SUTHERLAND. — ALEXANDER MACKENZIE ON THE CLEARANCES. [1] — THE REV. DONALD SAGE ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES. — GENERAL STEWART OF GARTH ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES. [4] — HUGH MILLER ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES. [5] — MR JAMES LOCH ON SUTHERLAND IMPROVEMENTS. [6] — MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE ON THE SUTHERLAND CLEARANCES. [7] — REPLY TO MRS. BEECHER STOWE BY DONALD MACLEOD. [8]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 services; hence they did not regard
their patriotism or loyalty, and disregarded their past
services. Sheep, bullocks, deer, and game, became
more valuable than men. Yet a remnant, or in
other words a skeleton, of them is to be found along the
sea shore, huddled together in motley groups upon barren
moors, among cliffs and precipices, in the most impoverished,
degraded, subjugated, slavish, spiritless, condition
that human beings could exist in. If this is really the
lady who has “Glory to God in the highest, peace on
earth, and good will to men,” in view, and who is so
religiously denouncing the American statute which
“denies the slave the sanctity of marriage, with all its
joys, rights, and obligations—which separates, at the
will of the master, the wife from the husband, the children
from the parents,” I would advise her in God’s name to
take a tour round the sea-skirts of Sutherland, her own
estate, beginning at Brora, then to Helmsdale, Portskerra,
Strathy, Farr, Tongue, Durness, Eddrachillis,
and Assynt, and learn the subjugated, degraded, impoverished,
uneducated condition of the spiritless people of
that sea-beaten coast, about two hundred miles in length,
and let her with similar zeal remonstrate with her husband,
that their condition is bettered; for the cure for
all their misery and want is lying unmolested in the fertile
valleys above, and all under his control; and to advise
his Grace, her husband, to be no longer guided by his
Ahitophel, Mr. Loch, but to discontinue his depopulating
schemes, which have separated many a wife from her
husband, never to meet—which caused many a premature
death, and that separated many sons and daughters,
never to see each other; and by all means to withdraw
that mandate of Mr. Loch, which forbids marriage on the
Sutherland estate, under pains and penalties of being
banished from the county; for it has already augmented
illegitimate connections and issues fifty per cent above
what such were a few years ago—before this unnatural,
ungodly law was put in force.
Let us see what the character of these ill-used people
was! General Stewart of Garth, in his “Sketches of the
Highlands” says: In the words of a general officer
by whom the 93rd Sutherlanders were once reviewed,
“They exhibit a perfect pattern of military discipline
and moral rectitude. In the case of such men disgraceful
punishment would be as unnecessary as it would be
pernicious.” “Indeed,” says the General, “so remote
was the idea of such a measure in regard to them, that
when punishments were to be inflicted on others, and the
troops in garrison assembled to witness their execution,
the presence of the Sutherland Highlanders was dispensed
with, the effects of terror as a check to crime
being in their case uncalled for, as examples of that
nature were not necessary for such honourable soldiers.
When the Sutherland Highlanders were stationed at the
Cape of Good Hope anxious to enjoy the advantages of
religious instruction agreeably to the tenets of their
national church, and there being no religious service in
the garrison except the customary one of reading prayers
to the soldiers on parade, the Sutherland men
formed themselves into a congregation, appointed
elders of their own number, engaged and paid a
stipend (collected among themselves) to a clergyman of
the Church of Scotland, and had divine service performed
agreeably to the ritual of the Established Church every
Sabbath, and prayer meetings through the week.”
This reverend gentleman, Mr. Thom, in a letter which
appeared in the Christian Herald of October, 1814,
writes thus: “When the 93rd Highlanders left Cape
Town last month, there were among them 156 members
of the church, including three elders and three deacons,
all of whom, so far as men can know the heart from the
life, were pious men. The regiment was certainly a
pattern of morality, and good behaviour to all other
corps. They read their Bibles and observed the Sabbath.
They saved their money to do good. 7000 rix dollars,
a sum equal to £1200, the non-commissioned officers
and privates saved for books, societies, and for the spread
of the Gospel, a sum unparalleled in any other corps in
the world, given in the short space of eighteen months.
Their example had a general good effect on both the
colonists and the heathen. If ever apostolic days were
revived in modern times on earth, I certainly believe
some of those to have been granted to us in Africa.”
Another letter of a similar kind, addressed to the Committee
of the Edinburgh Gaelic School Society (fourth
annual report), says: “The 93rd Highlanders arrived
in England, when they immediately received orders to
proceed to North America; but before they re-embarked
the sum collected for your society was made up and remitted
to your treasurer, amounting to seventy-eight
pounds, sterling.” “In addition to this,” says the
noble-minded, immortal General, “such of them as had
parents and friends in Sutherland did not forget their
destitute condition, occasioned by the operation of the
fire and faggot, mis-improved state of the county.”
