The History of the Highland Clearances
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Title: The History of the Highland Clearances
Author: Alexander Mackenzie
Release date: February 21, 2016 [eBook #51271]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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THE HISTORY OF THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES
by
ALEXANDER MACKENZIE, F.S.A., Scot.
With a New Introduction by Ian Macpherson, M.P.
“Truth is stranger than fiction.”
P. J. O’Callaghan,
132-134 West Nile Street, Glasgow.
First Edition 1883.
Second Edition, altered and revised 1914.
CONTENTS.
EDITOR’S PREFACE, 7
INTRODUCTION, 9
SUTHERLAND--
Alexander Mackenzie on the Clearances, 19
The Rev. Donald Sage on the Sutherland Clearances, 32
General Stewart of Garth on the Sutherland Clearances, 41
Hugh Miller on the Sutherland Clearances, 52
Mr. James Loch on Sutherland Improvements, 69
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on the Sutherland Clearances, 78
Reply to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe by Donald Macleod, 88
TRIAL OF PATRICK SELLAR, 115
ROSS-SHIRE--
Glencalvie, 128
The Eviction of the Rosses, 134
Kintail, 143
Coigeach, 144
Strathconon, 144
The Black Isle, 146
The Island of Lewis, 147
Mr. Alexander Mackenzie on the Leckmelm Evictions, 149
Lochcarron, 161
The 78th Highlanders, 167
The Rev. Dr. John Kennedy on the Ross-shire Clearances, 169
INVERNESS-SHIRE--
Glengarry, 170
Strathglass, 187
Guisachan, 193
Glenelg, 194
Glendesseray and Locharkaig, 196
THE HEBRIDES--
North Uist, 198
Boreraig and Suisinish, Isle of Skye, 202
A Contrast, 212
South Uist and Barra, 213
The Island of Rum, 222
ARGYLLSHIRE--
The Island of Mull, 228
Ardnamurchan, 232
Morven, 235
Glenorchy, 237
BUTESHIRE--
Arran, 240
PERTHSHIRE--
Rannoch, 242
Breadalbane, 245
NOTABLE DICTA--
The Rev. Dr. Maclachlan, 247
A Highland Sheriff, 253
The Wizard of the North, 254
A Continental Historian, 254
Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, 255
A French Economist, 259
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, 263
Hardships Endured by First Emigrants, 264
An Evicting Agent, 271
An Octogenarian Gael, 274
STATISTICAL STATEMENT--
Showing the Population in 1831, 1841, 1851, 1881, and
1911, of all Parishes in whole or in part in the Counties
of Perth, Argyll, Inverness, Ross and
Cromarty, Caithness, and Sutherland, 278-282
APPENDICES, 283
EDITOR’S PREFACE
TO SECOND EDITION.
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.
J. I. MACPHERSON.
_Highland Clearances._
_SUTHERLAND._
ALEXANDER MACKENZIE ON THE CLEARANCES.[1]
[1] Mackenzie’s Pamphlet, 1881.
To give a proper account of the Sutherland Clearances would take a
bulky volume. Indeed, a large tome of 354 pages has been written and
published in their defence by him who was mainly responsible for them,
called “An Account of the Sutherland Improvements,” by James Loch, at
that time Commissioner for the Marchioness of Stafford and heiress of
Sutherland. This was the first account I ever read of these so-called
improvements; and it was quite enough to convince me, and it will be
sufficient to convince anyone who knows anything of the country, that
the improvement of the people, by driving them in the most merciless
and cruel manner from the homes of their fathers, was carried out on a
huge scale and in the most inconsiderate and heartless manner by those
in charge of the Sutherland estates. But when one reads the other side,
Macleod’s “Gloomy Memories,” General Stewart of Garth’s “Sketches of
the Highlanders,” and other contemporary publications, one wonders
that such iniquities could ever have been permitted in any Christian
country, much more so in Great Britain, which has done so much for the
amelioration of subject races and the oppressed in every part of the
world, while her own brave sons have been persecuted, oppressed and
banished without compensation by greedy and cold-blooded proprietors,
who owed their position and their lands to the ancestors of the very
men they were now treating so cruelly.
The motives of the landlords, generally led by southern factors
worse than themselves, were, in most cases, pure self-interest,
and they pursued their policy of extermination with a recklessness
and remorselessness unparalleled anywhere else where the Gospel of
peace and charity was preached--except, perhaps, unhappy Ireland.
Generally, law and justice, religion and humanity, were either totally
disregarded, or, what was worse, in many cases converted into and
applied as instruments of oppression. Every conceivable means, short
of the musket and the sword, were used to drive the natives from
the land they loved, and to force them to exchange their crofts and
homes--brought originally into cultivation and built by themselves,
or by their forefathers--for wretched patches among the barren rocks
on the sea shore, and to depend, after losing their cattle and their
sheep, and after having their houses burnt about their ears or razed to
the ground, on the uncertain produce of the sea for subsistence, and
that in the case of a people, who, in many instances, and especially in
Sutherlandshire, were totally unacquainted with a seafaring life, and
quite unfitted to contend with its perils.
What was true generally of the Highlands, was in the county of
Sutherland carried to the greatest extreme. That unfortunate county,
according to an eye-witness, was made another Moscow. The inhabitants
were literally burnt out, and every contrivance and ingenious and
unrelenting cruelty was eagerly adopted for extirpating the race. Many
lives were sacrificed by famine and other hardships and privations;
hundreds, stripped of their all, emigrated to the Canadas and other
parts of America; great numbers, especially of the young and athletic,
sought employment in the Lowlands and in England, where, few of them
being skilled workmen, they were obliged--even farmers who had lived
in comparative affluence in their own country--to compete with common
labourers, in communities where their language and simple manners
rendered them objects of derision and ridicule. The aged and infirm,
the widows and orphans, with those of their families who could not
think of leaving them alone in their helplessness, and a number, whose
attachment to the soil which contained the ashes of their ancestors,
were induced to accept of the wretched allotments offered them on the
wild moors and barren rocks. The mild nature and religious training of
the Highlanders prevented a resort to that determined resistance and
revenge which has repeatedly set bounds to the rapacity of landlords
in Ireland. Their ignorance of the English language, and the want of
natural leaders, made it impossible for them to make their grievances
known to the outside world. They were, therefore, maltreated with
impunity. The ministers generally sided with the oppressing lairds, who
had the Church patronage at their disposal for themselves and for their
sons. The professed ministers of religion sanctioned the iniquity,
“the foulest deeds were glossed over, and all the evil which could
not be attributed to the natives themselves, such as severe seasons,
famines, and consequent disease, was by these pious gentlemen ascribed
to Providence, as a punishment for sin.”
The system of turning out the ancient inhabitants from their native
soil throughout the Highlands during the first half of the nineteenth
century has been carried into effect in the county of Sutherland
with greater severity and revolting cruelty than in any other part
of the Highlands, and that though the Countess-Marchioness and her
husband, the Marquis of Stafford, were by no means devoid of humanity,
however atrocious and devoid of human feeling were the acts carried
out in their name by heartless underlings, who represented the
ancient tenantry to their superiors as lazy and rebellious, though,
they maintained, everything was being done for their advantage and
improvement. How this was done will be seen in the sequel. South
countrymen were introduced and the land given to them for sheep farms
over the heads of the native tenantry. These strangers were made
justices of the peace and armed with all sorts of authority in the
county, and thus enabled to act in the most harsh and tyrannical
fashion, none making them afraid; while the oppressed natives were
placed completely at their mercy. They dare not even complain, for were
not their oppressors also the administrators of the law? The seventeen
parish ministers, with the single exception of the Rev. Mr. Sage, took
the side of the powers that were, exhorting the people to submit and to
stifle their cries of distress, telling them that all their sufferings
came from the hand of their Heavenly Father as a punishment for their
past transgressions. Most of these ministers have since rendered their
account, and let us hope they have been forgiven for such cruel and
blasphemous conduct. But one cannot help noting, to what horrid uses
these men in Sutherlandshire and elsewhere prostituted their sacred
office and high calling.
The Sutherland clearances were commenced in a comparatively mild way
in 1807, by the ejection of ninety families from Farr and Lairg.
These were provided for some fifteen or seventeen miles distant with
smaller lots, to which they were permitted to remove their cattle and
plenishing, leaving their crops unprotected, however, in the ground
from which they were evicted. They had to pull down their old houses,
remove the timber, and build new ones, during which period they had
in many cases to sleep under the open canopy of heaven. In the autumn
they carried away, with great difficulty, what remained of their crops,
but the fatigue incurred cost a few of them their lives, while others
contracted diseases which stuck to them during the remainder of their
lives, and shortened their days.
In 1809 several hundred were evicted from the parishes of Dornoch,
Rogart, Loth, Clyne, and Golspie, under circumstances of much greater
severity than those already described. Several were driven by various
means to leave the country altogether, and to those who could not be
induced to do so, patches of moor and bog were offered on Dornoch
Moor and Brora Links--quite unfit for cultivation. This process was
carried on annually until, in 1811, the land from which the people were
ejected was divided into large farms, and advertised as huge sheep
runs. The country was overrun with strangers who came to look at these
extensive tracts. Some of these gentlemen got up a cry that they were
afraid of their lives among the evicted tenantry. A trumped-up story
was manufactured that one of the interlopers was pursued by some of
the natives of Kildonan, and put in bodily fear. The military were
sent for from Fort George. The 21st Regiment was marched to Dunrobin
Castle, with artillery and cartloads of ammunition. A great farce was
performed; the people were sent for by the factors to the Castle at a
certain hour. They came peaceably, but the farce must be gone through,
the Riot Act was read; a few sheepish, innocent Highlanders were made
prisoners, but nothing could be laid to their charge, and they were
almost immediately set at liberty, while the soldiers were ordered back
to Fort George. The demonstration, however, had the desired effect in
cowing and frightening the people into the most absolute submission.
They became dismayed and broken-hearted, and quietly submitted to their
fate. The clergy all this time were assiduous in preaching that all the
misfortunes of the people were “fore-ordained of God, and denouncing
the vengeance of Heaven and eternal damnation on all those who would
presume to make the slightest resistance.” At the May term of 1812
large districts of these parishes were cleared in the most peaceable
manner, the poor creatures foolishly believing the false teaching
of their selfish and dishonest spiritual guides--save the mark! The
Earl of Selkirk, who went personally to the district, allured many
of the evicted people to emigrate to his estates on the Red River
in British North America, whither a whole ship-cargo of them went.
After a long and otherwise disastrous passage they found themselves
deceived and deserted by the Earl, left to their unhappy fate in an
inclement wilderness, without any protection from the hordes of Red
Indian savages by whom the district was infested, and who plundered
them of their all on their arrival and finally massacred them, save a
small remnant who managed to escape, and travelled, through immense
difficulties, across trackless forests to Upper Canada.
The notorious Mr. Sellar was at this time sub-factor, and in the
spring of 1814 he took a large portion of the parishes of Farr and
Kildonan into his own hands. In the month of March the old tenantry
received notices to quit at the ensuing May term, and a few days after
the summonses were served the greater portion of the heath pasture
was, by his orders, set on fire. By this cruel proceeding the cattle
belonging to the old tenantry were left without food during the spring,
and it was impossible to dispose of them at a fair price, the price
having fallen after the war; for Napoleon was now a prisoner in Elba,
and the demand for cattle became temporarily dull, and prices very
much reduced. To make matters worse, fodder was unusually scarce this
spring, and the poor people’s cattle depended for subsistence solely on
the spring grass which sprouts out among the heather, but which this
year had been burnt by the factor who would himself reap the benefit
when he came into possession later on.
In May the work of ejectment was again commenced, accompanied by
cruelties hitherto unknown even in the Highlands. Atrocities were
perpetrated which I cannot trust myself to describe in my own words. I
shall give what is much more valuable--a description by an eye-witness
in his own language. He says:--In former removals the tenants had been
allowed to carry away the timber of their old dwellings to erect houses
on their new allotments, but now a more summary mode was adopted by
setting fire to them. The able-bodied men were by this time away after
their cattle or otherwise engaged at a distance, so that the immediate
sufferers by the general house-burning that now commenced were the
aged and infirm, the women and children. As the lands were now in the
hands of the factor himself, and were to be occupied as sheep farms,
and as the people made no resistance, they expected, at least, some
indulgence in the way of permission to occupy their houses and other
buildings till they could gradually remove, and meanwhile look after
their growing crops. Their consternation was therefore greater, when
immediately after the May term-day, a commencement was made to pull
down and set fire to the houses over their heads. The old people, women
and others, then began to preserve the timber which was their own; but
the devastators proceeded with the greatest celerity, demolishing all
before them, and when they had overthrown all the houses in a large
tract of country they set fire to the wreck. Timber, furniture, and
every other article that could not be instantly removed was consumed
by fire or otherwise utterly destroyed. The proceedings were carried
on with the greatest rapidity and the most reckless cruelty. The cries
of the victims, the confusion, the despair and horror painted on the
countenances of the one party, and the exulting ferocity of the other,
beggar all description. At these scenes Mr. Sellar was present, and
apparently, as sworn by several witnesses at his subsequent trial,
ordering and directing the whole. Many deaths ensued from alarm,
from fatigue, and cold, the people having been instantly deprived of
shelter, and left to the mercies of the elements. Some old men took
to the woods and to the rocks, wandering about in a state approaching
to, or of absolute, insanity; and several of them in this situation
lived only a few days. Pregnant women were taken in premature labour,
and several children did not long survive their sufferings. “To these
scenes,” says Donald Macleod[2], “I was an eye-witness, and am ready to
substantiate the truth of my statements, not only by my own testimony,
but by that of many others who were present at the time. In such a
scene of general devastation, it is almost useless to particularise the
cases of individuals; the suffering was great and universal. I shall,
however, notice a very few of the extreme cases of which I was myself
an eye-witness. John Mackay’s wife, Ravigill, in attempting to pull
down her house, in the absence of her husband, to preserve the timber,
fell through the roof. She was in consequence taken in premature
labour, and in that state was exposed to the open air and to the view
of all the by-standers. Donald Munro, Garvott, lying in a fever, was
turned out of his house and exposed to the elements. Donald Macbeath,
an infirm and bed-ridden old man, had the house unroofed over him, and
was in that state exposed to the wind and rain until death put a period
to his sufferings. I was present at the pulling down and burning of the
house of William Chisholm, Badinloskin, in which was lying his wife’s
mother, an old bed-ridden woman of nearly 100 years of age, none of the
family being present. I informed the persons about to set fire to the
house of this circumstance, and prevailed on them to wait until Mr.
Sellar came. On his arrival, I told him of the poor old woman being
in a condition unfit for removal, when he replied, ‘Damn her, the old
witch, she has lived too long--let her burn.’ Fire was immediately set
to the house, and the blankets in which she was carried out were in
flames before she could be got out. She was placed in a little shed,
and it was with great difficulty they were prevented from firing it
also. The old woman’s daughter arrived while the house was on fire, and
assisted the neighbours in removing her mother out of the flames and
smoke, presenting a picture of horror which I shall never forget, but
cannot attempt to describe.” Within five days she was a corpse.
[2] Author of “Gloomy Memories,” etc.
In 1816 Sellar was charged at Inverness, before the Court of
Justiciary, with culpable homicide and fire-raising in connection
with these proceedings, and, considering all the circumstances, it
is not at all surprising that he was “honourably” acquitted of the
grave charges made against him. Almost immediately after, however, he
ceased to be factor on the Sutherland estates, and Mr. Loch came into
power. Evictions were carried out from 1814 down to 1819 and 1820,
pretty much of the same character as those already described, but the
removal of Mr. Young, the chief factor, and Mr. Sellar from power was
hailed with delight by the whole remaining population. Their very
names had become a terror. Their appearance in any part of the county
caused such alarm as to make women fall into fits. One woman became
so terrified that she became insane, and whenever she saw any one she
did not recognise, she invariably cried out in a state of absolute
terror--“_Oh! sin Sellar_”--“Oh! there’s Sellar.” The people, however,
soon discovered that the new factors were not much better. Several
leases which were current would not expire until 1819 and 1820, so that
the evictions were necessarily only partial from 1814 down to that
period. The people were reduced to such a state of poverty that even
Mr. Loch himself, in his “Sutherland Improvements,” page 76, admits
that--“Their wretchedness was so great that, after pawning everything
they possessed to the fishermen on the coast, such as had no cattle
were reduced to come down from the hills in hundreds for the purpose
of gathering cockles on the shore. Those who lived in the more remote
situations of the county were obliged to subsist upon broth made of
nettles, thickened with a little oatmeal. Those who had cattle had
recourse to the still more wretched expedient of bleeding them, and
mixing the blood with oatmeal, which they afterwards cut into slices
and fried. Those who had a little money came down and slept all night
upon the beach, in order to watch the boats returning from the fishing,
that they might be in time to obtain a part of what had been caught.”
He, however, omitted to mention the share he and his predecessors had
taken in reducing the people to such misery, and the fact that at this
very time he had constables stationed at the Little Ferry to prevent
the starved tenantry from collecting shellfish in the only place where
they could find them.
