Highland Clearances

Ruined croft houses on Fuaigh Mòr in Loch Roag. The island was cleared of its inhabitants in 1841 and is now only used for grazing sheep.

The Highland Clearances (Scottish Gaelic: Fuadach nan Gàidheal, the "expulsion of the Gael") was the forced displacement of a significant number of people in the Scottish Highlands during the 18th and 19th centuries, as a result of an agricultural revolution, that resulted in enclosures, largely carried out by hereditary aristocratic landowners.

The changes were seen to be supported by the government, which gave financial aid for roads and bridges to assist the new sheep-based agriculture and trade.

There was large-scale forced migration to the sea coast, the Scottish Lowlands and North America, Australia and New Zealand. The clearances were particularly notorious as a result of the late timing, the lack of legal protection for year-by-year tenants under Scots law, the abruptness of the change from the traditional clan system, and the brutality of many evictions.

Background

The enclosures that depopulated rural England in the British Agricultural Revolution started much earlier, during the Tudor period, and similar developments in Scotland have lately been called the Lowland Clearances by historians such as Tom Devine. But in the Highlands the impact on a Goidelic (Scottish Gaelic)-speaking semi-feudal culture that anticipated the fulfilment of obligations of a chief to his clan, led to vocal campaigning and a lingering bitterness among the descendants of those forced to emigrate or to remain in crofting townships on very small areas of poor farming land. Crofters became a source of virtually free labour to their landlords, being forced to work long hours in activities such as harvesting and processing of kelp, an activity that reached its peak in the West Highlands between 1750 and 1815.

From the late 16th century, laws required clan leaders to appear in Edinburgh regularly to provide bonds for the conduct of anyone in their territory. This created a tendency among chiefs to see themselves as landlords. The lesser clan-gentry increasingly took up droving, taking cattle along the old unpaved drove roads to sell in the Lowlands. This brought wealth and land ownership within the clan, though the Highlands continued to be overpopulated and poor.

The Jacobite Risings brought repeated British government efforts to curb the clans, culminating after the 1746 Battle of Culloden with brutal repression. The Act of Proscription of 1746 incorporating the Dress Act required all swords to be surrendered to the government and prohibited the wearing of tartans or kilts. The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 ended the feudal bond of military service and the Heritable Jurisdictions Act removed the virtually sovereign power the chiefs held over their clan. The extent of enforcement of the prohibitions varied and related to a clan's support of the government during the rebellion, but over all led to the destruction of the traditional clan system and of the supportive social structures of small agricultural townships.

From about 1725, in the aftermath of the first Jacobite Rising, Highlanders had begun emigrating to the Americas in increasing numbers. The Disarming Act of 1746 and the Clan Act made ineffectual attempts to subdue the Scottish Highlands, and eventually troops were sent in. Government garrisons were built or extended in the Great Glen at Fort William, Kiliwhimin (later renamed Fort Augustus) and Fort George, Inverness, as well as barracks at Ruthven, Bernera and Inversnaid, linked to the south by the Wade roads (constructed for Major-General George Wade). These had the effect of limiting organisational travel and choking off news and further isolated the clans. Nevertheless, conditions remained unsettled for the whole decade.

"Improvements"

Two improvers and their possessions: Lady Grisell Baillie (1665-1744) and Sheriff Donald MacLeod (1745-1834).

What became known as the Clearances were considered by the landlords as necessary "improvements". They are thought to have been begun by Admiral John Ross of Balnagowan Castle in Scotland in 1762. MacLeod of MacLeod (i.e., the chief of MacLeod) began experimental work on Skye in 1732. Chiefs engaged Lowland, or sometimes English, factors with expertise in more profitable sheep farming, and they "encouraged", sometimes forcibly, the population to move off suitable land.

To landlords, "improvement" and "clearance" did not necessarily mean depopulation. At least until the 1820s, when there were steep falls in the price of kelp, landlords wanted to create pools of cheap or virtually free labour, supplied by families subsisting in new crofting townships. Kelp collection and processing was a very profitable way of using this labour, and landlords petitioned successfully for legislation designed to stop emigration. This took the form of the Passenger Vessels Act 1803. Attitudes changed during the 1820s and, for many landlords, the potato famine which began in 1846 became another reason for encouraging or forcing emigration and depopulation.

Year of the Sheep

Another wave of mass emigration came in 1792, known as the Bliadhna nan Caorach ("Year of the Sheep") to Gaelic speaking Scottish Highlanders. The people were accommodated in poor crofts or small farms in coastal areas where farming could not sustain the communities and they were expected to take up fishing. In the village of Badbea in Caithness the conditions were so harsh that, while the women worked, they had to tether their livestock and even their children to rocks or posts to prevent them being blown over the cliffs.

