival of the first shiploads of people from his estate that they should be dispersed rather than kept together in the same communities. He contended that would be ‘the best means of eradicating those habits of indolence and inertness to which their impoverished condition must in some measure be attributed’.24
These views coloured the decision-making processes to a considerable extent. Indeed, some estate managers come across in the sources as rigorous guardians of Victorian morality rather than as impartial administrators. While the ‘respectable poor’ might be protected and saved from removal, others were less fortunate. In April 1848, for instance, John Campbell issued ‘a goodly number’ of ‘removing summonses’. Some were for rent arrears but others were for such offences as ‘selling whisky’, ‘unruly conduct’, ‘extreme laziness and bad conduct’. ‘Bad characters’ were also likely to suffer eviction.25 Thomas Goldie Dickson also made life-changing decisions for the people of the Ardnamurchan estate on grounds which were far removed from economic criteria alone.26 Dugald McDonald, the blacksmith at Sunart, had few rent arrears but ‘was of intemperate habits’ and so ‘must be removed and another smith procured’. Another unfortunate was James McMaster, who not only had substantial rent arrears but ‘was living with a Woman not his wife’. Even more extraordinarily, Duncan Henderson of Kilmory was described as ‘a clever man, a little too much so’. The decision was therefore that he ‘must be sequestrated for safety’. Hugh McPherson ‘does nothing all winter … An ill-dressed and evidently lazy fellow.’ In this and other estates, managers had total power over the lives of crofters, who held land on annual tenure, and cottars, who had no legal rights to land at all. Several used this authority to impose the virtues of self-help, the work ethic and ‘respectability’ on a population deemed to be inferior in all these respects. Also striking was the callousness of the decisions; the very old, the sick and even the dying were not exempt from the programme of removals.
For a people already brought low by years of failing crops this must have seemed like a reign of terror and, not surprisingly, long after these events their infamy lived on among the emigrant communities overseas. The following satirical poem, suffused with anger, was penned by Eugene Ross (or Rose), a native of Ardtun in the Ross of Mull, to mark the death of the aforesaid John Campbell of Ardmore, known widely as the ‘Factor Mhòir’, the Big Factor, because of his height. The ‘Big Angus’ referred to in the text was Angus McVicar, Campbell’s sub-factor. Both were natives of the island of Islay.
‘Cumha a’ Bhailldh Mhoir’
Uisdean Ros
Tha sgeul an duthaic, s’ tha sin sunndach ga
Gu bheil am Baillidh ‘na shineadh, ’s gun trid air ach leine
‘S e gun chomas na bruidhneadh, gun sgriobhadh, gun leughadh
‘S gu bheil cul-taice nan Ileach ‘na shineadh ‘s chan eirich
‘S nuair theid iaddon bhata ni sinn gair a bhios eibhinn
‘S nuair chruinnicheas sinn comhla bidh sin nag ol air a cheile
Uisge-beatha math Gaidhealach, fion laidir is seudar;
‘Scha bhi sinn tuileadh fo churam on a sgiursadh ‘a bheist ud
Gum bi a’ Factor air thoiseach san t-sloc sa bheil Satan,
‘S Aonghas Mor as a dhearahaidh, ‘s lasair theine ri mhasan,
Leis na rinn thu de ainneart air mnathan ‘s paisdean,
‘S an sluagh bha san duthaic rinn sgiursadh far saile
S’ nuair a chulaig iad an Canada gun do chaidl a’ bheist ud,
Chaidh an tein-eibhinn fhadadh is chaidh bratach ri gugan:
‘S ann an sin a bha lan aighear, s’ iad a’ tachairt ri cheile,
S’ chaidh iad a bha lan aighear, s’ thug iad cliu gun do dh’eug thu.
‘Lament for Factor Mòr’
Eugene Ross
There is news in the land that we rejoice to hear –
that the Factor is laid out without a stitch on him but a shroud,
without the ability to speak and unable to read or write;
the champion of the Islay folk is laid low, and will never rise again.
When they go to the boat we will laugh with glee,
and when we gather together, we will drink toasts to one another
with a good Highland whisky, with strong wine and cider,
and we will not be worried any longer, since that beast has been vanquished.
The Factor will have the pre-eminence in Satan’s pit,
and Big Angus will be right behind him, with a flame of fire up his buttocks,
because of all the oppression that you inflicted on women and children,
and the people of the country that you drove mercilessly overseas.