He prevailed upon the people to sign documents consenting to remove
at the next Whitsunday term, promising at the same time to make good
provision for them elsewhere. In about a month after, the work of
demolition and devastation again commenced, and parts of the parishes
of Golspie, Rogart, Farr, and the whole of Kildonan were in a blaze.
Strong parties with faggots and other combustible material were set
to work; three hundred houses were given ruthlessly to the flames, and
their occupants pushed out in the open air without food or shelter.
Macleod, who was present, describes the horrible scene as follows:--
“The consternation and confusion were extreme; little or no time was
given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to
remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them;
next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries
of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle,
hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the
smoke and fire, altogether presented a scene that completely baffles
description--it required to be seen to be believed. A dense cloud
of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended far
out to sea; at night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented
itself--all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once.
I myself ascended a height about eleven o’clock in the evening, and
counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, many of the owners of
which were my relations, and all of whom I personally knew, but whose
present condition--whether in or out of the flames--I could not tell.
The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were
reduced to ashes or smoking ruins. During one of these days a boat
actually lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the shore,
but at night was enabled to reach a landing-place by the lurid light of
the flames.”
The whole of the inhabitants of Kildonan, numbering nearly 2000 souls,
except three families, were utterly rooted and burnt out, and the whole
parish converted into a solitary wilderness. The suffering was intense.
Some lost their reason. Over a hundred souls took passage to Caithness
in a small sloop, the master humanely agreeing to take them in the
hold, from which he had just unloaded a cargo of quicklime. A head
storm came on, and they were nine days at sea in the most miserable
condition--men, women, and helpless children huddled up together, with
barely any provisions. Several died in consequence, and others became
invalids for the rest of their days. One man, Donald Mackay, whose
family was suffering from a severe fever, carried two of his children
a distance of twenty-five miles to this vessel. Another old man took
shelter in a meal mill, where he was kept from starvation by licking
the meal refuse scattered among the dust on the floor, and protected
from the rats and other vermin by his faithful collie. George Munro,
the miller at Farr, who had six of his family down with fever, had to
remove them in that state to a damp kiln, while his home was given to
the flames. And all this was done in the name of proprietors who could
not be considered tyrants in the ordinary sense of the term.
General Stewart of Garth, about a year after the cruelties perpetrated
in Sutherland, writes with regret of the unnatural proceedings as
“the delusions practised (by his subordinates) on a generous and
public-spirited proprietor, which have been so perseveringly applied,
that it would appear as if all feeling of former kindness towards the
native tenantry had ceased to exist. To them any uncultivated spot of
moorland, however small, was considered sufficient for the support of a
family; while the most lavish encouragement has been given to all the
new tenants, on whom, with the erection of buildings, the improvement
of lands, roads, bridges, &c., upwards of £210,000 had been expended
since 1808 (in fourteen years). With this proof of unprecedented
liberality, it cannot be sufficiently lamented that an estimate of the
character of these poor people was taken from the misrepresentation
of interested persons, instead of judging from the conduct of the
same men when brought into the world, where they obtained a name
and character which have secured the esteem and approbation of men
high in honour and rank, and, from their talents and experience,
perfectly capable of judging with correctness. With such proofs of
capability, and with such materials for carrying on the improvements
and maintaining the permanent prosperity of the county, when occupied
by a hardy, abstemious race, easily led on to a full exertion of their
faculties by a proper management, there cannot be a question but that
if, instead of placing them, as has been done, in situations bearing
too near a resemblance to the potato-gardens of Ireland, they had been
permitted to remain as cultivators of the soil, receiving a moderate
share of the vast sums lavished on their richer successors, such a
humane and considerate regard to the prosperity of a whole people
would undoubtedly have answered every good purpose.” He then goes
on to show that when the valleys and higher grounds were let to the
sheep-farmers, the whole native population was driven to the sea shore,
where they were crowded on small lots of land to earn subsistence
by labour and sea-fishing, the latter so little congenial to their
former habits and experience. “And these _one or two acre lots_ are
represented as _improvements!_” He then asks how in a country, without
regular employment or manufactories, a family is to be supported on one
or two acres? The thing was impossible, and the consequence is that
“over the whole of this district, where the sea-shore is accessible,
the coast is thickly studded with thatched cottages, crowded with
starving inhabitants,” while strangers, with capital, usurp the land
and dispossess the swain. Ancient respectable tenants, who passed the
greater part of their lives in the enjoyment of abundance, and in the
exercise of hospitality and charity, possessing stocks of ten, twenty,
and thirty breeding cows, with the usual proportion of other stock, are
now pining on one or two acres of bad land, with one or two starved
cows; and for this accommodation a calculation is made, that they must
support their families, and pay the rents of their lots, not from the
produce, but from the sea. When the herring fishery succeeds, they
generally satisfy the landlords, whatever privations they may suffer;
but when the fishing fails, they fall in arrears and are sequestrated
and their stocks sold to pay the rents, their lots given to others, and
they and their families turned adrift on the world; but in these trying
circumstances, he concludes, “we cannot sufficiently admire their meek
and patient spirit, supported by the powerful influence of moral and
religious principle.”
The beautiful Strathnaver, containing a population equal to Kildonan,
had been cleared in the same heartless manner.
In 1828, Donald Macleod, after a considerable absence, returned to his
native Kildonan, where he attended divine service in the parish church,
which he found attended by a congregation consisting of eight shepherds
and their dogs--numbering between twenty and thirty--the minister, and
three members of his family. Macleod came in too late for the first
psalm, but at the conclusion of the service the fine old tune Bangor
was given out, “when the four-footed hearers became excited, got up on
the seats, and raised a most infernal chorus of howling. Their masters
attacked them with their crooks, which only made matters worse; the
yelping and howling continued to the end of the service.” And Donald
Macleod retired to contemplate the painful and shameful scene, and
contrast it with what he had previously experienced as a member, for
many years, of the large and devout congregation that worshipped
formerly in the parish church of his native valley.
The Parish Church of Farr was no longer in existence; the fine
population of Strathnaver was rooted and burnt out during the general
conflagration, and presented a similar aspect to his own native parish.
The church, no longer found necessary, was razed to the ground, and its
timbers conveyed to construct one of the Sutherland “improvements”--the
Inn at Altnaharra, while the minister’s house was converted into
a dwelling for a fox-hunter. A woman, well-known in the parish,
travelling through the desolated Strath next year after the evictions,
was asked on her return home for her news, when she replied--“O, chan
eil ach sgiala bronach! sgiala bronach!” “Oh, only sad news, sad news!
I have seen the timber of our well attended kirk covering the inn at
Altnaharra; I have seen the kirk-yard where our friends are mouldering
filled with tarry sheep, and Mr. Sage’s study turned into a kennel for
Robert Gunn’s dogs, and I have seen a crow’s nest in James Gordon’s
chimney head;” after which she fell into a paroxysm of grief.
THE REV. DONALD SAGE ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES.
I remained for about a year in the capacity of tutor in the family
of Mr. Robert MacKid, Sheriff-Substitute of Sutherland, who lived
at Kirkton, in the parish of Golspie. I shall briefly sum up what I
remember of this period.
It was a very short time previous to my residence in Mr. MacKid’s
family that the first “Sutherland Clearance” took place. This consisted
in the ejection from their minutely-divided farms of several hundreds
of the Sutherlandshire aborigines, who had from time immemorial been
in possession of their mountain tenements. This sweeping desolation
extended over many parishes, but it fell most heavily on the parish
of Kildonan. It was the device of one William Young, a successful
corn-dealer and land-improver. He rose from indigence, but was
naturally a man of taste, of an ingenious turn of mind, and a shrewd
calculator. After realising some hundreds of pounds by corn-dealing,
he purchased from Sir Archibald Dunbar of Thundertown a small and
valueless property in Morayshire called Inverugie. It lay upon the
sea-shore, and, like many properties of more ancient date, it had been
completely covered with sea-sand which had drifted upon its surface.
For this small and worthless spot he paid a correspondingly small
price--about £700--but, tasking his native and vigorous genius for
improvement, he set himself at once to better his bargain. Making use
of a plough of peculiar construction, he turned the sand down and
the rich old soil up, and thus made it one of the most productive
properties in the county. This, with other necessary improvements,
however, involved him in debt; but, just as it became a question with
him how to pay it, his praise in the north as a scientific improver
of land reached the ears of the Stafford family, who, in connection
with their immense wealth, were racked with the anxiety to improve
their Highland estate. As William Young had been so successful on the
estate of Inverugie they thought he could not but be equally so on
the Sutherland estate. Young introduced the depopulating system into
Sutherland.[3] This system, during his tenure of office as commissioner
on the Sutherland property, was just at its commencement. It was
first brought to bear on the parish of Kildonan. The whole north and
south sides of the Strath, from Kildonan to Caen on the left bank of
the river, and from Dalcharn to Marrel on the right bank, were, at
one fell sweep, cleared of their inhabitants. The measures for their
ejectment had been taken with such promptness, and were so suddenly and
brutally carried out, as to excite a tumult among the people. Young
had as his associate in the factorship a man of the name of Sellar,
who acted in the subordinate capacity of legal agent and accountant on
the estate, and who, by his unprincipled recklessness in conducting
the process of ejectment, added fuel to the flame. It was said that
the people rose almost _en masse_, that the constables and officials
were resisted and their lives threatened, and the combination among
the peasantry was represented as assuming at last so alarming an
aspect that the Sheriff-Depute of the county was under the necessity
of calling in the military to quell the riot. A detachment of soldiers
was accordingly sent from Fort-George, a powder magazine was erected
at Dornoch, and every preparation made as for the commencement of a
civil war. But the chief magistrate of the county, shrewdly suspecting
the origin of these reports, ordered back the military, came himself
alone among the people, and instituted a cool and impartial enquiry
into their proceedings. The result was that the formidable riot, which
was reported to have for its objects the murder of Young and Sellar,
the expulsion of the store-farmers, and the burning of Dunrobin
Castle, amounted after all only to this, that a certain number of the
people had congregated in different places and had given vent to their
outraged feelings and sense of oppression in rash and unguarded terms.
It could not be proved that a single act of violence was committed.
Sellar laboured hard to involve my father and mother in the criminality
of these proceedings, but he utterly failed. The peasantry, as fine
as any in the world, were treated by the owners of the soil as “good
for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under feet of men,” while
the tract of country thus depopulated was divided into two large sheep
farms, one of which was given in lease to William Cluness of Cracaig,
and the other to a Mr. Reid from Northumberland.
[3] “Clearances” had, however, been effected in some parts of
Sutherland previous to this period, although to a smaller extent. From
along the banks of the river Oykell, for instance, many families were
evicted, in the year 1780. (Statement by the Rev. Dr. Aird, of Creich).
The reckless lordly proprietors had resolved upon the expulsion
of their long-standing and much-attached tenantry from their
widely-extended estates, and the Sutherland Clearance of 1819 was
not only the climax of their system of oppression for many years
before, but the extinction of the last remnant of the ancient Highland
peasantry in the north. As violent tempests send out before them many
a deep and sullen roar, so did the advancing storm give notice of
its approach by various single acts of oppression. I can yet recall
to memory the deep and thrilling sensation which I experienced, as
I sat at the fireside in my rude, little parlour at Achness, when
the tidings of the meditated removal of my poor flock first reached
me from headquarters. It might be about the beginning of October,
1818. A tenant from the middle of the Strath had been to Rhives, the
residence of Mr. Young, the commissioner, paying his rent. He was
informed, and authorised to tell his neighbours, that the rent for
the half-year, ending in May, 1819, would not be demanded, as it was
determined to lay the districts of Strathnaver and Upper Kildonan
under sheep. This intelligence when first announced was indignantly
discredited by the people. Notwithstanding their knowledge of former
clearances they clung to the hope that the “Ban-mhorair Chataibh” (the
Duchess of Sutherland) would not give her consent to the warning as
issued by her subordinates, and thus deprive herself of her people,
as truly a part of her noble inheritance as were her broad acres. But
the course of a few weeks soon undeceived them. Summonses of ejectment
were issued and despatched all over the district. These must have
amounted to upwards of a thousand, as the population of the Mission
alone was 1600 souls, and many more than those of the Mission were
ejected. The summonses were distributed with the utmost preciseness.
They were handed in at every house and hovel alike, be the occupiers
of them who or what they might--minister, catechist, or elder, tenant,
or sub-tenant, out-servant, or cottar--all were made to feel the
irresponsible power of the proprietor. The enormous amount of citations
might also be accounted for by the fact that Mr. Peter Sellar had a
threefold personal interest in the whole matter. He was, in the first
place, factor on the Sutherland estate at the time; then, he was law
agent for the proprietors; and, lastly, the lessee or tacksman of more
than a third of the county to be cleared of its inhabitants. It may
easily be conceived how such a three-plied cord of worldly interest
would bind him over to greater rigour, and even atrocity, in executing
the orders of his superiors on the wretched people among whom he was
thus let loose like a beast of prey. But the effects produced by these
decided measures I now distinctly remember. Having myself, in common
with the rest of my people, received one of these notices, I resolved
that, at the ensuing term of Martinmas, I would remove from Achness,
and go once more permanently to reside under my father’s roof, although
I would at the same time continue the punctual discharge of my pastoral
duties among the people till they also should be removed. I could not
but regard the summoning of the minister as tantamount to the putting
down of the ministration of the Word and ordinances of religion in that
part of the country. And, indeed, it is a fact, that, although this
desolate district is still occupied by shepherds, no provision has,
since that time, been made for their spiritual wants. I left Achness,
therefore, about the middle of November, 1818, sold my cow at the
Ardgay market, and got my furniture conveyed to Kildonan by my father’s
horses and my own. The people received the legal warning to leave for
ever the homes of their fathers with a sort of stupor--that apparent
indifference which is often the external aspect of intense feeling.
As they began, however, to awaken from the stunning effects of this
first intimation, their feelings found vent, and I was much struck
with the different ways in which they expressed their sentiments.
The truly pious acknowledged the mighty hand of God in the matter.
In their prayers and religious conferences not a solitary expression
could be heard indicative of anger or vindictiveness, but in the sight
of God they humbled themselves, and received the chastisement at His
hand. Those, however, who were strangers to such exalted and ennobling
impressions of the Gospel breathed deep and muttered curses on the
heads of the persons who subjected them to such treatment. The more
reckless portion of them fully realised the character of the impenitent
in all ages, and indulged in the most culpable excesses, even while
this divine punishment was still suspended over them. These last,
however, were very few in number--not more than a dozen. To my poor and
defenceless flock the dark hour of trial came at last in right earnest.
It was in the month of April, and about the middle of it, that they
were all--man, woman, and child--from the heights of Farr to the mouth
of the Naver, on one day, to quit their tenements and go--many of them
knew not whither. For a few, some miserable patches of ground along
the shores were doled out as lots, without aught in the shape of the
poorest hut to shelter them. Upon these lots it was intended that they
should build houses at their own expense, and cultivate the ground, at
the same time occupying themselves as fishermen, although the great
majority of them had never set foot on a boat in their lives. Thither,
therefore, they were driven at a week’s warning. As for the rest most
of them knew not whither to go, unless their neighbours on the shore
provided them with a temporary shelter; for, on the day of their
removal, they would not be allowed to remain, even on the bleakest
moor, and in the open air, for a distance of twenty miles around.
On the Sabbath, a fortnight previous to the fated day, I preached
my valedictory sermon in Achness, and the Sabbath thereafter at
Ach-na-h-uaigh. Both occasions were felt by myself and by the people
from the oldest to the youngest, to be among the bitterest and most
overwhelming experiences of our lives. In Strathnaver we assembled,
for the last time, at the place of Langdale, where I had frequently
preached before, on a beautiful green sward overhung by Robert Gordon’s
antique, romantic little cottage on an eminence close beside us. The
still-flowing waters of the Naver swept past us a few yards to the
eastward. The Sabbath morning was unusually fine, and mountain, hill,
and dale, water and woodland, among which we had so long dwelt, and
with which all our associations of “home” and “native land” were so
fondly linked, appeared to unite their attractions to bid us farewell.
My preparations for the pulpit had always cost me much anxiety, but
in view of this sore scene of parting, they caused me pain almost
beyond endurance. I selected a text which had a pointed reference to
the peculiarity of our circumstances, but my difficulty was how to
restrain my feelings till I should illustrate and enforce the great
truths which it involved with reference to eternity. The service began.
The very aspect of the congregation was of itself a sermon, and a most
impressive one. Old Achoul sat right opposite to me. As my eye fell
upon his venerable countenance, bearing the impress of eighty-seven
winters, I was deeply affected, and could scarcely articulate the
psalm. I preached and the people listened, but every sentence uttered
and heard was in opposition to the tide of our natural feelings, which,
setting in against us, mounted at every step of our progress higher
and higher. At last all restraints were compelled to give way. The
preacher ceased to speak, the people to listen. All lifted up their
voices, and wept, mingling their tears together. It was indeed the
place of parting, and the hour. The greater number parted never again
to behold each other in the land of the living. My adieu to the people
of Ach-na-h-uaighe was scarcely less affecting, although somewhat
alleviated by the consideration that I had the prospect of ministering
still to those among them who had leases of their farms, and whom Mr.