During the short period the regiment was quartered at
Plymouth, upwards of £500 was lodged in one banking-house,
to be remitted to Sutherland, exclusive of many
sums sent through the Post Office and by officers; some
of the sums exceeding £20 from an individual soldier.
Men like these do credit to the peasantry of a country.
“It must appear strange, and somewhat inconsistent,”
continues the General, “when the same men who are so
loud in their profession of an eager desire to promote and
preserve the religious and moral virtues of the people,
should so frequently take the lead in removing them from
where they imbibed principles which have attracted the
notice of Europe and of measures which lead to a deterioration,
placing families on patches of potato ground
as in Ireland, a system pregnant with degradation,
poverty, and disaffection.” It is only when parents and
heads of families in the Highlands are moral, happy, and
contented, that they can instil sound principles into their
children, who in their intercourse with the world may
become what the men of Sutherland have already been,
“an honourable example, worthy the imitation of all.”
I cannot help being grieved at my unavoidable
abbreviation of these heart-stirring and heart-warming
extracts, which should ornament every mantel-piece
and library in the Highlands of Scotland; but I could
refer to other authors of similar weight; among the
last (though not the least), Mr. Hugh Millar of the Witness,
in his “Sutherland as it was and is: or, How a country
can be ruined;” a work which should silence and put
to shame every vile, malignant calumniator of Highland
religion and moral virtue in bygone years, who in their
sophistical profession of a desire to promote the temporal
and spiritual welfare of the people, had their own sordid
cupidity and aggrandisement in view in all their unworthy
lucubrations.
At the commencement of the Russian war a
correspondent wrote as follows: “Your predictions
are making their appearance at last, great demands
are here for men to go to Russia, but they are not
to be found. It seems that the Secretary of War
has corresponded with all our Highland proprietors, to
raise as many men as they could for the Crimean war,
and ordered so many officers of rank to the Highlands to
assist the proprietors in doing so—but it has been a complete
failure as yet. The nobles advertised, by placards,
meetings of the people; these proclamations were attended
to, but when they came to understand what they
were about, in most cases the recruiting proprietors
and staff were saluted with the ominous cry of ‘Maa!
maa! boo! boo!’ imitating sheep and bullocks, and,
‘Send your deer, your roes, your rams, dogs, shepherds,
and gamekeepers to fight the Russians, they have never
done us any harm.’ The success of his Grace the Duke of
Sutherland was deplorable; I believe you would have
pitied the poor old man had you seen him.
“In my last letter I told you that his head commissioner,
Mr. Loch, and military officer, was in Sutherland
for the last six weeks, and failed in getting one man
to enlist; on getting these doleful tidings, the Duke himself
left London for Sutherland, arriving at Dunrobin
about ten days ago, and after presenting himself upon the
streets of Golspie and Brora, he called a meeting of the
male inhabitants of the parishes of Clyne, Rogart, and
Golspie; the meeting was well attended; upwards of
400 were punctual at the hour; his Grace in his carriage,
with his military staff and factors appeared shortly after;
the people gave them a hearty cheer; his Grace took the
chair. Three or four clerks took their seats at the table,
and loosened down bulky packages of bank notes, and
spread out platefuls of glittering gold. The Duke addressed
the people very seriously, and entered upon the
necessity of going to war with Russia, and the danger of
allowing the Czar to have more power than what he holds
already; of his cruel, despotic reign in Russia, etc.;
likewise praising the Queen and her government, rulers
and nobles of Great Britain, who stood so much in need
of men to put and keep down the tyrant of Russia, and
foil him in his wicked schemes to take possession of
Turkey. In concluding his address, which was often
cheered, the Duke told the young able-bodied men that
his clerks were ready to take down the names of all those
willing to enlist, and everyone who would enlist in the
93rd Highlanders, that the clerk would give him, there
and then, £6 sterling; those who would rather enter any
other corps, would get £3, all from his own private purse,
independently of the government bounty. After advancing
many silly flattering decoyments, he sat down to
see the result, but there was no movement among the
people; after sitting for a long time looking at the clerks,
and they at him, at last his anxious looks at the people
assumed a somewhat indignant appearance, when he
suddenly rose up and asked what was the cause of their
non-attention to the proposals he made, but no reply;
it was the silence of the grave. Still standing, his Grace
suddenly asked the cause; but no reply; at last an old
man, leaning upon his staff, was observed moving towards
the Duke, and when he approached near enough, he
addressed his Grace something as follows: ‘I am sorry
for the response your Grace’s proposals are meeting here
to-day, so near the spot where your maternal grandmother,
by giving forty-eight hours’ notice, marshalled fifteen
hundred men to pick out of them the nine hundred she
required, but there is a cause for it, and a grievous cause,
and as your Grace demands to know it, I must tell you,
as I see no one else are inclined in this assembly to do it.
