Mackenzie’s _History of the Highland Clearances_, with its thrilling
and almost incredible narratives of oppression and eviction, has
been for a long time out of print. In view of the current movement,
described by Mr. Asquith as an “organised campaign against the present
system of land tenure,” it has occurred to the holder of the copyright,
Mr. Eneas Mackay, publisher, Stirling, that, at the present juncture,
a re-issue might be expediently prepared. He recognised that the story
of the great upheaval which, early in the nineteenth century, took
place among the Highland crofters would be of undoubted interest and
utility to those who follow the efforts now put forth to settle the
land question in Scotland. At his request I readily undertook the task
of re-editing.
The circumstances, or points of view, having changed in no slight
measure since the first appearance of the work, I decided to subject
it to a pretty thorough revision--to excise a large mass of irrelevant
matter and to introduce several fresh articles. Donald Macleod’s
“Gloomy Memories” are omitted out of considerations for space,
and because it is proposed to reprint them shortly in a separate
form. There is included, for the first time, a vindication of the
Sutherland Clearances by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” and another by Mr. James Loch, principal factor on the
Sutherland Estates during the time the removals were carried out.
There are also given graphic and realistic word pictures of these
evictions by the Rev. Donald Sage. The general arrangement of the
book has been altered to the extent of grouping together the accounts
relating to each particular county, and descriptions are added of a
number of Clearances which were not dealt with in the first edition.
I have pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr. Ian Macpherson,
M.P., and Dr. J. H. Fullarton, London, for kindly looking over the
proofs.
Special and very sincere thanks are due to Mr. John Henderson,
secretary of the National Library Club, London, who manifested the
kindest and liveliest interest in the undertaking. Not only did he read
the proofs with scrupulous care, but he was ever ready to give advice
and offer suggestions when cases of doubt arose. To me, one of the most
pleasant memories connected with the labour of editing is the valuable
assistance always so promptly and cheerfully given by Mr. Henderson.
I greatly appreciate the courtesy shown by Messrs. Daniel Ross & Co.,
Ltd., publishers, Wick, in permitting extracts to be taken from Mr.
Sage’s _Memorabilia Domestica_.
Regarding the Publisher, I may be permitted to mention that he rendered
my task very easy by providing, sometimes at considerable trouble and
expense, all works of reference which I considered would be of service
in endeavouring to make this History thoroughly accurate and reliable.
_INTRODUCTION._
It is with great pleasure that I accede to the request that I should
write a short introduction to welcome this reprint of so interesting
and valuable a book as Mackenzie’s _Highland Clearances_. It has long
been out of print, which anyone who recalls its first appearance will
easily understand. It was written by a Highlander who commanded in
a great measure the esteem of Highlanders, and it collected for the
first time the sane and authenticated accounts of the experience of the
Highlanders in the great agrarian crisis of their history. It appealed
to the race as no book within recent years has done. The Highlander
loves his past and his native land with a passionate attachment, and
the story of the great wrongs of the days of the clearances is still
deeply embedded in his mind. Within the last year or two many accounts,
more or less imaginary, have appeared purporting to be true stories
of those terrible days in the north, and it is peculiarly appropriate
that, when once again men’s minds are centred on the great problem of
the land in this country as a whole, and specific attention has been
directed towards the Highlands, this reprint should now appear. We
are all, therefore, under deep obligations to the public spirit and
enterprize of the publishers and others who have been good enough to
secure in an accessible form a reliable account of the conditions and
events which at once intensified the acuteness of the land-hunger in
the Highlands and constituted the blackest page in Highland history.