Sellar, the factor and law agent, had no power to remove.
The middle of the week brought on the day of the Strathnaver Clearance
(1819). It was a Tuesday. At an early hour of that day Mr. Sellar,
accompanied by the Fiscal, and escorted by a strong body of constables,
sheriff-officers and others, commenced work at Grummore, the first
inhabited township to the west of the Achness district. Their plan of
operations was to clear the cottages of their inmates, giving them
about half-an-hour to pack up and carry off their furniture, and then
set the cottages on fire. To this plan they ruthlessly adhered, without
the slightest regard to any obstacle that might arise while carrying it
into execution.
At Grumbeg lived a soldier’s widow, Henny Munro. She had followed her
husband in all his campaigns, marches, and battles, in Sicily and in
Spain. Whether his death was on the field of battle, or the result of
fever or fatigue, I forget; but his faithful helpmeet attended him
to his last hour, and, when his spirit fled, closed his eyes, and
followed his remains to their last resting-place. After his death she
returned to Grumbeg, the place of her nativity, and, as she was utterly
destitute of any means of support, she was affectionately received by
her friends, who built her a small cottage and gave her a cow and grass
for it. The din of arms, orders, and counter-orders from headquarters,
marchings and counter-marchings and pitched battles, retreats and
advances, were the leading and nearly unceasing subjects of her winter
evening conversations. She was a joyous, cheery old creature; so
inoffensive, moreover, and so contented, and brimful of good-will that
all who got acquainted with old Henny Munro could only desire to do
her a good turn, were it merely for the warm and hearty expressions
of gratitude with which it was received. Surely the factor and his
followers did not personally know old Henny, or they could not have
treated her as they did. After the cottages at Grummore were emptied
of their inmates, and roofs and rafters had been lighted up into one
red blaze, Mr. Sellar and his iron-hearted attendants approached the
residence of the soldier’s widow. Henny stood up to plead for her
furniture--the coarsest and most valueless that well could be, but
still her earthly all. She first asked that, as her neighbours were
so occupied with their own furniture, hers might be allowed to remain
till they should be free to remove it for her. This request was curtly
refused. She then besought them to allow a shepherd who was present and
offered his services for that purpose, to remove the furniture to his
own residence on the opposite shore of the loch, to remain there till
she could carry it away. This also was refused, and she was told, with
an oath, that if she did not take her trumpery off within half-an-hour
it would be burned. The poor widow had only to task the remains of
her bodily strength, and address herself to the work of dragging her
chests, beds, presses, and stools out at the door, and placing them at
the gable of her cottage. No sooner was her task accomplished than the
torch was applied, the widow’s hut, built of very combustible material,
speedily ignited, and there rose up rapidly, first a dense cloud of
smoke, and soon thereafter a bright red flame. The wind unfortunately
blew in the direction of the furniture, and the flame, lighting upon
it, speedily reduced it to ashes.
In their progress down the Strath, Ceann-na-coille was the next
township reached by the fire-raising evictors. An aged widow lived
there who, by infirmity, had been reduced to such a state of bodily
weakness that she could neither walk nor lie in bed. She could only,
night and day, sit in her chair; and having been confined for many
years in that posture, her limbs had become so stiff that any attempt
to move her was attended with acute pain. She was the mother-in-law of
Samuel Matheson, and had, with her family, been removed by Mr. Sellar
from Rhimisdale some time before. His treatment of her and others on
that occasion had brought Mr. Sellar into trouble, but now, in the
Providence of God, she was once more in his power. “Bean Raomasdail,”
or “the good wife of Rhimisdale,” as she was called, was much revered.
In her house I have held diets of catechising and meetings for prayer,
and been signally refreshed by her Christian converse. When the
evicting party commenced their operations in her township, the aged
widow’s house was among the very first that was to be consigned to the
flames. Her family and neighbours represented the widow’s strong claims
on their compassion, and the imminent danger to her life of removing
her to such a distance as the lower end of the Strath, at least ten
miles off, without suitable means of conveyance. They implored that she
might be allowed to remain for only two days till a conveyance could be
provided for her. They were told that they should have thought on that
before, and that she must immediately be removed by her friends, or the
constables would be ordered to do it. The good wife of Rhimisdale was,
therefore, raised by her weeping family, from her chair and laid on a
blanket, the corners of which were held up by four of the strongest
youths in the place. All this she bore with meekness, and while the
eyes of her attendants were streaming with tears, her pale and gentle
countenance was suffused with a smile. The change of posture and the
rapid motion of the bearers, however, awakened the most intense pain,
and her cries never ceased till within a few miles of her destination,
when she fell asleep. A burning fever supervened, of which she died a
few months later.
During these proceedings, I was resident at my father’s house, but I
had occasion on the week immediately ensuing to visit the manse of
Tongue. On my way thither, I passed through the scene of the campaign
of burning. The spectacle presented was hideous and ghastly! The banks
of the lake and the river, formerly studded with cottages, now met
the eye as a scene of desolation. Of all the houses, the thatched
roofs were gone, but the walls, built of alternate layers of turf and
stone, remained. The flames of the preceding week still slumbered in
their ruins, and sent up into the air spiral columns of smoke; whilst
here a gable, and there a long side-wall, undermined by the fire
burning within them, might be seen tumbling to the ground, from which
a cloud of smoke, and then a dusky flame, slowly sprang up. The sooty
rafters of the cottages, as they were being consumed, filled the air
with a heavy and most offensive odour. In short, nothing could more
vividly represent the horrors of grinding oppression, and the extent
to which one man, dressed up in a “little brief authority,” will
exercise that power, without feeling or restraint, to the injury of his
fellow-creatures.
GENERAL STEWART OF GARTH ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES.[4]
[4] “Sketches of the Highlanders.” First edition.
On the part of those who instituted similar improvements, in which so
few of the people were to have a share, conciliatory measures, and a
degree of tenderness, beyond what would have been shown to strangers,
were to have been expected towards the hereditary supporters of their
families. It was, however, unfortunately the natural consequences of
the measures which were adopted, that few men of liberal feelings could
be induced to undertake their execution. The respectable gentlemen,
who, in so many cases, had formerly been entrusted with the management
of Highland property, resigned, and their places were supplied by
persons cast in a coarser mould, and, generally, strangers to the
country, who, detesting the people, and ignorant of their character,
capability, and language, quickly surmounted every obstacle, and
hurried on the change, without reflecting on the distress of which it
might be productive, or allowing the kindlier feelings of landlords to
operate in favour of their ancient tenantry. To attempt a new system,
and become acceptable tenants, required a little time and a little
indulgence, two things which it was resolved should not be conceded
them: they were immediately removed from the fertile and cultivated
farms; some left the country, and others were offered limited
portions of land on uncultivated moors, on which they were to form a
settlement; and thus, while particular districts have been desolated,
the gross numerical population has, in some manner, been preserved.
Many judicious men, however, doubt the policy of these measures, and
dread their consequences on the condition and habits of the people.
The following account of their situation is from the respectable and
intelligent clergyman of an extensive parish in the county:--
“When the valleys and higher grounds were let to the shepherds, the
whole population was drawn down to the sea-shore, where they were
crowded on small lots of land, to earn their subsistence by labour
(where all are labourers and few employers) and by sea-fishing, the
latter so little congenial to their former habits. This cutting down
farms into lots was found so profitable, that over the whole of this
district, the sea-coast, where the shore is accessible, is thickly
studded with wretched cottages, crowded with starving inhabitants.
Ancient respectable tenants, who passed the greater part of life in the
enjoyment of abundance, and in the exercise of hospitality and charity,
possessing stocks of ten, twenty, and thirty breeding cows, with the
usual proportion of other stock, are now pining on one or two acres of
bad land, with one or two starved cows, and, for this accommodation
a calculation is made, that they must support their families and pay
the rent of their lots, which the land cannot afford. When the herring
fishery (the only fishery prosecuted on this coast) succeeds, they
generally satisfy the landlords, whatever privations they may suffer,
but when the fishing fails, they fall in arrears, and are sequestrated,
and their stock sold to pay the rents, their lots given to others,
and they and their families turned adrift on the world. The herring
fishery, always precarious, has, for a succession of years, been very
defective, and this class of people are reduced to extreme misery.
At first, some of them possessed capital, from converting their farm
stock into cash, but this has been long exhausted. It is distressing
to view the general poverty of this class of people, aggravated by
their having once enjoyed abundance and independence; and we cannot
sufficiently admire their meek and patient spirit, supported by the
powerful influence of religious and moral principle. There are still a
few small tenants on the old system, occupying the same farm jointly,
but they are falling fast to decay, and sinking into the new class of
cottars.”
This mode of sub-dividing small portions of inferior land is bad enough
certainly, and to propose the establishment of villages, in a pastoral
country, for the benefit of men who can neither betake themselves to
the cultivation of the land nor to commerce for earning the means of
subsistence, is doubtless a refinement in policy solely to be ascribed
to the enlightened and enlarged views peculiar to the new system. But,
leaving out of view the consideration that, from the prevalence of
turning corn lands into pasture, the demand for labour is diminished,
while the number of labourers is increased, it can scarcely be expected
that a man who had once been in the condition of a farmer, possessed
of land, and of considerable property in cattle, horses, sheep, and
money, often employing servants himself, conscious of his independence,
and proud of his ability to assist others, should, without the most
poignant feelings, descend to the rank of a hired labourer, even where
labour and payment can be obtained, more especially if he must serve on
the farms or in the country where he formerly commanded as a master.
It is not easy for those who live in a country like England, where
so many of the lower orders have nothing but what they acquire by
the labour of the passing day, and possess no permanent property or
share in the agricultural produce of the soil, to appreciate the
nature of the spirit of independence which is generated in countries
where the free cultivators of the soil constitute the major part of
the population. It can scarcely be imagined how proudly a man feels,
however small his property may be, when he has a spot of arable
land and pasture, stocked with corn, horses, and cows, a species of
property which, more than any other, binds him, by ties of interest
and attachment, to the spot with which he is connected. He considers
himself an independent person, placed in a station in society far
above the day labourer, who has no stake in the permanency of
existing circumstances, beyond the prospect of daily employment; his
independence being founded on permanent property, he has an interest
in the welfare of the state, by supporting which he renders his own
property more secure, and, although the value of the property may not
be great, it is every day in his view; his cattle and horses feed
around him; his grass and corn he sees growing and ripening; his
property is visible to all observers, which is calculated to raise
the owner in general consideration; and when a passing friend or
neighbour praises his thriving crops and his cattle, his heart swells
with pleasure, and he exerts himself to support and to preserve that
government and those laws which render it secure. Such is the case in
many parts of the world; such was formerly the case in Scotland, and is
still in many parts of the Highlands. Those who wish to see only the
two castes of capitalists and day-labourers, may smile at this union
of independence and poverty. But, that the opposite system is daily
quenching the independent spirit of the Highlanders, is an undoubted
fact, and gives additional strength to the arguments of those who
object to the reduction of the agricultural population, and regret
their removal to the great towns, and to the villages in preparation in
some parts of the country.
It is painful to dwell on this subject, but as information communicated
by men of honour, judgment, and perfect veracity, descriptive of
what they daily witness, affords the best means of forming a correct
judgment, and as these gentlemen, from their situations in life, have
no immediate interest in the determination of the question, beyond what
is dictated by humanity and a love of truth, their authority may be
considered as undoubted.
The following extract of a letter from a friend, as well as the extract
already quoted, is of this description. Speaking of the settlers on the
new allotments, he says:--
“I scarcely need tell you that these wretched people exhibit every
symptom of the most abject poverty, and the most helpless distress.
Their miserable lots in the moors, notwithstanding their utmost labour
and strictest economy, have not yielded them a sufficient crop for
the support of their families for three months. The little money they
were able to derive from the sale of their stock has, therefore, been
expended in the purchase of necessaries, and is now wholly exhausted.
Though they have now, therefore, overcome all their scruples about
leaving their native land, and possess the most ardent desire to
emigrate, in order to avoid more intolerable evils of starvation, and
have been much encouraged by the favourable accounts they have received
from their countrymen already in America, they cannot possibly pay the
expense of transporting themselves and their families thither.”
It has been said that an old Highlander warned his countrymen “to
take care of themselves, for the law had reached Ross-shire.” When
his fears were excited by vague apprehensions of change, he could
not well anticipate that the introduction of civil order, and the
extension of legal authority, which in an enlightened age tend to
advance the prosperity as well as promote the security of a nation,
should have been to his countrymen either the signals of banishment
from their native country, or the means of lowering the condition of
those who were permitted to remain. With more reason it might have
been expected that the principles of an enlightened age would have
gradually introduced beneficial changes among the ancient race; that
they would have softened down the harsher features of their character,
and prepared them for habits better suited to the cultivation of the
soil, than the indolent freedom of a pastoral life. Instead of this,
the new system, whatever may be its intrinsic merits or defects, has,
in too many cases, been carried into execution in a manner which has
excited the strongest and most indignant sensations in the breasts of
those who do not overlook the present inconvenience and distress of
the many, in the eager pursuit of a prospective advantage to the few.
The consequences which have resulted, and the contrast between the
present and past condition of the people, and between their present and
past disposition and feelings towards their superiors, show, in the
most striking light, the impolicy of attempting, with such unnatural
rapidity, innovations which it would require an age, instead of a few
years, to accomplish in a salutary manner, and the impossibility of
effecting them without inflicting great misery, endangering morals, and
undermining loyalty to the king, and respect for constituted authority.
A love of change, proceeding from the actual possession of wealth,
or from the desire of acquiring it, disturbs, by an ill-directed
influence, the gradual and effectual progress of those improvements
which, instead of benefiting the man of capital alone, should equally
distribute their advantages to all. In the prosecution of recent
changes in the north, it would appear that the original inhabitants
were never thought of, nor included in the system which was to be
productive of such wealth to the landlord, the man of capital, and the
country at large,--and that no native could be intrusted with, or,
perhaps, none was found hardy enough to act a part in the execution of
plans which commenced with the ejectment of their unfortunate friends
and neighbours. Strangers were, therefore, called in, and whole glens
cleared of their inhabitants, who, in some instances, resisted these
mandates (although legally executed), in the hope of preserving to
their families their ancient homes, to which all were enthusiastically
attached. These people, blameless in every respect, save their poverty
and ignorance of modern agriculture, could not believe that such harsh
measures proceeded from their honoured superiors, who had hitherto been
kind, and to whom they themselves had ever been attached and faithful.
The whole was attributed to the acting agents, and to them, therefore,
their indignation was principally directed; and, in some instances,
their resistance was so obstinate, that it became necessary to enforce
the orders “vi et armis,” and to have recourse to a mode of ejectment,
happily long obsolete, by setting their houses on fire. This last
species of legal proceeding was so peculiarly conclusive and forcible
that even the stubborn Highlanders, with all their attachment to the
homes of their fathers, were compelled to yield.
In the first instances of this mode of removing refractory tenants, a
small compensation (six shillings), in two separate sums, was allowed
for the houses destroyed. Some of the ejected tenants were also allowed
small allotments of land, on which they were to build houses at their
own expense, no assistance being given for that purpose. Perhaps it
was owing to this that they were the more reluctant to remove till
they had built houses on their new stations. The compensations allowed
in the more recent removals are stated to have been more liberal; and
the improvements which have succeeded those summary ejectments of
the ancient inhabitants are highly eulogised both in pamphlets and
newspapers.
Some people may, however, be inclined to doubt the advantages of
improvements which called for such frequent apologies; for, if more
lenient measures had been pursued, vindication would have, perhaps,
been unnecessary, and the trial of one of the acting agents might have
been avoided.
This trial was brought forward at the instance of the Lord Advocate,
in consequence of the loud cry of indignation raised in the country
against proceedings characterised by the sheriff of the county as
“conduct which has seldom disgraced any country.” But the trial ended
(as was expected by every person who understood the circumstances) in
the acquittal of the acting agent, the verdict of the jury proceeding
on the principle that he acted under legal authority. This acquittal,
however, did by no means diminish the general feeling of culpability;
it only transferred the offence from the agent to a quarter too high
and too distant to be directly affected by public indignation, if,
indeed, there be any station so elevated, or so distant, that public
indignation, justly excited, will not, sooner or later, reach, so as to
touch the feelings, however obtuse, of the transgressor of that law of
humanity written on every upright mind, and deeply engraved on every
kind and generous heart.
It must, however, be a matter of deep regret, that such a line of
proceeding was pursued with regard to these brave, unfortunate, and
well-principled people, as excited a sensation of horror, and a
conviction of culpability, so powerful as only to be removed by an
appeal to a criminal court. It is no less to be deplored that any
conduct sanctioned by authority, even although productive of ultimate
advantage (and how it can produce any advantage beyond what might have
been obtained by pursuing a scheme of conciliation and encouragement
is a very questionable point), should have, in the first instance,
inflicted such general misery. More humane measures would undoubtedly
have answered every good purpose; and had such a course been pursued,
as an enlightened humanity would have suggested, instead of depopulated
glens and starving peasantry, alienated from their superiors, and,
in the exacerbation of their feelings, too ready to imbibe opinions
hostile to the best interests of their country, we should still have
seen a high-spirited and loyal people, ready, at the nod of their
respected chiefs, to embody themselves into regiments, with the same
zeal as in former times; and when enrolled among the defenders of
their country, to exhibit a conduct honourable to that country and
to their profession. Such is the acknowledged character of the men
of these districts as soldiers, when called forth in the service of
their country, although they be now described as irregular in their
habits, and a burthen on the lands which gave them birth, and on which
their forefathers maintained the honour, and promoted the wealth and
prosperity of the ancestors of those who now reject them.
