A History of the Highland Clearances

Emigration, Protest, Reasons

Eric Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000082432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1985, A History of the Highland Clearances: Volume 2 explores the various types of communal and intellectual responses, contemporary and retrospective, to the experience of the clearances. The first section considers the legacy of the two hundred years' debate about the Highland problem and the place of the clearances therein. The second section assesses the scale, range and timing of the emigrations of the Highlanders, as well as some of the motivations. The third section contemplates the direct popular response to the clearances, the collective memory and the tradition of physical resistance. The fourth section is about the career, trial and reputation of Patrick Sellar, which together embodied much of the social history, ruling ideas, and the necessary mythology of the clearances. The final section considers the fundamental economic problem of the Highlands in the age of the clearances, and the moral and economic alternatives that faced the community, the landlords, and the nation.

PART ONE

THE EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND

1

DR JOHNSON, DR SMITH AND THE IMPROVERS

I entered several of these huts [on Mull in 1797] which are even inferior to the generality of poor cottages in Wales. Their interior represents the most abject state to which human nature, by poverty and barbarism, can possible be reduced. The pig-sties of England are palaces to the huts of Mull; because the former admit at least fresh air, to which the latter are entirely strangers. But if anyone imagines happiness and contentment are strangers in these receptacles of abomination, they are much deceived, so relative is all human felicity. Surely, if anything can teach mankind the golden lesson of being contented with a small and peaceful competence, it is the spectacle of unfeigned satisfaction amidst poverty and want, such as this … We do not visit the Hebrides to see stately palaces, and groves of citron, but to behold uncultivated nature, in the shed of the Highlander, or the solitude of mountains … I found the untutored natives such as I expected them to be, and in their miserable mountains received a lesson of contentment, which future impressions will never be able to obliterate.

The Life and Remains of the Rev. Edward
Daniel Clarke LL D, ed. William Otter

To the people of the Highlands the clearances that dominated the years between 1780 and 1855 were nothing less than a devastation of the old patterns of life. The foundations of their existence uprooted, the dispersed, disaffiliated peasantry met their fate without comprehension. For many landlords, the clearances were the means to improvement and profit, though for some the evictions were the last resort in an unavailing war against poverty and overpopulation. They, too, had little understanding of the reasons why. To the improvers of the eighteenth century, and their twentieth-century successors (planners and economists, historians and politicians), the question of Highland depopulation and undevelopment constituted a great intellectual challenge. Were the Highland clearances really necessary?

The clearances were part of a tragic problem entrapping the Highlands from at least 1800, and probably for much longer. By then it was already apparent to some that the people of the north were excluded from the benefits of industrialisation currently transforming the British Isles; it was becoming evident that population growth was outstripping the resources of that region. Realisation was dawning too that the landlords as a class would not, or could not, devise schemes capable of sustaining the swollen population. Thus the sheep came in by their thousands and pressed the human population out to the fringes of the land. Large numbers of people left the Highlands altogether, with or without direct compulsion from the proprietors; and those who remained lived in conditions of agricultural squalor which became a stain on the character of the Scottish (and indeed the British) nation. That this should happen during the age of improvement, when Britain cast off its pre-industrial shackles and eventually provided security of subsistence, and even affluence, to the masses was profoundly perplexing to the Victorian age. Whether the conundrum has yet been solved is a matter of some considerable controversy, and the subject of these chapters.

The effort to understand the ‘Highland Problem’ began in earnest when the intellectuals of the south ceased to dismiss the Highlands as barbarous, uncouth and literally unspeakable. The application of systematic analysis to the north of Scotland, not surprisingly, coincided with the rise of economic science, the doctrines of improvement, and the associated rational forces of the Enlightenment. And although few of the great Scottish intellects of the eighteenth century invested much direct attention in the Highlands, the general influence of their thinking saturated the ideas of virtually all observers of the time. The impact of the political economists may be juxtaposed with the direct observations of eye witnesses during the same period. The Highlands, soon after Culloden, began to exert a magnetic attraction for crusaders, the curious and the entrepreneurs. Between them, the political economists and the travellers shaped the definition and the diagnoses of the Highland problem during the age of the clearances.

I

For more than two hundred years there has been a procession of literary visitors to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland: tourists, journalists, missionaries, geologists, economists, sportsmen and, latterly, battalions of sociologists. The intrepid Samuel Johnson and his Lowland guide, James Boswell, aroused the nation’s curiosity in the 1770s about this outlying culture, revealing the existence within a few hundred miles of the metropolis of a separate civilisation, as mysterious and exotic as any of the social systems recently discovered in the South Seas. The coexistence of breathtaking scenery, extraordinary social organisation and customs, and rank poverty was an attraction irresistible to southern visitors. The challenge was both aesthetic and intellectual. The effort to understand the nature of this society, to diagnose the ‘Highland Problem’, and to prescribe the proper direction of its development became the preoccupation of a succession of well-meaning outsiders who freely offered their thoughts to the Highland lairds and the government during the following two hundred years.

When Johnson and Boswell journeyed to the Hebrides in 1773 a structural transformation of the Highlands was already under way. In common with most of Western Europe, the Highlands was subjected to a series of pressures and opportunities which shifted the very foundations of life in the region. After the defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745–1745, northern Scotland was comprehensively pacified by military and political power. A substantial part of the territory was expropriated from the rebellious landowners and administered on commercial principles for the government. Many private owners, already gripped by the propaganda of improvement, were conscious of the possibility of rapidly increasing rent-rolls. Rising prices for Highland products — notably cattle, kelp and wool, but also fish — encouraged the idea that the region could be made rich if directed rationally and supplied with enterprising capital investment. The extraordinary expansion of the industrial economy of Britain exerted profound effects on the Scottish Highlands: in essence the expansionary stimuli from the south ended northern isolation and created powerful economic incentives for new patterns of production, and for a radically changed society.