Many evil deeds have been associated with the abuse of the monopoly
power of land ownership in this and other countries, but it is safe
to say that nowhere within the limits of those islands, or, indeed,
anywhere else at any time have blacker or more foul deeds been
committed in the sacred name of property than in the Highlands of
Scotland in those days. It has always been a matter of astonishment
that a brave race should ever have submitted to them. This becomes all
the more remarkable, too, when one remembers that during those very
years regiments raised in these very districts of the finest soldiers
who ever marched to the stirring strains of the bagpipes, were gaining
for the empire and for British arms the most noted achievements ever
won in the Napoleonic wars and in the colonies. It is true, of course,
and it is an eternal discredit, that many of these brave fellows came
back wounded and war-scarred to find, not that a grateful country had
taken care that the homes and the helpless ones they had left behind
were kept sacred and immune from the greed and ruthless savagery of
the landlord or his hirelings, but that their hearths and homes were
desecrated and destroyed, and every moral law of patriotism and honour
had been violated. “Their humble dwellings,” says Hugh Miller, “were
of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their
little fields from the waste; from time immemorial, far beyond the
reach of history, they had possessed their mountain holdings, they had
defended them so well of old that the soil was still virgin ground,
in which the invader had found only a grave; and their young men were
now in foreign lands fighting at the command of their chieftainess the
battles of their country, not in the character of hired soldiers, but
of men who regarded these very holdings as their stake in the quarrel.”
Well has my friend Mackenzie MacBride expressed it:--
“Ye remnant of the brave!
Who charge when the pipes are heard;
Don’t think, my lads, that you fight for your own,
’Tis but for the good of the land.
And when the fight is done
And you come back over the foam,
‘Well done,’ they say, ‘you are good and true,
But we cannot give you a home.
‘For the hill we want for the deer,
And the glen the birds enjoy,
And bad for the game is the smoke of the cot,
And the song of the crofter’s boy.’”
The silence with which men of that calibre met these hardships and
cruelty might well remain an enigma to one who does not know the
Highlands. They knew that for centuries their ancestors had tilled
those lands and lived free and untrammelled. By every moral law, if not
by the law of the land, they had a right to the soil which had been
defended with their own right arm and that of their ancestors. These
were the days when they were useful to the chief, who assumed some
indefinable right to the land. But the day came after the “Forty-Five”
when men were no longer assets to the chief. His territorial
jurisdiction was broken. He wanted money, not men, and the lonely
silences of the hills instead of merry laughter and prattle of children
singing graces by the wayside. And these men bore the change which
meant so much to them with patience. Why? The Highlands were permeated
then as now with a deep religious sense. They lent a willing ear to the
teachings of the ministers of the Gospel, who wielded the power of the
iron hand which left its deep impress on the social life and even the
literature of the Highlands. They regarded the minister as the stern
oracle of truth, and the strict interpreter of the meaning of the ways
of God to man. What happened was right. And a perusal of the pages that
are to follow will show what a mean use many of these ministers made
of the power which their faithful flock believed was vested in them.
These men were--with a noble exception or two--in reality the servile
tools of the “estate” whose powers they feared, and whose support they
received. In their own interests and in those of their earthly lord
and master, they assured the people that all their troubles were but
part of the punishment inflicted on them by Providence in the course
of working out their redemption! This attitude of the ministers had
another significance. In many parishes they were the only persons
who were educated enough to write, and so able to express the wrongs
which their people were called upon to endure. But their voices were
silent and their pens were idle, except, indeed, when they were used
to ennoble the character, the prestige, and the benevolence of the
evicting tyrant!