But is it conceivable that the people at home should be so degraded,
while their brothers and sons who become soldiers maintain an
honourable character? The people ought not to be reproached with
incapacity or immorality without better evidence than that of their
prejudiced and unfeeling calumniators. If it be so, however, and if
this virtuous and honourable race, which has contributed to raise
and uphold the character of the British peasantry in the eyes of all
Europe, are thus fallen, and so suddenly fallen, how great and powerful
must be the cause, and how heavy the responsibility of its authors?
But if at home they are thus low in character, how unparalleled must
be the improvement which is produced by difference of profession, as
for example, when they become soldiers, and associate in barracks
with troops of all characters, or in quarters, or billets, with the
lowest of the people, instead of mingling with such society as they
left in their native homes? Why should these Highlanders be at home so
degenerate as they are represented, and as in recent instances they
would actually appear to be? And why, when they mount the cockade,
are they found to be so virtuous and regular, that one thousand men
of Sutherland have been embodied four and five years together, at
different and distant periods, from 1759 to 1763, from 1779 to 1783,
and from 1793 to 1798, without an instance of military punishment?
These men performed all the duties of soldiers to the perfect
satisfaction of their commanders, and continued so unexceptionable in
their conduct down to the latest period, when embodied into the 93rd
regiment, that, according to the words of a distinguished general
officer, “Although the youngest regiment in the service, they might
form an example to all:” and on general parades for punishment,
the Sutherland Highlanders have been ordered to their quarters, as
“examples of this kind were not necessary for such honourable soldiers.”
General Stewart adds the following in the third edition of his
_Sketches_, published in 1825:--
The great changes which have taken place in the above parishes of
Sutherland, and some others, have excited a warm and general interest.
While the liberal expenditure of capital was applauded by all, many
intelligent persons lamented that its application was so much in
one direction; that the ancient tenantry were to have no share in
this expenditure; and that so small a portion was allotted for the
future settlement of the numerous population who had been removed
from their farms, and were placed in situations so new, and in many
respects so unsuitable,--certain that, in the first instance, great
distress, disaffection, and hostility towards the landlords and
government, with a diminution of that spirit of independence, and
those proper principles which had hitherto distinguished them, would
be the inevitable result. So sudden and universal a change of station,
habits, and circumstances, and their being reduced from the state of
independent tenants to that of cottagers and day-labourers, could not
fail of arresting the notice of the public.
Anxious to obtain the best information on this interesting subject,
I early made the most minute enquiry, careful, at the same time, to
form no opinion on intelligence communicated by the people of the
district, or by persons connected with them, and who would naturally be
interested in, and prejudiced against, or in favour of those changes.
I was the more desirous for the best information as the statements
published with regard to the character, capability, and principles of
the people, exhibited a perfect contrast to my own personal experience
and knowledge of the admirable character and exemplary conduct of that
portion of them that had left their native country; and I believe it
improbable, nay impossible, that the sons of worthless parents, without
religious or moral principle--as they have been described--could
conduct themselves in such an honourable manner as to be held up as an
example to the British army. But, indeed, as to information, so much
publicity had been given by various statements explanatory of, and
in vindication of these proceedings, that little more was necessary,
beyond what these publications afforded, to show the nature of the
plans, and the manner in which they were carried into execution.
Forming my opinions, therefore, from those statements, and from
information communicated by persons not immediately connected with
that part of the country, I drew the conclusions which appeared in
the former editions of these _Sketches_. But, with a strong desire to
be correct and well informed in all I state, and with an intention
of correcting myself, in this edition, should I find that I had
been misinformed, or had taken up mistaken views of the subject, in
the different statements I had produced, I embraced the first spare
time I could command, and in autumn, 1823, I travelled over the
“improved” districts, and a large portion of those parts which had been
depopulated and laid out in extensive pastoral farms, as well as the
stations in which the people are placed. After as strict an examination
as circumstances permitted, and a careful inquiry among those who, from
their knowledge and judgment were enabled to form the best opinions,
I do not find that I have one statement to alter, or one opinion to
correct; though I am fully aware that many hold very different opinions.
But however much I may differ in some points, there is one in which
I warmly and cordially join; and that is, in expressing my high
satisfaction and admiration at the liberality displayed in the immense
sums expended on buildings, in enclosing, clearing, and draining land,
in forming roads and communications, and introducing the most improved
agricultural implements. In all these, the generous distribution of
such exemplary encouragement stands unparalleled and alone. Equally
remarkable is the great abatement of rents given to the tenants of
capital--abatements which it was not to be expected they would ask,
considering the preference and encouragement given them, and the
promises they had held out of great and unprecedented revenue, from
their skill and exertions. But these promises seem to have been early
forgotten; the tenants of capital were the first to call for relief;
and so great and generous has this relief been that the rents are
reduced so low as to be almost on a level with what they were when
the great changes commenced. Thus while upwards of £210,000 have been
expended on improvements, no return is to be looked for from this
vast expenditure; and in the failure of their promised rents, the
tenants have sufficiently proved the unstable and fallacious nature
of the system which they, with so much plausibility and perseverance,
got established by delusions, practised on a high-minded, honourable
individual, not aware of the evils produced by so universal a
movement of a whole people. Every friend to a brave and valuable
race must rejoice that these evils are in progress of alleviation
by a return of that kindness and protection which had formerly been
so conspicuous towards that race of tenantry, and which could never
have been interrupted had it not been for those delusions to which I
have more than once alluded, and which have been prosecuted, within
the last twenty years, in many parts of the Highlands, with a degree
of assiduity and antipathy to the unfortunate inhabitants altogether
remarkable.
HUGH MILLER ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES.[5]
[5] Leading articles on _Sutherland as it was and is_.
So much has been already said about these disastrous Sutherland
evictions that we greatly fear the reader is sickened with the horrid
narrative, but as it is intended to make the present record of these
atrocious proceedings, not only in Sutherland but throughout the whole
Highlands, as complete as it is now possible to make it, we shall
yet place before the reader at considerable length Hugh Miller’s
observations on this National Crime--especially as his remarks largely
embody the philosophical views and conclusions of the able and
far-seeing French writer Sismondi, who in his great work declares:--“It
is by a cruel use of legal power--it is by an unjust usurpation--that
the tacksman and the tenant of Sutherland are considered as having no
right to the land which they have occupied for so many ages.... A count
or earl has no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of
his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of
his kingdom.” Hugh Miller introduces his remarks on Sutherland by a
reference to the celebrated Frenchman’s work, and his opinion of the
Sutherland Clearances, thus:--
There appeared at Paris, about five years ago, a singularly ingenious
work on political economy, from the pen of the late M. de Sismondi, a
writer of European reputation. The greater part of the first volume is
taken up with discussions on territorial wealth, and the condition of
the cultivators of the soil; and in this portion of the work there is a
prominent place assigned to a subject which perhaps few Scotch readers
would expect to see introduced through the medium of a foreign tongue
to the people of a great continental state. We find this philosophic
writer, whose works are known far beyond the limits of his language,
devoting an entire essay to the case of the Duchess of Sutherland and
her tenants, and forming a judgment on it very unlike the decision of
political economists in our own country, who have not hesitated to
characterise her great and singularly harsh experiment, whose worst
effects we are but beginning to see, as at once justifiable in itself
and happy in its results. It is curious to observe how deeds done as if
in darkness and in a corner, are beginning, after the lapse of nearly
thirty years, to be proclaimed on the house-tops. The experiment of
the late Duchess was not intended to be made in the eye of Europe. Its
details would ill bear the exposure. When Cobbett simply referred to
it, only ten years ago, the noble proprietrix was startled, as if a
rather delicate family secret was on the eve of being divulged; and yet
nothing seems more evident now than that civilised man all over the
world is to be made aware of how the experiment was accomplished, and
what it is ultimately to produce.
In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in the right or
the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, the argument which
the philosophic Frenchman employs in behalf of the ejected tenantry of
Sutherland is an argument at which proprietors may afford to smile.
In a time of revolution, however, when lands change their owners,
and old families give place to new ones, it might be found somewhat
formidable,--sufficiently so, at least, to lead a wise proprietor in an
unsettled age rather to conciliate than oppress and irritate the class
who would be able in such circumstances to urge it with most effect.
It is not easy doing justice in a few sentences to the facts and
reasonings of an elaborate essay; but the line of argument runs thus:--
Under the old Celtic tenures--the only tenures, be it remembered
through which the Lords of Sutherland derive their rights to their
lands,--the _Klaan_, or children of the soil, were the proprietors of
the soil--“the whole of Sutherland,” says Sismondi, belonged to “the
men of Sutherland.” Their chief was their monarch, and a very absolute
monarch he was. “He gave the different _tacks_ of land to his officers,
or took them away from them, according as they showed themselves
more or less useful in war. But though he could thus, in a military
sense, reward or punish the clan, he could not diminish in the least
the property of the clan itself;”--he was a chief, not a proprietor,
and had “no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of
his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of
his kingdom.” “Now, the Gaelic tenant,” continues the Frenchman, “has
never been conquered; nor did he forfeit, on any after occasion, the
rights which he originally possessed;” in point of right, he is still a
co-proprietor with his captain. To a Scotchman acquainted with the law
of property as it has existed among us, in even the Highlands, for the
last century, and everywhere else for at least two centuries more, the
view may seem extreme; not so, however, to a native of the Continent,
in many parts of which prescription and custom are found ranged, not
on the side of the chief, but on that of the vassal. “Switzerland,”
says Sismondi, “which in so many respects resembles Scotland,--in its
lakes, its mountains, its climate, and the character, manners, and
habits of its children,--was likewise at the same period parcelled out
among a small number of lords. If the Counts of Kyburgh, of Lentzburg,
of Hapsburg, and of Gruyeres, had been protected by the English
laws, they would find themselves at the present day precisely in the
condition in which the Earls of Sutherland were twenty years ago. Some
of them would perhaps have had the same taste for _improvements_, and
several republics would have been expelled from the Alps, to make room
for flocks of sheep. But while the law has given to the Swiss peasant
a guarantee of perpetuity, it is to the Scottish laird that it has
extended this guarantee in the British empire, leaving the peasant in
a precarious situation. The clan,--recognised at first by the captain,
whom they followed in war, and obeyed for their common advantage, as
his friends and relations, then as his soldiers, then as his vassals,
then as his farmers,--he has come finally to regard as hired labourers,
whom he may perchance allow to remain on the soil of their common
country for his own advantage, but whom he has the power to expel so
soon as he no longer finds it for his interest to keep them.”
Arguments like those of Sismondi, however much their force may be
felt on the Continent, would be formidable at home, as we have said,
in only a time of revolution, when the very foundations of society
would be unfixed, and opinions set loose, to pull down or re-construct
at pleasure. But it is surely not uninteresting to mark how, in the
course of events, that very law of England which, in the view of the
Frenchman, has done the Highland peasant so much less, and the Highland
chief so much more than justice, is bidding fair, in the case of
Sutherland at least, to carry its rude equalising remedy along with it.
Between the years 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand inhabitants of this
northern district were ejected from their snug inland farms, by means
for which we would in vain seek a precedent, except, perchance, in the
history of the Irish massacre.
But though the interior of the county was thus improved into a desert,
in which there are many thousands of sheep, but few human habitations,
let it not be supposed by the reader that its general population was
in any degree lessened. So far was this from being the case, that
the census of 1821 showed an increase over the census of 1811 of more
than two hundred; and the present population of Sutherland exceeds,
by a thousand, its population before the change. The county has not
been depopulated--its population has been merely arranged after a new
fashion. The late Duchess found it spread equally over the interior
and the sea-coast, and in very comfortable circumstances;--she left
it compressed into a wretched selvage of poverty and suffering that
fringes the county on its eastern and western shores, and the law which
enabled her to make such an arrangement, maugre the ancient rights
of the poor Highlander, is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own
clumsy way, to make her family pay the penalty. The southern kingdom
must and will give us a poor-law; and then shall the selvage of deep
poverty which fringes the sea-coasts of Sutherland avenge on the titled
proprietor of the county both his mother’s error and his own. If our
British laws, unlike those of Switzerland, failed miserably in her day
in protecting the vassal, they will more than fail, in those of her
successor, in protecting the lord. Our political economists shall have
an opportunity of reducing their arguments regarding the improvements
in Sutherland, into a few arithmetical terms, which the merest tyro
will be able to grapple with.
There is but poor comfort, however, to know, when one sees a country
ruined, that the perpetrators of the mischief have not ruined it to
their own advantage. We purpose showing how signal in the case of
Sutherland this ruin has been, and how very extreme the infatuation
which continues to possess its hereditary lord. We are old enough to
remember the county in its original state, when it was at once the
happiest and one of the most exemplary districts in Scotland, and
passed, at two several periods, a considerable time among its hills; we
are not unacquainted with it now, nor with its melancholy and dejected
people, that wear out life in their comfortless cottages on the
sea-shore. The problem solved in this remote district of the kingdom
is not at all unworthy the attention which it seems but beginning to
draw, but which is already not restricted to one kingdom, or even one
continent.
But what, asks the reader, was the economic condition--the condition
with regard to circumstances and means of living--of these Sutherland
Highlanders? How did they fare? The question has been variously
answered: much must depend on the class selected from among them as
specimens of the whole,--much, too, taking for granted the honesty
of the party who replies, on his own condition in life, and his
acquaintance with the circumstances of the poorer people of Scotland
generally. The county had its less genial localities, in which, for a
month or two in the summer season, when the stock of grain from the
previous year was fast running out, and the crops on the ground not
yet ripened for use, the people experienced a considerable degree of
scarcity--such scarcity as a mechanic in the South feels when he has
been a fortnight out of employment. But the Highlander had resources
in these seasons which the mechanic has not. He had his cattle and
his wild potherbs, such as the mug-wort and the nettle. It has been
adduced by the advocates of the change which has ruined Sutherland, as
a proof of the extreme hardship of the Highlander’s condition, that at
such times he could have eaten as food broth made of nettles, mixed
up with a little oatmeal, or have had recourse to the expedient of
bleeding his cattle, and making the blood into a sort of pudding. And
it is quite true that the Sutherlandshire Highlander was in the habit
at such times, of having recourse to such food. It is not less true,
however, that the statement is just as little conclusive regarding his
condition, as if it were alleged that there must always be famine in
France when the people eat the hind legs of frogs, or in Italy when
they make dishes of snails. With regard to the general comfort of the
people in their old condition, there are better tests than can be
drawn from the kind of food they occasionally ate. The country hears
often of dearth in Sutherland now. Every year in which the crop falls
a little below average in other districts, is a year of famine there,
but the country never heard of dearth in Sutherland then. There were
very few among the holders of its small inland farms who had not
saved a little money. Their circumstances were such, that their moral
nature found full room to develop itself, and in a way the world has
rarely witnessed. Never were there a happier or more contented people,
or a people more strongly attached to the soil; and not one of them
now lives in the altered circumstances on which they were so rudely
precipitated by the landlord, who does not look back on this period of
comfort and enjoyment with sad and hopeless regret.
But we have not yet said how this ruinous revolution was effected in
Sutherland,--how the aggravations of the _mode_, if we may so speak,
still fester in the recollections of the people,--or how thoroughly
that policy of the lord of the soil, through which he now seems
determined to complete the work of ruin which his predecessor began,
harmonizes with its worst details. We must first relate, however, a
disastrous change which took place, in the providence of God, in the
noble family of Sutherland, and which, though it dates fully eighty
years back, may be regarded as pregnant with the disasters which
afterwards befell the county.
The marriage of the young countess into a noble English family was
fraught with further disaster to the county. There are many Englishmen
quite intelligent enough to perceive the difference between a smoky
cottage of turf, and a whitewashed cottage of stone, whose judgments on
their respective inhabitants would be of but little value. Sutherland,
as a county of men, stood higher at this period than perhaps any other
district in the British Empire; but, as our descriptions have shown, it
by no means stood high as a county of farms and cottages. The marriage
of the countess brought a new set of eyes upon it,--eyes accustomed
to quite a different face of things. It seemed a wild, rude county,
where all was wrong, and all had to be set right,--a sort of Russia on
a small scale, that had just got another Peter the Great to civilize
it,--or a sort of barbarous Egypt, with an energetic Ali Pasha at its
head. Even the vast wealth and great liberality of the Stafford family
militated against this hapless county! It enabled them to treat it as a
mere subject of an interesting experiment, in which gain to themselves
was really no object,--nearly as little so, as if they had resolved
on dissecting a dog alive for the benefit of science. It was a still
farther disadvantage, that they had to carry on their experiment by
the hands, and to watch its first effects with the eyes, of others.