When they heard in Canada that that beast had expired,
bonfires were lit and banners were attached to branches;
people were cock-a-hoop with joy, as they met one another,
and they all got down on their knees and praised God that you had died.27
The micro-history of John Campbell’s evictions on the Ross of Mull and the island of Tiree provide some revealing insights on how they were conducted and the response of the people to them. Even before the potatoes failed in 1846, the 8th Duke of Argyll and his managers had determined by 1840 to carry out large-scale removals on the Ross and Tiree of crofters and cottars and replace them with medium-sized mixed farms and extensive sheep runs which would be mainly rented by Islay kinsmen and associates of his factor, John Campbell. It was argued that this strategy would finally provide some economic stability to districts over-populated by impoverished and destitute families. In the Ross the better land lay to the south and this was where over 60 per cent of the people lived at the census of 1841. By that year the population of the Ross had risen to 2,500, more than half of whom were cottars paying no rental or only minimal amounts. The removals were to be targeted at them in particular and the settlements of the richer land of the southern Ross in general. There were ten townships in that area with 167 households and a total population of 928 in 1841. By 1861 three had been left virtually untouched and the remaining seven cleared in whole or in part. The number of households fell to ninety-seven and the population of South Ross to 391, less than half that of 1841.
The first to be cleared was Shiaba, ‘nan sia ba’ (‘of the six cows’), in the far south-east corner of the Ross. There had been a township there since early medieval times. Shiaba had some of the best land in the district and so paid an above-average rental. As well as houses, byres and stackyards, this substantial settlement boasted kailyards, stone enclosures, a schoolhouse, shop, fishermen’s huts and two water mills. The remains of a small medieval chapel were within walking distance. None of the twelve main tenants were in arrears and for many years had paid their rents on time. Notices of eviction were served on them in 1845, before the onset of the potato disease, and again a second time in 1847 from the Factor Mor demanding their immediate removal. The news sent tremors of alarm throughout the Ross as Shiaba was the most prosperous township in the district, with much arable land for the cultivation of oats as well as potatoes. It even paid some of the in-kind rental in coal. More impoverished settlements now looked to their own fate in the future with dread.
On 1 June 1847 an appeal signed by seven of the tenants was sent to the Duke of Argyll together with a letter from Shiaba’s oldest inhabitant, aged nearly 100, Neil MacDonald, who signed himself ‘ex-soldier’:
… having paid rent to your grace’s ancestors for upwards of sixty years I beg leave to send prefixed a petition by myself and the other tenants in Shiaba. Trusting that your Grace will give us a favourable reply to it’s [sic] prayers as it would be a great hardship and quite unprecedented to remove a man of my age, who, as natural to suppose, is drawing close to the house appointed for all living. Trusting that your Grace will order an answer soon.28
The petition itself read:
Unto His Grace The Duke of Argyll
The Petition of the undersigned tenants in Shiaba, Ross of Mull
Humbly showeth
That the petitioners and their forefathers had been tenants in Shiaba about sixty years and in other estates in the Ross since time immemorial.
That the petitioners were lately warned to flit [leave] and remove from their respective possessions, although they were not in arrears of rent, but, on the contrary, have paid the same regularly, though they had large families to support – numbering, including, cottars, upwards of one hundred persons neither of whom received any aid or were a burden on the parish.
That the whole farm has lately been let in one lot to one individual who is not native of the Ross and neither he, nor any of his ancestors, ever possessed any lands under your Grace’s noble ancestors.
That a few days ago the incoming tenant came with shepherds and men to value the sheep belonging to the petitioners without giving them previous intimation, but as he had not the money and could not find a cautioner for the payment of the price, and is under good character – all the surrounding tenants and others being afraid of him – they would not deliver the stock.
May it, therefore, please your Grace to take our petitioners’ case into consideration and give instructions whether they are to be removed under the circumstances above stated – and if so they trust that they will be accommodated with land on other parts of the estate. And your Grace’s petitioners beg to pray accordingly.
Writer – Neil MacDonald ex-soldier
Signatories: Alexander MacGillvary, Archie MacGillvary, Donald McKinnon, John Campbell, John McKinnon, Allan McDougall, Duncan McCormick29
A tone of deference and even submissiveness runs through the petition but also articulated is the age-old claim of the people to the land because of past service to the ducal family and long residence on the township and the estate. There is no evidence that the Duke ever replied. The evictions went ahead. Some families who had decided to go to Canada were taken off by ship from the Traig Bhan, the beach below Shiaba. Others were moved into townships on the poorer north of the Ross and an unknown number left for Glasgow. A cattle dealer from Factor Mor’s home island of Islay became sole tenant of the virtually deserted lands of Shiaba.