If they were thus comparatively passive in their “white-washing,” there
were others openly active. In Hugh Miller’s words. “Ever since the
planning of the fatal experience which ruined Sutherland, the noble
family through which it was originated and carried on, had betrayed
the utmost jealousy in having its real result made public. Volumes
of special pleading have been written on the subject. Pamphlets have
been published, laboured articles have been inserted in widely-spread
reviews--statistical accounts have been watched over with the utmost
surveillance. If the misrepresentations of the press could have altered
the matter of fact, famine would not now be gnawing the vitals of
Sutherland in a year a little less abundant than its predecessors, nor
would the dejected and oppressed people be feeding their discontent
amid present misery, with the recollections of a happier past. If a
singularly well-conditioned and wholesome district of country has
been converted into one wide ulcer of wretchedness and woe, it must
be confessed that the sore has been carefully bandaged up from the
public eye that if there has been little done for its cure, there has
at least been much done for its concealment.” And then he goes on to
say, “It has been said that the Gaelic language removed a district
more effectually from the influence of English opinion than an ocean
of three thousand miles, and that the British public know better what
is doing in New York than what is doing in Lewis or Skye.” And so the
House of Sutherland inveigles Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, fresh from
her literary triumphs in the American environment of “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin,” with no knowledge of the Gaelic language which “separated so
effectually the district in which it was spoken” from English public
opinion, but in which language alone grievances were likely to be
expressed, to write a grovelling apology. This she does, forsooth,
in “Sunny Memories,” when the hearts and the spirits of the people
outside the circle in which she was receiving well-merited, if short,
hospitality were broken! Readers of the “Clearances” will notice
how completely Donald M’Leod, whose name every lover of nobility of
character, courage, and justice will ever honour, demolishes her
insipid table-talk. An even worse type of white-washer was James Loch,
who is now put forward as an unbiassed and disinterested observer of
the gracious benevolence and marvellous generosity of the House of
Sutherland. It was not mentioned that he was the factor for the then
Duke!
The most notorious of all the evictions were the Sutherlandshire
ones, and though there are many accounts of them in this volume, the
gruesomeness of which has become a bye-word, they do not tell the
whole tale. Since this question was revived during these last few
months, I have had letters from descendants of the evicted from all
over the colonies with new and conclusive proofs of the recklessness
and severity which characterised them. A factor visited a township in
western Sutherland, and went towards the house of the great grandmother
of one correspondent. He met her as she was returning from milking the
cows carrying a wooden vessel of milk. Brutally he snatched it from
her, and to use his words, “drowned for ever the fire of her hearth
with it,” and then drove her and her children to search through great
privation for some foothold on rugged ground beside the western sea.
When this factor died, his body was carried through another township.
The sympathy of the people was but slight, for they remembered his
cruelty. An old woman expressed the general, but hitherto suppressed,
feeling of the community when she said, “Cha deach am maor rìamh troimh
na bhaile cho samhach sa chaidh e an duigh” (“The factor never went
through this township so peacefully as he went to-day”).
If, as Hugh Miller says, there has been no lack of professional
white-washers, there has equally been no lack of testimony, straight
and true, from the hearts of the people, in bitter lamentation over
the cruelty that befel the race at the hands of mercenary landlords.
This testimony does not come from one class nor from one county. I have
shown in another place how even Dr. Johnson, who loved neither the
Scots nor their traditions, found himself “full of the old Highland
spirit, and was dissatisfied at hearing of rack rents and emigration,”
and was compelled to remark, “A rapacious chief would make a wilderness
of his estate;” how unprejudiced writers like Mrs. Grant of Laggan
bemoaned the rapacity of those who drove away the descendants of men
whom their fathers led; and how bitterly a scholar like Professor
Blackie viewed the depopulated glens where once heroes lived and
fought. The bitterest note of all, as well as the truest, is sung by
the Gaelic bards. They were of the people, and lived among them. They
knew their feelings, none better, and it was their right to express
that feeling with truth and with fearlessness in the language of the
people. And I know of no bard in any county in the Highlands who has
not vigorously denounced in some way the cruelty to which his people
were arbitrarily subjected. It was a blow to them to find that chiefs
of the old school had departed, that a change--in Gaelic, change is
the best word for death--had taken place from the spirit of the chief
who said, “I would rather drink punch in the house of my people than
be enabled by their hardships to drink claret in my own.” Well might
a good Celt of a later day have written of the new type of so-called
chief:
“See that you kindly use them, O man
To whom God giveth
Stewardship over them in thy short span,
Not for thy pleasure;
Woe be to them who choose for a clan
Four-footed people.”