The agonies of the dog might have had their softening influence on
a dissecter who held the knife himself; but there could be no such
influence exerted over him, did he merely issue orders to his footman
that the dissection should be completed, remaining himself, meanwhile,
out of sight and out of hearing. The plan of improvement sketched out
by his English family was a plan exceedingly easy of conception. Here
is a vast tract of land, furnished with two distinct sources of wealth.
Its shores may be made the seats of extensive fisheries, and the whole
of its interior parcelled out into productive sheep farms. All is
waste in its present state; it has no fisheries, and two-thirds of its
internal produce is consumed by the inhabitants. It had contributed,
for the use of the community and the landlord, its large herds of black
cattle; but the English family saw, and, we believe, saw truly, that
for every one pound of beef which it produced, it could be made to
produce two pounds of mutton, and perhaps a pound of fish in addition.
And it was resolved, therefore, that the inhabitants of the central
districts, who, as they were mere Celts, could not be transformed, it
was held, into store farmers, should be marched down to the sea-side,
there to convert themselves into fishermen, on the shortest possible
notice, and that a few farmers of capital, of the industrious Lowland
race, should be invited to occupy the new sub-divisions of the interior.
And, pray, what objections can be urged against so liberal and
large-minded a scheme? The poor inhabitants of the interior had very
serious objections to urge against it. Their humble dwellings 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, had they 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. To them, then, the scheme seemed fraught with the most
flagrant, the most monstrous injustice. Were it to be suggested by
some Chartist convention in a time of revolution that Sutherland might
be still further improved--that it was really a piece of great waste
to suffer the revenues of so extensive a district to be squandered by
one individual--that it would be better to appropriate them to the
use of the community in general--that the community in general might
be still further benefited by the removal of the said individual from
Dunrobin to a roadside, where he might be profitably employed in
breaking stones--and that this new arrangement could not be entered
on too soon--the noble Duke would not be a whit more astonished, or
rendered a whit more indignant by the scheme than were the Highlanders
of Sutherland by the scheme of his predecessor.
The reader must keep in view, therefore, that if atrocities unexampled
in Britain for at least a century were perpetrated in the clearing
of Sutherland, there was a species of at least passive resistance
on the part of the people (for active resistance there was none),
which in some degree provoked them. Had the Highlanders, on receiving
orders, marched down to the sea-coast and become fishermen with the
readiness with which a regiment deploys on review day, the atrocities
would, we doubt not, have been much fewer. But though the orders
were very distinct, the Highlanders were very unwilling to obey; and
the severities formed merely a part of the means through which the
necessary obedience was ultimately secured. We shall instance a single
case as illustrative of the process.
In the month of March, 1814, a large proportion of the Highlanders
of Farr and Kildonan, two parishes in Sutherland, were summoned to
quit their farms in the following May. In a few days after, the
surrounding heath on which they pastured their cattle and from which,
at that season, the sole supply of herbage is derived (for in those
northern districts the grass springs late, and the cattle-feeder in
the spring months depends chiefly on the heather), were set on fire
and burnt up. There was that sort of policy in the stroke which men
deem allowable in a state of war. The starving cattle went roaming over
the burnt pastures, and found nothing to eat. Many of them perished,
and the greater part of what remained, though in miserable condition,
the Highlanders had to sell perforce. Most of the able-bodied men
were engaged in this latter business at a distance from home, when
the dreaded term-day came on. The pasturage had been destroyed before
the legal term, and while in even the eye of the law it was still the
property of the poor Highlanders; but ere disturbing them in their
dwellings, term-day was suffered to pass. The work of demolition then
began. A numerous party of men, with a factor at their head, entered
the district, and commenced pulling down the houses over the heads of
the inhabitants. In an extensive tract of country not a human dwelling
was left standing, and then, the more effectually to prevent their
temporary re-erection, the destroyers set fire to the wreck. In one day
were the people deprived of home and shelter, and left exposed to the
elements. Many deaths are said to have ensued from alarm, fatigue, and
cold.
Our author then corroborates in detail the atrocities, cruelties, and
personal hardships described by Donald MacLeod and proceeds:--But to
employ the language of Southey,
“Things such as these, we know, must be
At every famous victory.”
And in this instance the victory of the lord of the soil over the
children of the soil was signal and complete. In little more than
nine years a population of fifteen thousand individuals were removed
from the interior of Sutherland to its sea-coasts or had emigrated to
America. The inland districts were converted into deserts through which
the traveller may take a long day’s journey, amid ruins that still bear
the scathe of fire, and grassy patches betraying, when the evening
sun casts aslant its long deep shadows, the half-effaced lines of the
plough.
After pointing out how at the Disruption sites for churches were
refused, Hugh Miller proceeds:--We have exhibited to our readers,
in the _clearing_ of Sutherland a process of ruin so thoroughly
disastrous, that it might be deemed scarcely possible to render it
more complete. And yet with all its apparent completeness, it admitted
of a supplementary process. To employ one of the striking figures
of Scripture, it was possible to grind into powder what had been
previously broken into fragments,--to degrade the poor inhabitants
to a still lower level than that on which they had been so cruelly
precipitated,--though persons of a not very original cast of mind
might have found it difficult to say how the Duke of Sutherland has
been ingenious enough to fall on exactly the one proper expedient
for supplementing their ruin. All in mere circumstance and situation
that could lower and deteriorate had been present as ingredients in
the first process; but there still remained for the people, however
reduced to poverty or broken in spirit, all in religion that consoles
and ennobles. Sabbath-days came round with their humanising influences;
and, under the teachings of the gospel, the poor and the oppressed
looked longingly forward to a future scene of being, in which there
is no poverty or oppression. They still possessed, amid their misery,
something positively good, of which it was impossible to deprive
them; and hence the ability derived to the present lord of Sutherland
of deepening and rendering more signal the ruin accomplished by his
predecessor.
These harmonise but too well with the mode in which the interior of
Sutherland was cleared, and the improved cottages of its sea-coasts
erected. The plan has its two items. No sites are to be granted in
the district for Free Churches, and no dwelling-houses for Free
Church ministers. The climate is severe,--the winters prolonged and
stormy,--the roads which connect the chief seats of population with the
neighbouring counties, dreary and long. May not ministers and people
be eventually worn out in this way? Such is the portion of the plan
which his Grace and his Grace’s creatures can afford to present to the
light. But there are supplementary items of a somewhat darker kind.
The poor cotters are, in the great majority of cases, tenants-at-will;
and there has been much pains taken to inform them that, to the crime
of entertaining and sheltering a Protesting minister, the penalty
of ejection from their holdings must inevitably attach. The laws of
Charles have again returned in this unhappy district, and free and
tolerating Scotland has got, in the nineteenth century, as in the
seventeenth, its intercommuned ministers. We shall not say that the
intimation has emanated from the Duke. It is the misfortune of such
men that there creep around them creatures whose business it is to
anticipate their wishes; but who, at times, doubtless, instead of
anticipating misinterpret them; and who, even when not very much
mistaken, impart to whatever they do the impress of their own low and
menial natures, and thus exaggerate in the act the intention of their
masters. We do not say, therefore, that the intimation has emanated
from the Duke; but this we say, that an exemplary Sutherlandshire
minister of the Protesting Church, who resigned his worldly all for the
sake of his principles, had lately to travel, that he might preach to
his attached people, a long journey of forty-four miles outwards, and
as much in return, and all this without taking shelter under cover of a
roof, or without partaking of any other refreshment than that furnished
by the slender store of provisions which he had carried with him from
his new home. Willingly would the poor Highlanders have received him at
any risk; but knowing from experience what a Sutherlandshire removal
means he preferred enduring any amount of hardship rather than that the
hospitality of his people should be made the occasion of their ruin.
We have already adverted to the case of a lady of Sutherland threatened
with ejection from her home because she had extended the shelter of her
roof to one of the Protesting clergy,--an aged and venerable man, who
had quitted the neighbouring manse, his home for many years, because
he could no longer enjoy it in consistency with his principles; and we
have shown that that aged and venerable man was the lady’s own father.
What amount of oppression of a smaller and more petty character may not
be expected in the circumstances, when cases such as these are found to
stand but a very little over the ordinary level?
The meannesses to which ducal hostility can stoop in this hapless
district, impress with a feeling of surprise. In the parish of Dornoch
for instance, where his Grace is fortunately not the sole landowner,
there has been a site procured on the most generous terms from Sir
George Gunn Munro of Poyntzfield; and this gentleman, believing himself
possessed of a hereditary right to a quarry, which, though on the
Duke’s ground, had been long resorted to by the proprietors of the
district generally, instructed the builder to take from it the stones
which he needed. Never had the quarry been prohibited before, but on
this occasion a stringent interdict arrested its use. If his Grace
could not prevent a hated Free Church from arising in the district, he
could at least add to the expense of its erection. We have even heard
that the portion of the building previously erected had to be pulled
down and the stones returned.
How are we to account for a hostility so determined, and that can stoop
so low? In two different ways, we are of opinion, and in both have
the people of Scotland a direct interest. Did his Grace entertain a
very intense regard for Established Presbytery, it is probably that he
himself would be a Presbyterian of the Establishment. But such is not
the case. The church into which he would so fain force the people has
been long since deserted by himself. The secret of the course which
he pursues can have no connection therefore with religious motive or
belief. It can be no proselytising spirit that misleads his Grace. Let
us remark, in the first place, rather however in the way of embodying
a fact than imputing a motive, that with his present views, and in
his present circumstances, it may not seem particularly his Grace’s
interest to make the county of Sutherland a happy or desirable home
to the people of Scotland. It may not be his Grace’s interest that
the population of the district should increase. The clearing of the
sea-coast may seem as little prejudicial to his Grace’s welfare now
as the clearing of the interior seemed adverse to the interests of
his predecessor thirty years ago; nay, it is quite possible that his
Grace may be led to regard the clearing of the coast as the better
and more important clearing of the two. Let it not be forgotten that
a poor-law hangs over Scotland,--that the shores of Sutherland are
covered with what seems one vast straggling village, inhabited by an
impoverished and ruined people,--and that the coming assessment may
yet fall so weighty that the extra profits accruing to his Grace from
his large sheep-farms may go but a small way in supporting his extra
paupers. It is not in the least improbable that he may live to find the
revolution effected by his predecessor taking to itself the form, not
of a crime,--for that would be nothing,--but of a disastrous and very
terrible blunder.
There is another remark which may prove not unworthy the consideration
of the reader. Ever since the completion of the fatal experiment which
ruined Sutherland, the noble family through which it was originated
and carried on have betrayed the utmost jealousy of having its real
results 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 most careful surveillance. If the
misrepresentations of the press could have altered the matter of fact,
famine would not 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. Now, be it remembered that a Free Church threatened to
insert a _tent_ into this wound and so keep it open. It has been said
that the Gaelic language removes 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 hence one cause, at least,
of the thick obscurity that has so long enveloped the miseries which
the poor Highlander has had to endure, and the oppressions to which he
has been subjected. The Free Church threatens to translate her wrongs
into English, and to give them currency in the general mart of opinion.
She might possibly enough be no silent spectator of conflagrations
such as those which characterised the first general improvement of
Sutherland,--nor yet of such Egyptian schemes of house-building as
that which formed part of the improvements of a later plan. She might
be somewhat apt to betray the real state of the district and thus
render laborious misrepresentation of little avail. She might effect
a diversion in the cause of the people, and shake the foundations of
the hitherto despotic power which has so long weighed them down. She
might do for Sutherland what Cobbett promised to do, but what Cobbett
had not character enough to accomplish, and what did he not live even
to attempt. A combination of circumstances have conspired to vest in a
Scottish proprietor, in this northern district, a more despotic power
than even the most absolute monarchs of the Continent possess; and it
is, perhaps, no great wonder that that proprietor should be jealous of
the introduction of an element which threatens, it may seem, materially
to lessen it. And so he struggled hard to exclude the Free Church, and,
though no member of the Establishment himself, declares warmly in its
behalf. Certain it is that from the Establishment as now constituted
he can have nothing to fear and the people nothing to hope.
After what manner may his Grace the Duke of Sutherland be most
effectually met in this matter, so that the case of toleration and
freedom of conscience may be maintained in the extensive district which
God, in his providence, has consigned to his stewardship? We are not
unacquainted with the Celtic character as developed in the Highlands
of Scotland. Highlanders, up to a certain point, are the most docile,
patient, enduring of men; but that point once passed, endurance ceases,
and the all too gentle lamb starts up an angry lion. The spirit is
stirred and maddens at the sight of the naked weapon, and that in its
headlong rush upon the enemy, discipline can neither check nor control.
Let our oppressed Highlanders of Sutherland beware. They have suffered
much; but, so far as man is the agent, their battles can be fought only
on the arena of public opinion, and on that ground which the political
field may be soon found to furnish.
Let us follow, for a little, the poor Highlanders of Sutherland to the
sea-coast. It would be easy dwelling on the terrors of their expulsion,
and multiplying facts of horror; but had there been no permanent
deterioration effected in their condition, these, all harrowing and
repulsive as they were, would have mattered less. Sutherland would
have soon recovered the burning up of a few hundred hamlets, or the
loss of a few bed-ridden old people, who would have died as certainly
under cover, though perhaps a few months later, as when exposed to the
elements in the open air. Nay, had it lost a thousand of its best men
in the way in which it lost so many at the storming of New Orleans, the
blank ere now would have been completely filled up. The calamities of
fire or of decimation even, however distressing in themselves, never
yet ruined a country; no calamity ruins a country that leaves the
surviving inhabitants to develop, in their old circumstances, their old
character and resources.
In one of the eastern eclogues of Collins, where two shepherds are
described as flying for their lives before the troops of a ruthless
invader, we see with how much of the terrible the imagination of a poet
could invest the evils of war, when aggravated by pitiless barbarity.
Fertile as that imagination was, however, there might be found new
circumstances to heighten the horrors of the scene--circumstances
beyond the reach of invention--in the retreat of the Sutherland
Highlanders from the smoking ruins of their cottages to their
allotments on the coast. We have heard of one man, named Mackay,
whose family at the time of the greater conflagration referred to by
Macleod, were all lying ill of fever, who had to carry two of his
sick children on his back a distance of twenty-five miles. We have
heard of the famished people blackening the shores, like the crew of
some vessel wrecked on an inhospitable coast, that they might sustain
life by the shell-fish and sea-weed laid bare by the ebb. Many of
their allotments, especially on the western coast, were barren in the
extreme--unsheltered by bush or tree, and exposed to the sweeping
sea-winds, and in time of tempest, to the blighting spray; and it was
found a matter of the extremest difficulty to keep the few cattle which
they had retained, from wandering, especially in the night-time, into
the better sheltered and more fertile interior. The poor animals were
intelligent enough to read a practical comment on the nature of the
change effected; and, from the harshness of the shepherds to whom the
care of the interior had been entrusted, they served materially to add
to the distress of their unhappy masters. They were getting continually
impounded; and vexatious fines, in the form of trespass-money, came
thus to be wrung from the already impoverished Highlanders. Many who
had no money to give were obliged to relieve them by depositing some of
their few portable articles of value, such as bed or bodyclothes, or,
more distressing still, watches, and rings, and pins--the only relics,
in not a few instances, of brave men whose bones were mouldering under
the fatal rampart at New Orleans, or in the arid sands of Egypt--on
that spot of proud recollection, where the invincibles of Napoleon went
down before the Highland bayonet. Their first efforts as fishermen
were what might be expected from a rural people unaccustomed to the
sea. The shores of Sutherland, for immense tracts together, are
iron-bound, and much exposed--open on the Eastern coast to the waves
of the German Ocean, and on the North and West to the long roll of the
Atlantic. There could not be more perilous seas for the unpractised
boatman to take his first lessons on; but though the casualties were
numerous and the loss of life great, many of the younger Highlanders
became expert fishermen. The experiment was harsh in the extreme,
but so far, at least, it succeeded. It lies open, however, to other
objections than those which have been urged against it on the score of
its inhumanity.
MR JAMES LOCH ON SUTHERLAND IMPROVEMENTS.[6]
[6] An Account of the Improvements on the Estates of the Marquis of
Stafford, by James Kinloch, General Agent of the Sutherland Estates.
London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1820.
No country of Europe at any period of its history ever presented more
formidable obstacles to the improvement of a people arising out of the
prejudices and feelings of the people themselves. To the tacksman, it
is clear, from what has already been stated, such a change could not
be agreeable. Its effect being to alter his condition, and remove him
from a state of idle independence, in habits almost of equality with
his chief, to a situation, although fully, if not more respectable,
yet one in which his livelihood was to be obtained by his exertions
and industry, and in many instances by an application to pursuits,
which were by him considered as beneath the occupation of a gentleman,
although leading to real independence and wealth, to a degree he never
could arrive at in his original condition. Nor could it be agreeable to
him to lose that command and influence, which he had hitherto exercised
without control, over his sub-tenants and dependants; while it was at
variance with every feeling and prejudice in which he had been brought
up and educated. It required minds of no ordinary cast to rise superior
to these feelings: and men of no common understanding and vigour of
intellect were required, to shake off habits so opposed to active
industry and exertion. From a certain set of this class, therefore,
a real and determined opposition to any change was to be looked for.