The 1770s witnessed the emergence of these trends in forms which were clear to the eyes of Johnson and Boswell: landowners and capitalists were experimenting with improved methods of agricultural organisation and new enterprise flowered in many parts of the region. The disruption of the old tenurial arrangements was already creating turmoil in the lives of the common people. Rents were rising and commercial sheepfarmers had begun to colonise the southern quarters of the Highlands. While the expansion of pastoralism intensified the pressure on landed resources, the phenomenal success of the potato (only very recently accepted into the common people’s diet) worked to relieve land hunger, at least in the short run. The region had always been hostage to famine, and despite the new economic activity generated there in these decades, the iron grip of Malthusian forces was not broken. In part it was because population growth, already marked by 1770, outpaced the expansion of the Highland economy. In part it was a consequence also of the changing pattern of production and labour needs of the region which rendered redundant a large proportion of the swelling population. The poverty of the region was reflected in the recurrence of famine into the nineteenth century, and in the large seasonal and permanent emigrations remarked upon by most of the visitors who followed in the footsteps of Dr Johnson and his companion.

The story of the Highlands after Culloden was, therefore, one of failure. In contrast to most of the rest of Britain, where industrialisation eventually raised the average living standards of a vastly increased population, the Highlands seemed to regress. A region which had once supported practically half the population of Scotland, and had maintained a virtual autonomy of political structure and culture, was reduced by 1840 to a rural slum, frequently unable to feed itself and losing population at a time when growth was occurring elsewhere. In the context of British economic growth, the Highlands became ‘the regional problem’ par excellence.

The history of the ‘Highland Clearances’ is inseparable from the ‘Highland Problem’. Two centuries of controversy have raged over their consequences, comprehending questions of morality, cultural decline, landlord obligation, racial autonomy, genocide, economic development and religion. At its core are propositions about landlord culpability for the tragedy of modern Highland history, the role of the church, the policy of the Westminster government, and the relations between the Highlands and the Lowlands, England and Scotland, Celt and Anglo-Saxon. It boils over in controversy about the degree of violence employed by the Highland proprietors during the process of eviction. The literature is generally emotive and polemical, intertwined in a series of criteria which are extraordinarily difficult to disentangle.

Much of the obscurity and controversy in the debate is unnecessary. The character of the clearances, the attitudes of the landlords, the methods of the evictions, the response of the people, even the role of the factors and the ministers, and the posture of the government are — on the whole — not questions which can any longer generate much disagreement.¹ The relevant questions for rational debate are not what happened, or even how it happened, but why the clearances happened and with what consequences? In effect the important historical issues which remain are concerned with explanation and interpretation and it is to these matters that this volume is mainly addressed.

The Highland region has been a poor relation of England and the Lowlands throughout the modern period: and, ever since the clearances, it has been exceptionally difficult to generate balanced economic development there. The great question for historians is the degree of responsibility that may be attributed to the clearances for Highland poverty and economic distress in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries. The fact that there were other concurrent causes renders the question at once more interesting and more complicated.

It was natural that those controlling the resources of the Highlands, the landlords, should be held directly responsible for the poverty of the people. This view was implicit, if not explicit, in most contemporary accounts. In 1803, thirty years after Johnson and Boswell, another tourist, the Rev. P. B. Homer, commented on the current exodus of Highlanders from the north:

I asked the landlady what was the cause of the emigrations; she answered ‘oppression and poverty’ … If the poor in England are discontented with their lot let them come to the Highlands of Scotland and compare their conditions with what they find here. The life of the poor is here the most destitute and the most deplorable that an imagination can conceive. In the supply of its necessary wants it is not raised one degree above that of the savages of Otaheite.²

Homer’s view was unambiguous: the Highlanders were poor because the landlords were oppressive. Underlying his diagnosis was the assumption that the region possessed genuine control over its own destiny, through the instrumentality of its landlords. It is a question which provides the primary focus for the present volume.

The debate about the Highland clearances and the causes of Highland poverty and undevelopment has been a living issue in Scottish politics almost since the first Blackface sheep crossed the Highland line. There exists, therefore, a substantial body of critical literature which, though it may not match the richness and depth of research that informs much discussion of the English and Irish land questions, is not inferior in passion and controversy. Much of it is based upon sketchy evidence and analysis innocent of alternate realities. It reflects both the changing currents of wider intellectual influences affecting governments’ and landlords’ policies, and the dogmatism which has consistently disfigured the debate. Above all, the long debate illustrates the power of myth in historical explanation.

II

No visitor or scholar served the Highlands better, nor repaid its hospitality more fully, than James Boswell and Dr Samuel Johnson. Accounts of their tour provide some of the earliest and most perspicacious thoughts on the transformation of the Highlands in the second half of the eighteenth century. Their itinerary took in Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull and Ulva, as well as parts of the inland south of Inverness and Glenelg. Travellers’ tales of the eighteenth century are an unreliable genre, often written mainly for literary effect and designed to leave the reader open-mouthed at the freakishness of distant places.³ Johnson and Boswell were entirely exceptional. The journals of their tour⁴ provide a marvellous introduction to the condition of the Highlands already in the throes of great change. They identified changes under way even before the impact of the clearances, and foreshadowed several of the key issues that recur in virtually all the subsequent literature on the Highland question.

Johnson described, in striking prose, a society in a state of degeneration and demoralisation, ‘crushed by the heavy hand of a vindictive conqueror’.⁵ Its humiliation after Culloden had left a hollow shell of the previous life: ‘The...