Others were put directly onto emigration ships to Nova Scotia (Antigonish and Pictou counties and later Cape Breton), the Glengarry and Kingston areas of Ontario and the Carolinas of the American colonies.

There may have been a religious element in these forced removals since many Highlanders were Roman Catholic. This is reflected by the majority representation of Catholics in areas of Nova Scotia, such as in the town of Antigonish and the island of Cape Breton.

However almost all of the very large movement of Highland settlers to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina were Presbyterian. (This is evidenced even today in the presence and extent of Presbyterian congregations and adherents in the region.) Although, 'not all Highland Scots remained in North Carolina.  After the Revolution, some left for Barbados, Nova Scotia, or Great Britain, because they had lost their property by either being confiscated or emerced by the local government.'

See also: Highland Clearances § Impact of the Clearances

In 1792 tenant farmers from Strathrusdale led a protest by driving over 6,000 sheep off the land surrounding Ardross. This action, commonly referred to as the "Ross-shire Sheep Riot", was dealt with at the highest levels in government, with the Home Secretary Henry Dundas getting involved. The Black Watch was mobilised; it halted the drive and brought the ringleaders to trial. They were found guilty, but later escaped custody and disappeared.

Second phase of the Clearances

Ormaig was once the principal settlement on the Isle of Ulva near Mull. It had been inhabited since prehistoric times, until it was cleared by Francis William Clark in the mid 19th century.

It was only in the early nineteenth century that the second, more brutal phase of the Clearances began; this was well before the 1822 visit by George IV, when lowlanders set aside their previous distrust and hatred of the Highlanders and identified with them as national symbols. However, the cumulative effect was particularly devastating to the cultural landscape of Scotland in a way that did not happen in other areas of Britain.

Portrait by Henry Raeburn of Alexander Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry in 1812. MacDonnell claimed to support Highland Culture, while simultaneously clearing his tenants.

In 1807 Elizabeth Gordon, 19th Countess of Sutherland, touring her inheritance with her husband Lord Stafford (later made Duke of Sutherland), wrote that "he is seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements, and we both turn our attention with the greatest of energy to turnips". As well as turning land over to sheep farming, Stafford planned to invest in creating a coal-pit, salt pans, brick and tile works and herring fisheries. That year his agents began the evictions, and 90 families were forced to leave their crops in the ground and move their cattle, furniture and timbers to the land they were offered 20 miles (32 km) away on the coast, living in the open until they had built themselves new houses. Stafford's first Commissioner, William Young, arrived in 1809, and soon engaged Patrick Sellar as his factor who pressed ahead with the process while acquiring sheep farming estates for himself. This plan has been described as a "typical example... of social engineering which met neither the hopes of the benefactors nor the needs of the beneficiaries, but produced social disaster."

The Sutherlands were responsible for brutal clearances between 1811 and 1820. Evictions at the rate of 2,000 families in one day were not uncommon. Many starved and froze to death where their homes had once been. The Duchess of Sutherland, on seeing the starving tenants on her husband's estate, remarked in a letter to a friend in England, "Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals." Patrick Sellar, employed by the duke to organise the removals, in person threw people out if they showed any reluctance to go, and burned down their crofts to make sure they never came back. Two old people Sellar evicted were too ill to go far. He left them exposed to the chill northern air and they died. He was acquitted on a charge of manslaughter, but the duke’s wife wrote: “The more I hear and see of Sellar the more I am convinced that he is not to be trusted more than he is at present. He is so exceedingly greedy and harsh with the people, there are very heavy complaints against him from Strathnaver.” In due course Sellar was sacked.

Elsewhere, the flamboyant Alexander Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry portrayed himself as the last genuine specimen of the true Highland Chief while his tenants were subjected to a process of relentless eviction.

Account by Donald McLeod

Donald McLeod, a Sutherland crofter, wrote about the events he witnessed:

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 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.

Accounts like those of McLeod and General David Stewart of Garth brought widespread condemnation.

Potato famine

Main article: Highland Potato Famine

A romanticised early Victorian depiction of a member of Clan MacAlister leaving Scotland for Canada, by R. R. McIan.

As in Ireland, the potato crop failed in the mid nineteenth century, and a widespread outbreak of cholera further weakened the Highland population. The ongoing clearance policy resulted in starvation, deaths, and a secondary clearance, when families either migrated voluntarily or were forcibly evicted. There were many deaths of children and old people. As there were few alternatives, people emigrated, joined the British army, or moved to growing urban centres such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee in Lowland Scotland and Newcastle upon Tyne and Liverpool in the north of England. In places some people were given economic incentives to move, but in many instances landlords used violent methods.

However, the Clearances did result in significant emigration of Highlanders to North America and Australasia — where today are found considerably more descendants of Highlanders than in Scotland itself.