This expectation has not been disappointed; and it is from individuals
of this class, and persons connected with them, that those false and
malignant representations have proceeded, which have been so loudly and
extensively circulated. Actuated by motives of a mere personal nature,
regardless of the happiness of the people, whose improvement it was
the great object of the landlord to effect, they attempted to make an
appeal in favour of a set of people who were never before the objects
of their commiseration, in order that they might, if possible, reduce
them, for their own selfish purposes, to that state of degradation
from which they had been just emancipated. This was, however, by no
means true of the whole, or of the greater part of this class of
gentlemen; for the bulk of the most active improvers of Sutherland are
natives, who, both as sheep farmers, and as skilful and enterprising
agriculturists, are equal to any to be met with in the kingdom. They
have, with an intelligence and liberality of feeling which reflects
upon them the highest honour, embraced with alacrity the new scene of
active exertion presented for their adoption; seconding the views of
the landlords with the utmost zeal, marked with much foresight and
prudence. Out of the twenty-nine principal tacksmen on the estate,
seventeen are natives of Sutherland, four are Northumbrians, two are
from the county of Moray, two from Roxburghshire, two from Caithness,
one from Midlothian, and one from the Merse.
So strong, however, were the prejudices of the people, that, even to
those who were subjected to the power and control of the tacksmen,
this mode of life had charms which attached them strongly to it. He
extended, in some degree, to the more respectable of those who were
placed under him, the same familiarity which he received from the
chief. The burden of the outdoor work was cast upon the females. The
men deemed such an occupation unworthy of them, continued labour of any
sort being most adverse to their habits. They were contented with the
most simple and the poorest fare. Like all mountaineers, accustomed
to a life of irregular exertion, with intervals of sloth, they were
attached with a degree of enthusiasm, only felt by the natives of a
poor country, to their own glen and mountainside, adhering in the
strongest manner to the habits and homes of their fathers. They deemed
no comfort worth the possessing, which was to be purchased at the price
of regular industry; no improvement worthy of adoption, if it was to
be obtained at the expense of sacrificing the customs, or leaving the
homes of their ancestors. So strongly did these feelings operate, that
it cost them nearly the same effort to remove from the spot in which
they were born and brought up, though the place of their new dwelling
was situated on the sea-shore at the mouth of their native strath, or
even in a neighbouring glen, as it cost them to make an exertion equal
to transporting themselves across the Atlantic.
The cattle which they reared on the mountains, and from the sale of
which they depended for the payment of their rents, were of the poorest
description. During summer they procured a scanty sustenance, with much
toil and labour, by roaming over the mountains; while in winter they
died in numbers for the want of support; notwithstanding a practice,
which they universally adopted, of killing every second calf, on
account of the want of winter keep. To such an extent did this calamity
at times amount, that, in the spring of 1807, there died in the parish
of Kildonan alone, two hundred cows, five hundred head of cattle, and
more than two hundred small horses.
As soon as the works, undertaken under the direction of the
Parliamentary Commissioners, opened a prospect of removing successfully
the obstacles which stood in the way of the improvements of the
people, steps were taken to new model and arrange these extensive
possessions. The utmost caution and deliberation was used in doing
so, and plans were never more maturely weighed, nor executed with
more anxiety and tenderness. To aid the further arrangement of these
matters, application was made to William Young, Esq., of Inverugie,
in the county of Elgin, whose active mind and indefatigable industry
had been exhibited in what he had done upon his own estate. This
gentleman superintended the commencement of those vast improvements
which were undertaken on the estate of Sutherland. The success of the
measures carried into effect under his direction, combined with the
difficulties he had to contend with, must always be the best proof
of the ability and indefatigable zeal with which he executed the
charge of which he had taken the direction, and which he performed so
much to his own credit and the advantage of the country. It is only
doing justice to his merits to say, that the rapidity of the earlier
improvements was owing in a principal degree to the impulse and action
inspired by his intelligent and enterprising mind. Mr. Young resigned
his superintendence in 1816, when the local management of the estate
of Sutherland was entrusted to the present factor, Mr. Francis Suther,
whose good temper and judicious conduct in the immediate management
at Trentham, recommended him to the situation he now holds. These
expectations have been fully justified by the manner he has executed
the details of the late arrangements, in which he received the most
cordial and able assistance from Captain John Mackay, late of the 26th
Foot, the factor of Strathnaver, and from Lieutenant George Gunn, of
the Royal Marines, Chief of the clan Gunn, factor of Assynt.
These gentlemen deserve equal credit for the manner in which they have
enforced and promoted the plans which were laid down for the extension
of the fisheries and the cultivation of the coast side, as for their
kind and careful conduct towards the people. Mr. Suther’s exertions in
promoting and carrying into effect every arrangement which was made for
the encouragement and the success of the fishing station and village
of Helmsdale, requires particular commendation.
It is well known that the borders of the two kingdoms were inhabited
by a numerous population, who, in their pursuits, manners, and general
structure of society, bore a considerable resemblance to that which
existed in the Highlands of Scotland. When the union of the crowns, and
those subsequent transactions which arose out of that event, rendered
the maintenance of that irregular population not only unnecessary, but
a burden to the proprietor to whom the land belonged, the people were
removed, and the mountains were covered with sheep. So that it had been
for a length of time proved by the experience of the stock farmers
of those mountain tracts, which comprise the northern districts of
England, and the southern parts of Scotland, that such situations were
peculiarly suited for the maintenance of this species of stock. Taking
this example as their guide, experience had still further proved,
that the central and western Highlands of Scotland were equally well
calculated for the same end.
Reasoning from this success, and observing that the climate of
Sutherland, owing to its vicinity to the ocean, and to its being
considerably intersected by arms of the sea, was much more moderate
than this latter district, it was fairly concluded that this county
was even better fitted for this system of management, than the heights
of Perthshire and Inverness-shire. The inferior elevation of its
mountains contributed still further to this effect, and held out every
encouragement to adopt the same course which had been pursued with such
success in both parts of the kingdom.
The succession of those Alpine plants, which are common to the Cheviot
Hills, when they are put under sheep, being also the natural herbage of
the mountains of Sutherland, renders them still more suitable to this
mode of occupation.
On the first melting of the snow, the cotton grass is found to have
been growing rapidly; it forms a healthy and an abundant food for
sheep, until about the beginning of May, at which time it is in seed;
when, after a short interval, the deer hair takes its place, starting
up almost instantaneously, and forming, in the course of one week (if
the ground has been recently burnt, and the weather be favourable), a
green cover to the mountains. This plant grows with several varieties
of bents, until the end of July, when the cotton grass again begins
to spring, and with the pry moss, comes a second time into flower, in
September, after which the heather and more heating plants continue
until the frosts of winter. Nor is there any part of these mountains,
over which the sheep cannot roam with ease, in search of food,
rendering the whole available and profitable.
As there was every reason therefore for concluding, that the
mountainous parts of the estate and indeed of the county of Sutherland,
were as much calculated for the maintenance of stock as they were unfit
for the habitation of man, there could be no doubt as to the propriety
of converting them into sheep walks, _provided_ the people could be
at the same time settled in situations, where, by the exercise of
their honest industry, they could obtain a decent livelihood, and add
to the general mass of national wealth, and where they should not be
exposed to the recurrence of those privations, which so frequently and
so terribly afflicted them, when situated among the mountains. It was
a matter of important consideration, to determine how this was to be
accomplished. The local peculiarities of the county presented none of
those advantages in disposing of, and absorbing the surplus population,
which the borders of the two kingdoms, and the southern and eastern
highlands had enjoyed. Besides it had made no approximation to the
state in which the rest of Scotland was placed, when those changes were
carried into effect. It had stood still in the midst of that career of
improvement which had so remarkably and so splendidly distinguished the
rest of the kingdom; and remained separated by its habits, prejudices,
and language, from all around.
It had long been known, that the coast of Sutherland abounded with
many different kinds of fish, not only sufficient for the consumption
of the country, but affording also a supply _to any extent_, for more
distant markets or for exportation, when cured and salted. Besides
the regular and continual supply of white fish, with which the shores
thus abound, the coast of Sutherland is annually visited by one of
those vast shoals of herrings, which frequent the coast of Scotland.
It seemed as if it had been pointed out by Nature, that the system
for this remote district, in order that it might bear its suitable
importance in contributing its share to the general stock of the
country, was, to convert the mountainous districts into sheep walks,
and to remove the inhabitants to the coast, or to the valleys near the
sea.
It will be seen, that the object to be obtained by this arrangement,
was two-fold: it was, in the first place, to render this mountainous
district contributory, as far as it was possible, to the general
wealth and industry of the country, and in the manner most suitable to
its situation and peculiar circumstances. This was to be effected by
making it produce a large supply of wool, for the staple manufactory
of England. While, at the same time, it should support as numerous,
and a far more laborious and useful population, than it hitherto had
done at home: and, in the second place, to convert the inhabitants of
those districts to the habits of regular and continued industry, and to
enable them to bring to market a very considerable surplus quantity of
provisions, for the supply of the large towns in the southern parts of
the island, or for the purpose of exportation.
A policy well calculated to raise the importance, and increase the
happiness of the individuals themselves, who were the objects of
the change, to benefit those to whom these extensive but hitherto
unproductive possessions belonged, and to promote the general
prosperity of the nation. Such was the system which was adopted. In
carrying it into effect, every care was taken to explain the object
proposed to be accomplished, to those who were to be removed, and to
point out to them, the ultimate advantages that would necessarily
accrue to them, from their completion.
These communications were made to the people by the factor personally,
or by written statements, communicated to them by the ground officers.
That nothing might be omitted in this respect, the different ministers,
and the principal tacksmen connected with the districts which were
to be newly arranged, were written to, explaining to them, fully and
explicitly, the intentions of the proprietors in adopting them. It was
particularly requested of these gentlemen, that they would impress
upon the minds of the people, the propriety of agreeing to them, and
of explaining, that the motives which dictated this step, arose out of
a real regard for their interests and prosperity, as well as for the
general improvement of the estate.
It was distinctly admitted, that it was not to be expected, that
the people should be immediately reconciled to them. Such was to
expect more than it was possible to hope for. But it was represented,
that if this was so fully felt, and so clearly admitted, that the
landlords must have been strongly and conscientiously impressed with
the necessity and propriety of the measures adopted, as tending
directly to the happiness of those placed under their protection.
These representations had the desired effect, and nothing can be more
praiseworthy, or deserve more to be applauded, than the conduct of the
people on quitting their original habitations; for although they left
them with much regret, they did so in the most quiet, orderly, and
peaceable manner.
If, upon one occasion, in the earlier years of these arrangements, a
momentary feeling of a contrary nature was exhibited, it arose entirely
from the misconduct of persons whose duty it was to have recommended
and enforced obedience to the laws, in place of infusing into the
minds of the people, feelings of a contrary description. As soon,
however, as the interference of these persons was withdrawn, the poor
people returned to their usual state of quietness and repose. All the
statements, giving a different account of their conduct, are absolutely
false, and a libel upon their good conduct and peaceable character.
These arrangements commenced in 1807, and have been carried on
from that period, as the different tacks expired, and afforded an
opportunity of doing so. Bad years, and the failure of crops continuing
to produce the same miserable effects they had constantly occasioned to
that portion of the population, which still continued to reside among
the mountains. This calamity fell with great severity upon them in the
seasons of 1812-13 and 1816-17.
During the latter period they suffered the extremes of want and of
human misery, notwithstanding every aid that could be given to them,
through the bounty of their landlords. Their wretchedness was so great,
that after pawning everything they were possessed of, to the fishermen
on the coast, such as had no cattle were reduced to come down from the
hills in hundreds, for the purpose of gathering cockles on the shore.
Those who lived in the more remote situations of the country were
obliged to subsist upon broth made of nettles, thickened with a little
oatmeal. Those who had cattle had recourse to the still more wretched
expedient of bleeding them, and mixing the blood with oatmeal, which
they afterwards cut into slices and fried. Those who had a little money
came down and slept all night upon the beach, in order to watch the
boat returning from the fishing, that they might be in time to obtain
a part of what had been caught.
In order to alleviate this misery, every exertion was made by Lord
Stafford. To those who had cattle he advanced money to the amount of
above three thousand pounds.
To supply those who had no cattle, he sent meal into the country to the
amount of nearly nine thousand pounds. Besides which, Lady Stafford
distributed money to each parish on the estate: in order that no
pains nor consideration might be wanting, it was arranged that the
gentleman who is at the head of his Lordship’s affairs, the writer
of this statement, should go to Dunrobin to settle with the local
management and the clergymen, what was the best and most effectual
way of distributing his Lordship’s relief. Similar means were taken
by Lord Reay, to alleviate the distresses of his people. While such
was the distress of those who still remained among the hills, _it was
hardly felt by those who had been settled upon the coast_. Their new
occupation, as fishermen, rendered them not only independent of that
which produced the misery of their neighbours, but enabled them at
the same time, in some degree, to become contributors towards their
support, both by the fish they were able to sell to them, and also by
the regular payment of their rents. While it need hardly be stated,
that these wretched sufferers not only required to be relieved, but
failed entirely in the payment of what they owed the landlord.
MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES.[7]
[7] “Sunny Memories,” Letter xvii.
As to those ridiculous stories about the Duchess of Sutherland, which
have found their way into many of the prints in America, one has only
to be here, moving in society, to see how excessively absurd they are.
All my way through Scotland, and through England, I was associating,
from day to day, with people of every religious denomination, and every
rank of life. I have been with dissenters and with churchmen; with the
national Presbyterian church and the free Presbyterian; with Quakers
and Baptists.
In all these circles I have heard the great and noble of the land
freely spoken of and canvassed, and if there had been the least shadow
of a foundation for any such accusations, I certainly should have
heard it recognized in some manner. If in no other, such warm friends
as I have heard speak would have alluded to the subject in the way of
defence; but I have actually never heard any allusion of any sort, as
if there was anything to be explained or accounted for.
As I have before intimated, the Howard family, to which the duchess
belongs, is one which has always been on the side of popular rights and
popular reform. Lord Carlisle, her brother, has been a leader of the
people, particularly during the time of the corn-law reformation, and
_she_ has been known to take a wide and generous interest in all these
subjects. Everywhere that I have moved through Scotland and England I
have heard her kindness of heart, her affability of manner, and her
attention to the feelings of others spoken of as marked characteristics.
Imagine, then, what people must think when they find in respectable
American prints the absurd story of her turning her tenants out into
the snow, and ordering the cottages to be set on fire over their heads
because they would not go out.
But, if you ask how such an absurd story could ever have been made up,
whether there is the least foundation to make it on, I answer that it
is the exaggerated report of a movement made by the present Duke of
Sutherland’s father, in the year 1811, and which was part of a great
movement that passed through the Highlands of Scotland, when the
advancing progress of civilisation began to make it necessary to change
the estates from military to agricultural establishments.
Soon after the union of the crowns of England and Scotland, the border
chiefs found it profitable to adopt upon their estates that system of
agriculture to which their hills were adapted, rather than to continue
the maintenence of military retainers. Instead of keeping garrisons,
with small armies, in a district, they decided to keep only so many as
could profitably cultivate the land. The effect of this, of course,
was like disbanding an army. It threw many people out of employ, and
forced them to seek for a home elsewhere. Like many other movements
which, in their final results, are beneficial to society, this was at
first vehemently resisted, and had to be carried into effect in some
cases by force. As I have said, it began first in the southern counties
of Scotland, soon after the union of the English and Scottish crowns,
and gradually crept northward--one county after another yielding to the
change. To a certain extent, as it progressed northward, the demand for
labour in the great towns absorbed the surplus population; but when it
came in to the extreme Highlands, this refuge was wanting. Emigration
to America now became the resource; and the surplus population
were induced to this by means such as the Colonization Society now
recommends and approves for promoting emigration to Liberia.
The first farm that was so formed on the Sutherland estate was in 1806.
The great change was made in 1811-12, and completed in 1819-20.
The Sutherland estates are in the most northern portion of Scotland.
The distance of this district from the more advanced parts of the
kingdom, the total want of roads, the unfrequent communication by sea,
and the want of towns, made it necessary to adopt a different course
in regard to the location of the Sutherland population from that which
circumstances had provided in other parts of Scotland, where they had
been removed from the bleak and uncultivable mountains. They had lots
given them near the sea, or in more fertile spots, where, by labour and
industry, they might maintain themselves. They had two years allowed
them for preparing for the change, without payment of rent. Timber for
their houses was given, and many other facilities for assisting their
change.
The general agent of the Sutherland estate is Mr. Loch. In a speech of
this gentleman in the House of Commons on the second reading of the
Scotch Poor-Law Bill, June 12, 1845, he states the following fact with
regard to the management of the Sutherland estate during this period,
from 1811 to 1833, which certainly can speak for itself: “I can state
as from fact that, from 1811 to 1833, not one sixpence of rent has been
received from that county, but, on the contrary, there has been sent
there, for the benefit and improvement of the people, a sum exceeding
sixty thousand pounds.”
Mr. Loch goes on in the same speech to say: “There is no set of people
more industrious than the people of Sutherland. Thirty years since they
were engaged in illegal distillation to a very great extent; at the
present moment there is not, I believe, an illegal still in the county.