Take the Islay bard. He seeks to arouse our indignation because of
glens and hillsides reft of men to work and fight and of children who
might sing to Nature and her God. Clearly his patriotic soul is sorely
burdened: the cold iron that has entered into it has made his soul
terribly bitter. “Facit indignatio versus.” When he looks around and
thinks of the days that were, his spirit is that of blood and carnage.
He describes the hills that he loves with wonderful grace of diction;
he hears a song or two--shieling songs--of marvellous beauty, and
“shieling songs contain many soft, siren strains, which were believed
to have their source in fairyland,” for their airs came from the good
folk of the hills. But these things do not tempt him long; he is soon
back again to the point that was sorest of all to him--the desolate
glens and the hillsides “left to be garrisoned by the lonely shepherd.”
Some of the poets were sportsmen like Duncan M’Intyre. Their grievance
was always against the sheep, and the lowland shepherds, who desecrated
for filthy lucre the hills which were their birthright and who spoke an
alien tongue which frightened even the echoes!
Deer and sporting rights (after game laws were enacted) soon became
more profitable than sheep, and it is amusing to find controversialists
of to-day attempting to show that evictions never took place on account
of deer forests. It was not the fault of the landlords that they did
not. Evictions took place for the object that was at the moment most
profitable. The Napoleonic wars made sheep runs temporarily more
profitable; but the moment there was more profit to be obtained from
sport and deer forests, then deer forests were to a large extent
substituted for sheep runs. To-day there are over three million acres
in Northern Scotland alone devoted to these preserves; and in 1892
the Deer Forest Commission scheduled over one million seven hundred
thousand acres as being fit for small-holding purposes. The casual
reader must beware, and must notice that this vast number of acres
includes grazing lands also, otherwise critics who “avowedly represent
the landlord interests” may feel aggrieved. But it will also be
remembered that evictions primarily took place for grazing purposes;
and further, that a small holding in Scotland is not quite the same
as a small holding in England. In England it consists of a number
of acres which are under cultivation; in Scotland, I am referring,
of course, to the deer forest country, it consists of some acres of
cultivated land with very often a very large common outrun in moorland
and hills for the township. So that when the uninitiated see pictures
of deer forests that are said to be fit for small-holding purposes,
they will now understand and suppress a smile. If only men could
realise what can be produced out of what might appear to be the most
impossible places! It has been said that if you give a man the secure
possession of a rock, he will turn it into a garden, and one has only
got to visit the Highlands to see how a hard-working and industrious
peasantry have sought in this way with success to fight against the
ills with which they were confronted by an ungrateful landlordism.
One of the worst features of the “Clearances” was the method in which
they were perpetrated. Examples will be found in these pages of sick
people being carried out of their houses, and left on the wayside when
their houses were in flames, and the present locations of some of the
crofters are grim reminders of the extreme privations suffered by
the people who settled in them. Perched on the rocks and moorlands,
these people were driven from the inland valleys, and had to build
themselves shelters from the turf and stones of the hillside, and carve
out of barren land with enormous industry, and under the constant
menace of famine, the miserable patches of land which remain to-day
as evidence of their labours. The others were forced to emigrate, and
the sufferings of those who survived well-nigh baffle description.
The horrors of the small emigrant sailing ships of these days, and
particularly on these occasions when people were packed together
regardless of comfort and the decencies of life, and without sufficient
food, were equalled only by the terrible privations and struggle for
existence that awaited those who landed on the frozen lands of the
north of Canada, to be assailed by hostile Indians, the rigours of the
weather, and the desolation of an unfriendly country. It is altogether
a tale of barbarous action unequalled in the annals of agrarian crime.
And need I do more than add what one who will never be regarded
other than as a typical Tory, has written: “In too many instances
the Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of
population, but of the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed
by an unrelenting avarice, which will one day be found to have been
as shortsighted as it is selfish and unjust. Meantime, the Highlands
may become the fairy ground for romance and poetry, or the subject
of experiment for the professors of speculation, historical and
economical. But, if the hour of need should come, the pibroch may sound
through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered.”
These are the words of Sir Walter Scott.