One estimate for Cape Breton, Nova Scotia has 25,000 Gaelic-speaking Scots arriving as immigrants between 1775 and 1850. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were an estimated 100,000 Gaelic speakers in Cape Breton, but because of economic migration to English-speaking areas and the lack of Gaelic education in the Nova Scotian school system, the numbers of Gaelic speakers fell dramatically. By the beginning of the 21st century, the number of native Gaelic speakers had fallen to well below 1,000.

A major destination for these emigrants in the 18th century and early 19th century was Glengarry County, an original settlement for Highland Scots in what is now present-day eastern Ontario. Gaelic was the native tongue of the settlement in which thousands of people spoke the language throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the number of native speakers has decreased since in result of English and French migration throughout the county. In respect for their and their ancestors' Scottish culture, the county hosts the annual Glengarry Highland Games, one of the biggest Highland Games gatherings of its kind outside Scotland.

Aspects of the Clearances

A Highland Clearance has been defined as “an enforced simultaneous eviction of all families living in a given area such as an entire glen”. The Highland Clearances were a complex series of such events occurring over a period of more than a hundred years. It is difficult to make generalizations about the period without oversimplifying. Eric Richards, for example, who has written extensively on the subject for over 40 years, has chosen to conclude his most recent book on the subject with a chapter entitled “Answers and Questions”, rather than trying to wrap things neatly up with such generalizations. This section follows that example with a number of subsections on various aspects of the Clearances.

Race

There was a racial element behind some clearances based on a belief by some that the Celt was racially inferior to the Anglo Saxon. George Combe's popular and influential The Constitution of Man, published in 1828, provided a framework which would be used by some to support theories of racial superiority. In 1850 Robert Knox published “The Races of Men” which asserted the inferiority of the Celt compared to the Anglo Saxon and Nordic races.

The view that the economic failures of the Highlands were due to the shortcomings of the Celtic race was shared and expressed by the two most important Scottish newspapers, The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald – and even the more northerly Inverness Courier.

In 1851 The Scotsman wrote that

“Collective emigration is, therefore, the removal of a diseased and damaged part of our population. It is a relief to the rest of the population to be rid of this part.”

Similar views were held by senior public officials. Sir Charles Trevelyan was cofounder with Sir John McNeill of the Highland and Island Emigration Society. In a letter to McNeill in 1852 he wrote that

“A national effort” would now be necessary in order to rid the land of “the surviving Irish and Scotch Celts”. The exodus would then allow for the settlement of a racially superior people of Teutonic stock. He welcomed “the prospects of flights of Germans settling here in increasing numbers – an orderly, moral, industrious and frugal people, less foreign to us than the Irish or Scotch Celt, a congenial element which will readily assimilate with our body politic.”

(The "flights of Germans" in the above quotation may relate to significant emigration from Germany in the years that followed the failure of the German March Revolution of 1848)

Religion

See also: Religion in Scotland, Scottish religion in the eighteenth century, and History of religion in Scotland

Roman Catholicism

See also: Roman Catholicism in Scotland

After the Reformation Catholicism had been reduced to the fringes of the country, particularly the Gaelic-speaking areas of the Highlands and Islands . Numbers probably reduced in the seventeenth century and organisation had deteriorated. In the 1960s popular historian John Prebble's stated that Roman Catholicism flourished "[w]here there were deep glens, protected by the broadsword or the earth itself". The Pope appointed Thomas Nicolson as the first Vicar Apostolic over the mission in 1694. The country was organised into districts and by 1703 there were thirty-three Catholic clergy. Conditions also grew worse for Catholics after the Jacobite rebellions and Catholicism was reduced to little more than a poorly-run mission . In 1733 it was divided into two vicariates, one for the Highland and one for the Lowland, each under a bishop. There were six attempts to found a seminary in the Highlands between 1732 and 1838, all of which floundered on financial issues. Clergy entered the country secretly and although services were illegal they were maintained. In 1755 it was estimated that there were only 16,500 communicants, mainly in the north and west, although the number is probably an underestimate. Another source, based on contemporary records, estimates that in 1764, "the total Catholic population in Scotland would have been about 33,000 or 2.6% of the total population. Of these 23,000 were in the Highlands".

Background

Following the Scottish Reformation, when practicing Roman Catholicism was made illegal through the Penal laws and severe restraint put on any member of the Roman Catholic Church from participating in civil society; the Battle of Culloden, where Roman Catholic clans and those clans with a tolerant policy on private conscience (including those with Protestant chiefs) fought on the side of the Jacobites; the Disruption of 1843 ; and the Clearances, Roman Catholicism would no longer be the dominant religion in the Highlands.