Their morals have improved as those habits have been abandoned; and
they have added many hundreds, I believe thousands, of acres to the
land in cultivation since they were placed upon the shore.
“Previous to the change to which I have referred, they exported very
few cattle, and hardly anything else. They were also, every now and
then, exposed to all the difficulties of extreme famine. In the years
1812-13, and 1816-17, so great was the misery that it was necessary
to send down oatmeal for their supply to the amount of nine thousand
pounds, and that was given to the people. But, since, industrious
habits were introduced, and they were settled within reach of fishing,
no such calamity has overtaken them. Their condition was then so low
that they were obliged to bleed their cattle during the winter, and mix
the blood with the remnant of meal they had, in order to save from them
starvation.
“Since then the country has improved so much that the fish, in
particular, which they exported, in 1815, from one village alone,
Helmsdale (which, previous to 1811, did not exist), amounted to five
thousand three hundred and eighteen barrels of herring, and in 1844
thirty-seven thousand five hundred and ninety-four barrels, giving
employment to about three thousand nine hundred people. This extends
over the whole of the county, in which fifty-six thousand barrels were
cured.
“Do not let me be supposed to say that there are not cases requiring
attention: it must be so in a large population; but there can be no
means taken by a landlord, or by those under him, that are not bestowed
upon that tenantry.
“It has been said that the contribution by the heritor (the duke)
to one kirk session for the poor was but six pounds. Now, in the
eight parishes which are called Sutherland proper, the amount of
the contribution of the Duke of Sutherland to the kirk session is
forty-two pounds a-year. That is a very small sum, but that sum merely
is so given because the landlord thinks that he can distribute his
charity in a more beneficial manner to the people; and the amount of
charity which he gives--and which, I may say, is settled on them, for
it is given regularly--is above four hundred and fifty pounds a-year.
“Therefore the statements that have been made, so far from being
correct, are in every way an exaggeration of what is the fact. No
portion of the kingdom has advanced in prosperity so much; and if the
honourable member (Mr. S. Crawford) will go down there, I will give him
every facility for seeing the state of the people, and he shall judge
with his own eyes whether my representation be not correct. I could
go through a great many other particulars, but I will not trouble the
House now with them. The statements I have made are accurate, and I am
quite ready to prove them in any way that is necessary.”
The same Mr. Loch has published a pamphlet, in which he has traced out
the effects of the system pursued on the Sutherland estate, in many
very important particulars. It appears from this that previously to
1811 the people were generally sub-tenants to middlemen, who exacted
high rents, and also various perquisites, such as the delivery of
poultry and eggs, giving so many days’ labour in harvest time, cutting
and carrying peat and stones for building.
Since 1811 the people have become immediate tenants, at a greatly
diminished rate of rent, and released from all these exactions. For
instance, in two parishes, in 1812, the rents were one thousand five
hundred and ninety-three pounds, and in 1823 they were only nine
hundred and seventy-two pounds. In another parish the reduction of
rents has amounted, on an average, to thirty-six per cent. Previous
to 1811 the houses were turf huts of the poorest description, in many
instances the cattle being kept under the same roof with the family.
Since 1811 a large proportion of their houses have been rebuilt in a
superior manner--the landlord having paid them for their old timber
where it could not be moved, and having also contributed the new
timber, with lime.
Before 1811 all the rents of the estates were used for the personal
profit of the landlord; but since that time, both by the present duke
and his father, all the rents have been expended on improvements in the
county, besides sixty thousand pounds more which have been remitted
from England for the purpose. This money has been spent on churches,
school-houses, harbours, public inns, roads, and bridges.
In 1811 there was not a carriage-road in the county, and only two
bridges. Since that time four hundred and thirty miles of road have
been constructed on the estate, at the expense of the proprietor and
tenants. There is not a turnpike-gate in the county, and yet the roads
are kept perfect.
Before 1811 the mail was conveyed entirely by a foot runner, and there
was but one post-office in the county; and there was no direct post
across the county, but letters to the north and west were forwarded
once a month. A mail-coach has since been established, to which
the late Duke of Sutherland contributed more than two thousand six
hundred pounds; and since 1834 mail-gigs have been established to
convey letters to the north and west coast, towards which the Duke of
Sutherland contributes three hundred pounds a year. There are sixteen
post-offices and sub-offices in the county. Before 1811 there was no
inn in the county fit for the reception of strangers. Since that time
there have been fourteen inns either built or enlarged by the duke.
Before 1811 there was scarcely a cart on the estate; all the carriage
was done on the backs of ponies. The cultivation of the interior was
generally executed with a rude kind of spade, and there was not a gig
in the county. In 1845 there were one thousand one hundred and thirty
carts owned on the estate, and seven hundred and eight ploughs, also
forty-one gigs.
Before 1812 there was no baker, and only two shops. In 1845 there were
eight bakers and forty-six grocers’ shops, in nearly all of which
shoe-blacking was sold to some extent, an unmistakable evidence of
advancing civilization.
In 1808 the cultivation of the coast-side of Sutherland was so
defective that it was necessary often, in a fall of snow, to cut down
the young Scotch firs to feed the cattle on; and in 1808 hay had to
be imported. _Now_ the coast side of Sutherland exhibits an extensive
district of land cultivated according to the best principles of modern
agriculture; several thousand acres have been added to the arable land
by these improvements.
Before 1811 there were no woodlands of any extent on the estate,
and timber had to be obtained from a distance. Since that time many
thousand acres of woodland have been planted, the thinnings of which,
being sold to the people at a moderate rate, have greatly increased
their comfort and improved their domestic arrangements.
Before 1811 there were only two blacksmiths in the county. In 1845
there were forty-two blacksmiths and sixty-three carpenters. Before
1829 the exports of the county consisted of black cattle of an inferior
description, pickled salmon, and some ponies; but these were precarious
sources of profit, as many died in winter for want of food; for
example, in the spring of 1807, two hundred cows, five hundred cattle,
and more than two hundred ponies died in the parish of Kildonan alone.
Since that time the measures pursued by the Duke of Sutherland, in
introducing improved breeds of cattle, pigs, and modes of agriculture,
have produced results in exports which tell their own story. About
forty thousand sheep and one hundred and eighty thousand fleece of wool
are exported annually; also fifty thousand barrels of herring.
The whole fishing village of Helmsdale has been built since that
time. It now contains from thirteen to fifteen curing yards covered
with slate, and several streets with houses similarly built. The
herring fishery, which has been mentioned as so productive, has been
established since the change, and affords employment to three thousand
nine hundred people.
Since 1811, also, a savings-bank has been established in every parish,
of which the Duke of Sutherland is patron and treasurer, and the
savings have been very considerable.
The education of the children of the people has been a subject of deep
interest to the Duke of Sutherland. Besides the parochial schools
(which answer, I suppose, to our district schools), of which the
greater number have been rebuilt or repaired at an expense exceeding
what is legally required for such purposes, the Duke of Sutherland
contributes to the support of several schools for young females, at
which sewing and other branches of education are taught; and in 1844 he
agreed to establish twelve General Assembly schools, in such parts of
the county as were without the sphere of the parochial schools, and to
build schools and schoolmasters’ houses, which will, upon an average,
cost two hundred pounds each; and to contribute annually two hundred
pounds in aid of salaries to the teachers, besides a garden and cow’s
grass; and in 1845 he made an arrangement with the education committee
of the Free Church, whereby no child, of whatever persuasion, will be
beyond the reach of moral and religious education.
There are five medical gentlemen on the estate, three of whom receive
allowances from the Duke of Sutherland for attendance on the poor in
the districts in which they reside.
An agricultural association, or farmers’ club, has been formed under
the patronage of the Duke of Sutherland, of which the other proprietors
in the county, and the larger tenantry, are members, which is in a very
active and flourishing state. They have recently invited Professor
Johnston to visit Sutherland and give lectures on agricultural
chemistry.
The total population of the Sutherland estate is twenty-one thousand
seven hundred and eighty-four. To have the charge and care of so large
an estate, of course, must require very systematic arrangements; but a
talent for system seems to be rather the forte of the English.
The estate is first divided into three districts, and each district
is under the superintendence of a factor, who communicates with the
duke through a general agent. Besides this, when the duke is on the
estate, which is during a portion of every year, he receives on Monday
whoever of his tenants wishes to see him. Their complaints or wishes
are presented in writing; he takes them into consideration, and gives
written replies.
Besides the three factors there is a ground officer, or sub-factor, in
every parish, and an agriculturist in the Dunrobin district, who gives
particular attention to instructing the people in the best methods of
farming. The factors, the ground officers, and the agriculturists,
all work to one common end. They teach the advantages of draining;
of ploughing deep, and forming their ridges in straight lines; of
constructing tanks for saving liquid manure. The young farmers also
pick up a great deal of knowledge when working as ploughmen or
labourers on the more immediate grounds of the estate.
The head agent, Mr. Loch, has been kind enough to put into my hands a
general report of the condition of the estate, which he drew up for the
inspection of the duke, May 12, 1853, and in which he goes minutely
over the condition of every part of the estate.
One anecdote of the former Duke of Sutherland will show the spirit
which has influenced the family in their management of the estate. In
1817, when there was much suffering on account of bad seasons, the Duke
of Sutherland sent down his chief agent to look into the condition of
the people, who desired the ministers of the parishes to send in their
lists of poor. To his surprise it was found that there were located
on the estate a number of people who had settled there without leave.
They amounted to four hundred and eight families, or two thousand
persons; and though they had no legal title to remain where they were,
no hesitation was shown in supplying them with food in the same manner
with those who were tenants, on the sole condition that on the first
opportunity they should take cottages on the sea-shore, and become
industrious people. It was the constant object of the duke to keep the
rents of his poorer tenants at a nominal amount.
What led me more particularly to inquire into these facts was, that I
received by mail, while in London, an account containing some of these
stories, which had been industriously circulated in America. There were
dreadful accounts of cruelties practised in the process of inducing
the tenants to change their places of residence. The following is a
specimen of these stories:--
“I was present at the pulling down and burning of the house of William
Chisholm, Badinloskin, in which was lying his wife’s mother, an old,
bed-ridden woman of near one hundred years of age, none of the family
being present. I informed the persons about to set fire to the house of
this circumstance, and prevailed on them to wait till Mr. Sellar came.
On his arrival I told him of the poor old woman, being a condition
unfit for removal. He replied, ‘The old witch! she has lived too long;
let her burn.’ Fire was immediately set to the house, and the blankets
in which she was carried were in flames before she could be got out.
She was placed in a little shed, and it was with great difficulty they
were prevented from firing that also. The old woman’s daughter arrived
while the house was on fire, and assisted the neighbours in removing
her mother out of the flames and smoke, presenting a picture of horror
which I shall never forget but cannot attempt to describe. She died
within five days.”
With regard to this story, Mr. Loch, the agent, says: “I must notice
the only thing like a fact stated in the newspaper extract which
you sent to me, wherein Mr. Sellar is accused of acts of cruelty
towards some of the people. This Mr. Sellar tested, by bringing an
action against the then Sheriff-substitute of the county. He obtained
a verdict for heavy damages. The Sheriff, by whom the slander was
propagated, left the county. Both are since dead.”
Having, through Lord Shaftesbury’s kindness, received the benefit of
Mr. Loch’s corrections to this statement, I am permitted to make a
little further extract from his reply. He says:--
“In addition to what I was able to say in my former paper, I can
now state that the Duke of Sutherland has received from one of
the most determined opposers of the measures, who travelled to the
north of Scotland as editor of a newspaper, a letter regretting all
he had written on the subject, being convinced that he was entirely
misinformed. As you take so much interest in the subject, I will
conclude by saying that nothing could exceed the prosperity of the
county during the past year; their stock, sheep, and other things sold
at high prices; their crops of grain and turnips were never so good,
and the potatoes were free from all disease: rents have been paid
better than was ever known. * * * As an instance of the improved habits
of the farmers, no house is now built for them that they do not require
a hot bath and water-closets.”
From this long epitome you can gather the following results. First, if
the system were a bad one, the Duchess of Sutherland had nothing to do
with it, since it was first introduced in 1806, the same year her grace
was born; and the accusation against Mr. Sellar, dates in 1811, when
her grace was five or six years old. The Sutherland arrangements were
completed in 1819, and her grace was not married to the duke till 1823,
so that, had the arrangement been the worst in the world, it is nothing
to the purpose so far as she is concerned.
As to whether the arrangement _is_ a bad one, the facts which have
been stated speak for themselves. To my view it is an almost sublime
instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in
shortening the struggles of advancing civilization, and elevating in
a few years a whole community to a point of education and material
prosperity, which, unassisted, they might never have obtained.
REPLY TO MRS. BEECHER STOWE BY DONALD MACLEOD.[8]
[8] From enlarged edition of “Gloomy Memories,” published in Canada in
1857.
From the year 1812 to 1820, the whole interior of the county of
Sutherland--whose inhabitants were advancing rapidly in the science
of agriculture and education, who by nature and exemplary training
were the bravest, the most moral and patriotic people that ever
existed--even admitting a few of them did violate the excise laws, the
only sin which Mr. Loch and all the rest of their avowed enemies could
bring against them--where a body of men could be raised on the shortest
possible notice that kings and emperors might and would be proud of;
and where the whole fertile valleys and straths which gave them birth
were in due season waving with corn; their mountains and hill-sides
studded with sheep and cattle; where rejoicing, felicity, happiness,
and true piety prevailed; where the martial notes of the bagpipes
sounded and reverberated from mountain to glen, from glen to mountain.
I say, marvellous! in eight years converted to a solitary wilderness,
where the voice of man praising God is not to be heard, nor the image
of God upon man to be seen; where you can set a compass with twenty
miles of a radius upon it, and go round with it full stretched, and not
find one acre of land within the circumference which has come under the
plough for the last thirty years, except a few in the parishes of Lairg
and Tongue,--all under mute brute animals. This is the advancement of
civilization, is it not, madam?
Return now with me to the beginning of your elaborate eulogy on the
Duchess of Sutherland, and if you are open to conviction, I think
you should be convinced that I never published nor circulated in the
American, English, or Scotch public prints any ridiculous, absurd
stories about her Grace of Sutherland. An abridgment of my lucubrations
is now in the hands of the public, and you may peruse them. I stand
by them as facts (stubborn chiels). I can prove them to be so even
in this country (Canada), by a cloud of living witnesses, and my
readers will find that, instead of bringing absurd accusations against
her Grace, that I have endeavoured in some instances to screen her
and her predecessors from the public odium their own policy and the
doings of their servants merited. Moreover, there is thirty years
since I began to expostulate with the House of Sutherland for their
shortsighted policy in dealing with their people as they were doing,
and it is twenty years since I began to expose them publicly, with my
real name, Donald MacLeod, attached to each letter, sending a copy of
the public paper where it appeared, directed by post, to the Duke of
Sutherland. These exposing and remonstrating letters were published
in the Edinburgh papers, where the Duke and his predecessors had
their principal Scotch law agent, and you may easily believe that I
was closely watched, with the view to find one false accusation in my
letters, but they were baffled. I am well aware that each letter I have
written on the subject would, if untrue, constitute a libel, and I knew
the editors, printers, and publishers of these papers were as liable
or responsible for libel as I was. But the House of Sutherland could
never venture to raise an action of damages against either of us. In
1841, when I published my first pamphlet, I paid $4 50c., for binding
one of them, in a splendid style, which I sent by mail to his Grace
the present Duke of Sutherland, with a complimentary note requesting
him to peruse it, and let me know if it contained anything offensive
or untrue. I never received a reply, nor did I expect it; yet I am
satisfied that his Grace did peruse it. I posted a copy of it to Mr.
Loch, his chief commissioner; to Mr. W. Mackenzie, his chief lawyer
in Edinburgh; to every one of their underlings, to sheep farmers, and
ministers in the county of Sutherland, who abetted the depopulators,
and I challenged the whole of them, and other literary scourges who
aid and justified their unhallowed doings, to gainsay one statement I
have made. Can you or any other believe that a poor sinner like Donald
MacLeod would be allowed for so many years to escape with impunity,
had he been circulating and publishing calumnious, absurd falsehoods
against such personages as the House of Sutherland? No, I tell you, if
money could secure my punishment, without establishing their own shame
and guilt, that it would be considered well-spent long ere now,--they
would eat me in penny pies if they could get me cooked for them.
I agree with you that the Duchess of Sutherland is a beautiful,
accomplished lady, who would shudder at the idea of taking a faggot or
a burning torch in her hand to set fire to the cottages of her tenants,
and so would her predecessor, the first Duchess of Sutherland, her
good mother; likewise would the late and present Dukes of Sutherland,
at least I am willing to believe that they would. Yet it was done
in their name, under their authority, to their knowledge, and with
their sanction. The dukes and duchesses of Sutherland, and those of
their depopulating order, had not, nor have they any call to defile
their pure hands in milder work than to burn people’s houses; no,
no, they had, and have plenty of willing tools at their beck to
perform their dirty work. Whatever amount of humanity and purity of
heart the late or the present Duke and Duchess may possess or be
ascribed to them, we know the class of men from whom they selected
their commissioners, factors, and underlings. I knew every one of the
unrighteous servants who ruled the Sutherland estate for the last fifty
years, and I am justified in saying that the most skilful phrenologist
and physiognomist that ever existed could not discern one spark of
humanity in the whole of them, from Mr. Loch down to Donald Sgrios,
or Damnable Donald, the name by which the latter was known. The most
of those cruel executors of the atrocities I have been describing are
now dead, and to be feared but not lamented. But it seems their chief
was left to give you all the information you required about British
slavery and oppression. I have read from speeches delivered by Mr.