On the neighbouring island of Tiree, the social crisis triggered by the failure of the potatoes was if anything more acute than in the Ross of Mull. Population had been rising at an accelerating rate there: c.1750, 1,509; 1801, 2,776; 1841, 4,900. These were increases of 84 per cent from 1750 to 1801 and a further 79 per cent between 1801 and 1841. They were unsustainable even if the famine had not taken place, especially with the collapse or stagnation of the by-employments of kelp burning and fishing. The root cause of the teeming numbers had been the reckless subdivision of land into crofts which were then fragmented again by the expansion of the cottar class, who by 1841 comprised over a third of all the inhabitants on the island. The packing in of small tenants to provide labour for kelping was a principal factor. Another had been the long-term effect of soldier recruitment during the Napoleonic Wars: ‘the minute subdivision of the land was much increased by the family of Argyll having raised three or four regiments for government during the last war and residences were afforded to those soldiers on their return’.30 By the 1840s it was said that the people of Tiree had become ‘a vast semi-pauper population’.31 The 8th Duke of Argyll was candid enough to blame the policies or lack of them by his predecessors since the late eighteenth century for the social evils which threatened a human calamity after 1846:
I thought it my duty to remember that the improvidence of their fathers [of the inhabitants] had been at least seconded, left unchecked by any active measures, or by the enforcement of any rules of my own predecessors who had been in possession of the estate.
I regarded my self, therefore, as representing those who had some share in the responsibility, although that responsibility was one of omission and not of commission.32
When John Campbell, the Duke’s chamberlain, arrived in Tiree in January 1847 the impact of the potato blight on the people was instantly apparent. The inhabitants were in ‘a state of absolute starvation’, a judgement later confirmed by relief officials who considered the island to be one of the most distressed in the Hebrides.33 In that year alone the estate had to spend £5,403 on famine relief and employment projects to keep the people alive. Perhaps predictably, as circumstances improved, the Duke of Argyll embarked on a large-scale scheme of emigration, especially of the poorest class. At the considerable additional cost of £3.80 per person, the estate supported the emigration of 1,354 men, women and children, principally to Canada, between 1847 and 1851. Many years later, the Duke considered the investment worthwhile. The ‘old pauperized class’ had been eradicated: ‘the detritus of the old subdivided cottars and subtenants … also in great measure the remains of the old kelp burning population’.34 Strict controls over any future subdivision were imposed and, as in the Ross of Mull, crofts were consolidated into larger farms. Controversy remains on the extent of coercion employed to manage the exodus. Certainly many wanted to leave and petitioned the estate for help to do so. But not everyone did. There is abundant evidence in John Campbell’s correspondence of numerous eviction notices being delivered, confiscation of cattle stocks from those in arrears and the cutting back on famine relief to force people out.
Landlords, government officials and managers of estates had, of course, a quite different perspective from that of the small tenants and cottars who were ‘emigrated’ to Canada and Australia. For the élites emigration by coercion was an unfortunate but necessary evil. From their perspective, by removing the most distressed and vulnerable people from the Western Isles, a human catastrophe had been avoided. The potato crisis was not over by the early 1850s, but relief from the Lowlands had come to an end and opposition to further charitable support had hardened. Most proprietors were also hostile to the expenditure of large sums on relief as the famine entered its fourth year and the future continued to look bleak. For them, the enforcement of mass emigration was much more acceptable than risking a major crisis of mortality on their estates and exposing themselves to bankruptcy and forced sale of their lands.
In large part it was the clearances of the later famine period that marked out the experience of the western Highlands and Islands as different from the history of dispossession in the rest of Scotland. These removals were unleashed against communities still suffering from the ravages of a major destitution crisis. They affected many on the Hebridean islands, were concentrated in both time and space and for the most part designed to drive out the poorest families and the ‘redundant population’. Several were enforced by draconian means with little concern for humanity or the welfare of the people. Racialist assumptions undeniably helped to fashion those responsible for the strategy of dispossession.
These evictions by their extreme and often callous nature were therefore unique in the history of the many clearances that had taken place over generations in the Scottish countryside since the seventeenth century. They left a deep mark and their memory endured, while most of those that had gone before were lost to history.