Pre-Early Catholic Emancipation

During the mid-phase of Clearances, in The Highlands and Aberdeenshire Roman Catholicism was the religion of an estimate of around 10% of the population. As Michael Lynch states, '[i]n 1764, it had been estimated that there were 13,166 Catholics in the Highlands; perhaps a quarter of them had emigrated by 1790.'

Despite being illegal, a Roman Catholic seminary in Scalan in Glenlivet was the preliminary centre of education for Catholic priests in the area; though it was burnt to the ground on several occasions by soldiers sent from beyond The Highlands.

Following the “Relief Act“ of 1791

There is evidence of anti-Catholicism in the thoughts of some who were responsible for the clearances. However, Grant Dawson and Sonia Farber note that "although the landlords did not target people for ethnic or religious reasons, the effect of the Clearances was to destroy much of the Gaelic culture, which was dispersed along with the people that fled.

Whether or not there was tacit approval from the then Edinburgh establishment, the Catholic diaspora of The Highlands either made settlements en masse in places like Nova Scotia, or over a much wider dispersion throughout what would become The Commonwealth. In particular, large numbers of Catholics emigrated from the Western Highlands in the period 1770 to 1810 and there is evidence that anti Catholic sentiment (along with famine, poverty and rising rents) was a contributory factor in that period.

Noteworthy figures in the late stages of the specifically Catholic clearances and immigration from Scotland include Bishop Alexander Macdonnell, who, against the odds, made possible a settlement in Ontario, Canada, of an army regiment, and their families, after its disbandment.

Land reform

The Highland Land League eventually achieved land reform in the enactment of Crofting Acts, but these could not bring economic viability and came too late at a time when the land was already suffering from depopulation.

Memorials to the Clearances

The Highland Clearances are still remembered especially in the areas affected by the forced emigration and hardship endured by the peoples of the Highlands and their descendants across the world.

Scotland

The Emigrants Statue commemorates the flight of Highlanders during the clearances, but is also a testament to their accomplishments in the places they settled. Located at the foot of the Highland Mountains in Helmsdale, Scotland.

On 23 July 2007, the Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond unveiled a 10 ft-high bronze "Exiles" statue in Helmsdale, Sutherland, which commemorates the people who were cleared from the area by landowners and left their homeland to begin new lives overseas. The statue, which depicts a family leaving their home, stands at the mouth of the Strath of Kildonan and was funded by Dennis Macleod, a Scottish-Canadian mining millionaire who also attended the ceremony.

Canada

An identical 10 ft-high bronze "Exiles" statue has also been set up on the banks of the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

See also

• Lowland Clearances
• Clan MacDonell of Glengarry
• Highland Land League
• Crofting
• Scottish Canadian

External links

• Narratives in a Landscape: Monuments and Memories of the Sutherland Clearances dissertation on the landscape of the Clearances
• Highland Clearances by Janet Mackay
• The Tragic Highland Clearances, a history
• Abandoned communities - the clearance of Strathnaver 1814-1819
• The Cultural Impact of the Highland Clearances, a BBC History article by Ross Noble
• The Highland Clearances. Article by Thomas Devine, published in Refresh 4, Spring 1987.
• The impact of the Highland Clearances on one Mull family and their aftermath - a linear case study. http://www.blackshouse.demon.co.uk/knockan.htm
• Badbea Descendants Website
• Clanship, Duthchas & Culloden: The Prelude to Clearance

Further reading (with bibliography)

• An overview of the Clearances, Alexander McKenzie, 1881.
• Gloomy Memories, Donald Macleod, 1857 (first-hand account of Sutherland clearances).
• "Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power", Alastair McIntosh, Aurum Press Ltd, 2004, ISBN 1-85410-802-6
• The Highland Clearances, John Prebble, Secker & Warburg, 1963
• The Highland Clearances, Eric Richards, Birlinn Books, 2000.
• A history of the Highland clearances. Vol.1, Agrarian transformation and the evictions 1746-1886", Eric Richards, Croom Helm, c1982, 085664496X
• The Strathnaver Trilogy, Ian Grimble. 3vols: Chief of MacKay, The Trial of Patrick Sellar, and The World of Rob Donn.
• The People of Glengarry. Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820, Marianne McLean, McGill-Queen's University Press; 1993.
• Die Schottischen Clans im 18. Jahrhundert, Vom Wandel und Ende einer Hochlandgesellschaft am Rande Europas, A Personal Passion Play in Scottish History and Bibliography, Hubert Gebele, Regensburg 2003.
• The Making of the Crofting Community, James Hunter, John Donald Publishers Ltd; 2nd Revised edition (27 Jun 2000).
• Das Kapital, Karl Marx, Charles H. Kerr & Company; 1906, Volume I, Part VIII, Chapter XXVII.
• Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, The Modern Library Classics, Complete and Unabridged, 2000, Book III, Chapter IV