Loch at public dinners among his own party, “that he would never be
satisfied until the Gaelic language and the Gaelic people would be
extirpated root and branch from the Sutherland estate; yes, from the
Highlands of Scotland.” He published a book, where he stated as a
positive fact, “that when he got the management of the Sutherland
estate he found 408 families on the estate who never heard the name of
Jesus,”--whereas I could make oath that there were not at that time,
and for ages prior to it, above two families within the limits of the
county who did not worship that Name and holy Being every morning and
evening. I know there are hundreds in the Canadas who will bear me out
in this assertion. I was at the pulling down and burning of the house
of William Chisholm. I got my hands burnt taking out the poor old woman
from amidst the flames of her once-comfortable though humble dwelling,
and a more horrifying and lamentable scene could scarcely be witnessed.
I may say the skeleton of a once tall, robust, high-cheek-boned,
respectable woman, who had seen better days; who could neither hear,
see, nor speak; without a tooth in her mouth, her cheek skin meeting
in the centre, her eyes sunk out of sight in their sockets, her mouth
wide open, her nose standing upright among smoke and flames, uttering
piercing moans of distress and agony, in articulations from which
could be only understood, “_Oh, Dhia, Dhia, teine, teine_--Oh God,
God, fire, fire.” When she came to the pure air, her bosom heaved to
a most extraordinary degree, accompanied by a deep hollow sound from
her lungs, comparable to the sound of thunder at a distance. When laid
down upon the bare, soft, moss floor of the roofless shed, I will
never forget the foam of perspiration which emitted and covered the
pallid death-looking countenance. This was a scene, madam, worthy of an
artist’s pencil, and of a conspicuous place on the stages of tragedy.
Yet you call this a specimen of the ridiculous stories which found
their way into respectable prints, because Mr. Loch, the chief actor,
told you that Sellar, the head executive, brought an action against the
sheriff and obtained a verdict for heavy damages. What a subterfuge;
but it will not answer the purpose, “_the bed is too short to stretch
yourself, and the covering too narrow and short to cover you_.” If you
took the information and evidence upon which you founded your _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_ from such unreliable sources (as I said before), who can
believe the one-tenth of your novel? I cannot. I have at my hand here
the grandchild of the slaughtered old woman, who recollects well of
the circumstance. I have not far from me a respectable man, an elder
in the Free Church, who was examined as a witness at Sellar’s trial,
at the Spring Assizes of Inverness, in 1816, which you will find
narrated in letters four and five of my work. Had you the opportunity,
madam, of seeing the scenes which I, and hundreds more, have seen--the
wild ferocious appearance of the infamous _gang_ who constituted the
burning party, covered over face and hands with soot and ashes of the
burning houses, cemented by torch-grease and their own sweat, kept
continually drunk or half-drunk while at work; and to observe the
hellish amusements some of them would get up for themselves and for
an additional pleasure to their leaders! The people’s houses were
generally built upon declivities, and in many cases not far from pretty
steep precipices. They preserved their meal in tight-made boxes, or
chests, as they were called, and when this fiendish party found any
quantity of meal, they would carry it between them to the brink,
and dispatch it down the precipice amidst shrieks and yells. It was
considered grand sport to see the box breaking to atoms and the meal
mixed with the air. When they would set fire to a house, they would
watch any of the domestic animals making their escape from the flames,
such as dogs, cats, hens, or any poultry; these were caught and thrown
back to the flames--grand sport for demons in human form!
As to the vaunted letter which his “Grace received from one of the most
determined opposers of the measures, who travelled in the north of
Scotland as editor of a newspaper, regretting all that he had written
on the subject, being convinced that he was misinformed,” I may tell
you, madam, that this man did not travel to the north or in the north
of Scotland, as editor; his name was Thomas Mulock; he came to Scotland
a fanatic speculator in literature in search of money, or a lucrative
situation, vainly thinking that he would be a dictator to every
editor in Scotland. He first attacked the immortal Hugh Miller of the
_Witness_, Edinburgh, but in him he met more than his match. He then
went to the north, got hold of my first pamphlet, and by setting it up
in a literary style, and in better English than I, he made a splendid
and promising appearance in the northern papers for some time; but
he found out that the money expected was not coming in, and that the
hotels, head inns, and taverns would not keep him up any longer without
the prospect of being paid for the past or for the future. I found out
that he was hard up, and a few of the Highlanders in Edinburgh and
myself sent him from twenty to thirty pounds sterling. When he saw
that that was all he was to get, he at once turned tail upon us, and
instead of expressing his gratitude, he abused us unsparingly, and
regretted that ever he wrote in behalf of such a hungry, moneyless
class. He smelled (like others we suspect) where the gold was hoarded
up for hypocrites and flatterers, and that one apologising letter to
his Grace would be worth ten times as much as he could expect from the
Highlanders all his lifetime; and I doubt not it was, for his apology
for the sin of misinformation got wide circulation.
He then went to France and started an English paper in Paris, and for
the service he rendered Napoleon in crushing republicanism during the
besieging of Rome, etc., the Emperor presented him with a _gold pin_,
and in a few days afterwards sent a _gendarme_ to him with a brief
notice that his service was not any longer required, and a warning to
quit France in a few days, which he had to do. What became of him after
I know not, but very likely he is dictating to young Loch, or some
other Metternich.
No feelings of hostile vindictiveness, no desire to inflict
chastisement, no desire to make riches, influenced my mind, pourtraying
the scenes of havoc and misery which in those past days darkened the
annals of Sutherland. I write in my own humble style, with higher
aims, wishing to prepare the way for demonstrating to the Dukes of
Sutherland, and all other Highland proprietors, great and small, that
the path of selfish aggrandisement and oppression leads by sure and
inevitable results, yea to the ruin and destruction of the blind and
misguided oppressors themselves. I consider the Duke himself victimised
on a large scale by an incurably wrong system, and by being enthralled
by wicked counsellors and servants. I have no hesitation in saying, had
his Grace and his predecessors bestowed one-half of the encouragement
they had bestowed upon strangers on the aborigines--a hardy, healthy,
abstemious people, who lived peaceably in their primitive habitations,
unaffected with the vices of a subtle civilization, possessing little,
but enjoying much; a race devoted to their hereditary chief, ready to
abide by his counsels; a race profitable in peace, and loyal, available
in war; I say, his Grace, the present Duke of Sutherland, and his
beautiful Duchess, would be without compeers in the British dominions,
their rents, at least doubled; would be as secure from invasion and
annoyance in Dunrobin Castle as Queen Victoria could, or can be, in
her Highland residence, at Balmoral, and far safer than she is in
her English home, Buckingham Palace; every man and son of Sutherland
would be ready, as in the days of yore, to shed the last drop of
their blood in defence of their chief, if required. Congratulations,
rejoicings, dancing to the martial notes of the pipes, would meet
them at the entrance to every glen and strath in Sutherlandshire,
accompanied, surrounded, and greeted, as they proceeded, by the most
grateful, devotedly attached, happy, and bravest peasantry that ever
existed; yes, but alas! where there is nothing now, but desolation and
the cries of famine and want, to meet the noble pair--the ruins of
once comfortable dwellings--will be seen the landmarks of the furrows
and ridges which yielded food to thousands, the footprints of the
arch-enemy of human happiness, and ravager--before, after, and on each
side, solitude, stillness, and the quiet of the grave, disturbed only
at intervals by the yells of a shepherd, or fox-hunter, and the bark
of a collie dog. Surely we must admit that the Marquises and Dukes
of Sutherland have been duped and victimised to a most extraordinary
and incredible extent; and we have Mr. Loch’s own words for it in his
speech in the House of Commons, June 21st, 1845: “I can state, as
from facts, that from 1811 to 1833, not one sixpence of rent has been
received from that county; but, on the contrary, there has been sent
there for the benefit and improvement of the people a sum exceeding
sixty thousand pounds sterling.” Now think you of this immense wealth
which has been expended. I am not certain, but I think the rental of
the county would exceed £60,000 a year; you have then from 1811 to
1833, twenty-two years, leaving them at the above figures, and the
sum total will amount to £1,320,000 expended upon the self-styled
Sutherland improvements; add to this £60,000 sent down to preserve the
lives of the victims of those improvements from death by famine, and
the sum total will turn out in the shape of £1,380,000. It surely cost
the heads of the house of Sutherland an immense sum of money to convert
the county into the state I have described it in a former part of this
work (and I challenge contradiction).
You should be surprised to hear and learn, madam, for what purposes
most of the money drained from the Duke’s coffers yearly are expended
since he became the Duke and proprietor of Sutherland, upholding the
Loch policy. There are no fewer than seventeen who are known by the
name of water bailiffs in the county, who receive yearly salaries,
what doing, think you? Protecting the operations of the Loch policy,
watching day and night the freshwater lakes, rivers, and creeks,
teeming with the finest salmon and trout fish in the world, guarding
from the famishing people, even during the years of famine and
dire distress, when many had to subsist upon weeds, sea-ware, and
shell-fish, yet guarded and preserved for the amusement of English
anglers; and what is still more heartrending, to prevent the dying by
hunger to pick up any of the dead fish left by the sporting anglers
rotting on the lake, creek, and river sides, when the smallest of them,
or a morsel, would be considered by hundreds, I may say thousands,
of the needy natives, a treat; but they durst not touch them, or if
they did and were found out to jail they were conducted, or removed
summarily from his Grace’s domains; (let me be understood, these
gentlemen had no use for the fish, killing them for amusement, only
what they required for their own use, and complimented to the factors;
they were not permitted to cure them).
You will find, madam, that about three miles from Dunrobin Castle
there is a branch of the sea which extends up the county about six
miles, where shell-fish, called mussels, abound. Here you will find
two sturdy men, called mussel bailiffs, supplied with rifles and
ammunition, and as many Newfoundland dogs as assistants, watching
the mussel scalps, or beds, to preserve them from the people in the
surrounding parishes of Dornoch, Rogart, and Golspie, and keep them,
to supply the fishermen, on the opposite side of the Moray Firth,
with bait, who come there every year and take away thousands of tons
of this nutritive shell-fish, when many hundreds of the people would
be thankful for a diet per day of them, to pacify the cravings of
nature. You will find that the unfortunate native fishermen, who
pay a yearly rent to his Grace for bait, are only permitted theirs
from the refuse left by the strangers of the other side of the Moray
Firth, and if they violate the _iron_ rule laid down to them, they are
entirely at the mercy of the underlings. There has been an instance
of two of the fishermen’s wives going on a cold, snowy, frosty day to
gather bait, but on account of the boisterous sea, could not reach the
place appointed by the factors; one took what they required from the
forbidden ground, and was observed by some of the bailiffs, in ambush,
who pursued them like tigers. One came up to her unobserved, took out
his knife, and cut the straps by which the basket or creel on her back
was suspended; the weight on her back fell to the ground, and she, poor
woman, big in the family way, fell her whole length forward in the snow
and frost. Her companion turned round to see what had happened, when
she was pushed back with such force that she fell; he then trampled
their baskets and mussels to atoms, took them both prisoners, ordered
one of them to call his superior bailiff to assist him, and kept the
other for two hours standing, wet as she was, among frost and snow,
until the superior came a distance of three miles. After a short
consultation upon the enormity of the crime, the two poor women were
led, like convicted criminals, to Golspie, to appear before Lycurgus
Gunn, and in that deplorable condition were left standing before their
own doors in the snow, until Marshall Gunn found it convenient to
appear and pronounce judgment,--verdict: You are allowed to go into
your houses this night; this day week you must leave this village
for ever, and the whole of the fishermen of the village are strictly
prohibited from taking bait from the Little Ferry until you leave; my
bailiffs are requested to see this my decree strictly attended to.
Being the middle of winter and heavy snow, they delayed a week longer:
ultimately the villagers had to expel the two families from among
them, so that they would get bait, having nothing to depend upon for
subsistence but the fishing, and fish they could not without bait.
This is a specimen of the injustice to and subjugation of the Golspie
fishermen, and of the people at large; likewise of the purposes for
which the Duke’s money is expended in that quarter. If you go, then, to
the other side of the domain, you will find another Kyle, or a branch
of the sea, which abounds in cockles and other shell-fish, fortunately
for the poor people, not forbidden by a Loch ukase. But in the years
of distress, when the people were principally living upon vegetables,
sea-weeds, and shell-fish, various diseases made their appearance
amongst them hitherto unknown. The absence of meal of any kind being
considered the primary cause, some of the people thought they would be
permitted to exchange shell-fish for meal with their more fortunate
neighbours in Caithness, to whom such shell-fish were a rarity, and
so far the understanding went between them, that the Caithness boats
came up loaded with meal, but the Loch embargo, through his underling
in Tongue, who was watching their movements, was at once placed upon
it; the Caithness boats had to return home with the meal, and the
Duke’s people might live or die, as they best could. Now, madam, you
have steeped your brains, and ransacked the English language to find
refined terms for your panegyric on the Duke, Duchess, and family of
Sutherland. (I find no fault with you, knowing you have been well paid
for it.) But I would briefly ask you (and others who devoted much of
their time and talents in the same strain), would it not be more like
a noble pair--if they did merit such noble praise as you have bestowed
upon them--if they had, especially during years of famine and distress,
freely opened up all these bountiful resources which God in His eternal
wisdom and goodness prepared for His people, and which should never be
intercepted nor restricted by man or men. You and others have composed
hymns of praise, which it is questionable if there is a tune in heaven
to sing them to.
So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under
the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had
no comforter: and on the side of their oppressors there was power;
but they had no comforter.--Ecclesiastes iv. 1.
The wretch that works and weeps without relief
Has one that notices his silent grief.
He, from whose hands all pow’r proceeds
Ranks its abuse among the foulest deeds,
Considers _all_ injustice with a frown,
But _marks_ the man that treads his fellow down.
Remember Heav’n has an avenging rod--
To smite the poor is treason against God.--_Cowper._
But you shall find the Duke’s money is expended for most astonishing
purposes; not a little of it goes to hire hypocrites, and renowned
literary flatterers, to vindicate the mal-administration of those to
whom he entrusted the management of his affairs, and make his Grace
(who is by nature a simple-minded man) believe his servants are
innocent of all the charges brought against them, and doing justice to
himself and to his people, when they are doing the greatest injustice
to both; so that instead of calling his servants to account at any
time, and enquiring into the broad charges brought against them--as
every wise landlord should do--it seems the greater the enormities of
foul deeds they commit, and the louder their accusations may sound
through the land, the farther they are received into his favour. The
fact is, that James Loch was Duke of Sutherland, and not the “tall,
slender man with rather a thin face, light brown hair, and mild blue
eyes,” who armed you up the extraordinary elegant staircase in Stafford
House.
The Duchess of Sutherland pays a visit every year to Dunrobin Castle,
and has seen and heard so many supplicating appeals presented to her
husband by the poor fishermen of Golspie, soliciting liberty to take
mussels from the Little Ferry Sands to bait their nets--a liberty of
which they were deprived by his factors, though paying yearly rent for
it; yet returned by his Grace with the brief deliverance, that he could
do nothing for them. Can I believe that this is the same personage
who can set out from Dunrobin Castle, her own Highland seat, and
after travelling from it, then can ride in one direction over thirty
miles, in another direction forty-four miles, in another, by taking
the necessary circuitous route, sixty miles, and that over fertile
glens, valleys, and straths, bursting with fatness, which gave birth
to, and where were reared for ages, thousands of the bravest, the most
moral, virtuous, and religious men that Europe could boast of; ready
to a man, at a moment’s warning from their chiefs, to rise in defence
of their king, queen, and country; animated with patriotism and love
to their chief, and irresistible in the battle contest for victory?
But these valiant men had then a _country_, a _home_, and a _chief_
worth the fighting for. But I can tell her that she can now ride over
these extensive tracts in the interior of the county without seeing the
image of God upon a man travelling these roads, with the exception of
a wandering Highland shepherd, wrapped up in a grey plaid to the eyes,
with a collie dog behind him as a drill sergeant to train his ewes and
to marshal his tups. There may happen to travel over the dreary tract a
geologist, a tourist, or a lonely carrier, but these are as rare as a
pelican in the wilderness, or a camel’s convoy caravan in the deserts
of Arabia. Add to this a few English sportsmen, with their stag hounds,
pointer dogs, and servants, and put themselves and their bravery
together, and one company of French soldiers would put ten thousand of
them to a disorderly flight, to save their own carcases, leaving their
ewes and tups to feed the invaders!
The question may arise, where those people, who inhabited this
country at one period, have gone? In America and Australia the most
of them will be found. The Sutherland family and the nation had no
need of their s
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