Your Grace’s mother and predecessors applied to our
fathers for men upon former occasions, and our fathers
responded to their call; they have made liberal promises,
which neither them nor you performed; we are, we think,
a little wiser than our fathers, and we estimate your promises
of to-day at the value of theirs, besides you should
bear in mind that your predecessors and yourself expelled
us in a most cruel and unjust manner from the land which
our fathers held in lien from your family, for their sons,
brothers, cousins, and relations, which were handed over
to your parents to keep up their dignity, and to kill
the Americans, Turks, French, and the Irish; and these
lands are devoted now to rear dumb brute animals, which
you and your parents consider of far more value than men.
I do assure your Grace that it is the prevailing opinion
in this county, that should the Czar of Russia take possession
of Dunrobin Castle and of Stafford House next
term, that we could not expect worse treatment at his
hands, than we have experienced at the hands of your
family for the last fifty years. Your parents, yourself,
and your commissioners, have desolated the glens and
straths of Sutherland, where you should find hundreds,
yea, thousands of men to meet you, and respond cheerfully
to your call, had your parents and yourself kept faith
with them. How could your Grace expect to find men
where they are not, and the few of them which are to be
found among the rubbish or ruins of the county, has more
sense than to be decoyed by chaff to the field of slaughter;
but one comfort you have, though you cannot find men to
fight, you can supply those who will fight with plenty of
mutton, beef, and venison.’ The Duke rose up, put on
his hat, and left the field.”
Whether my correspondent added to the old man’s
reply to his Grace or not, I cannot say, but one thing is
evident, it was the very reply his Grace deserved.
I know for a certainty this to be the prevailing feeling
throughout the whole Highlands of Scotland, and who
should wonder at it? How many thousands of them who
served out their 21, 22, 25, and 26 years, fighting for the
British aristocracy, and on their return—wounded,
maimed, or worn out—to their own country, promising
themselves to spend the remainder of their days in peace,
and enjoying the blessings and comfort their fathers
enjoyed among their Highland, healthy, delightful hills,
but found to their grief, that their parents were expelled
from the country to make room for sheep, deer, and game,
the glens where they were born, desolate, and the abodes
which sheltered them at birth, and where they were
reared to manhood, burnt to the ground; and instead
of meeting the cheers, shaking-hands, hospitality, and
affections of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and relations,
met with desolated glens, bleating of sheep, barking
of dogs; and if they should happen to rest their
worn-out frame upon the green sod which has grown upon
their father’s hearth, and a gamekeeper, factor, or water
bailiff, to come round, he would very unceremoniously
tell them to absent themselves as smart as they could,
and not to annoy the deer. No race on record has suffered
so much at the hands of those who should be their patrons,
and proved to be so tenacious of patriotism as the Celtic
race, but I assure you it has found its level now, and will
disappear soon altogether; and as soon as patriotism
shall disappear in any nation, so sure that nation’s glory is
tarnished, victories uncertain, her greatness diminished,
and decaying consumptive death will be the result. If
ever the old adage, which says, “Those whom the gods
determine to destroy, they first deprive them of reason,”
was verified, it was, and is, in the case of the British
aristocracy, and Highland proprietors in particular. I
am not so void of feeling as to blame the Duke of Sutherland,
his parents, or any other Highland absentee proprietor
for all the evil done in the land, but the evil was
done in their name, and under the authority they have
invested in wicked, cruel servants. For instance, the
only silly man who enlisted from among the great assembly
which his Grace addressed, was a married man, with
three of a family and his wife; it was generally believed
that his bread was baked for life, but no sooner was he
away to Fort George to join his regiment, than his place
of abode was pulled down, his wife and family turned out,
and only permitted to live in a hut, from which an old
female pauper was carried a few days before to the
churchyard; there the young family were sheltered,
and their names registered upon the poor roll for support;
his Grace could not be guilty of such low rascality as this,
yet he was told of it, but took no cognisance of those who
did it in his name. It is likewise said that this man got a
furlough of two weeks to see his wife and family before
going abroad, and that when the factor heard he was
coming, he ordered the ground officer of the parish of
Rogart, named MacLeod, to watch the soldier, and not
allow him to see nor speak to his wife, but in his (the
officer’s) presence. We had at the same time, in the
parish, an old bachelor of the name of John Macdonald,
who had three idiot sisters, whom he upheld, independent
of any source of relief; but a favourite of George, the
notorious factor, envied this poor bachelor’s farm, and
he was summoned to remove at next term. The poor
fellow petitioned his Grace and Loch, but to no purpose;
he was doomed to walk away on the term day, as the
factor told him, “to America, Glasgow, or to the devil if
he choosed.” Seeing he had no other alternative, two
days before the day of his removal he yoked his cart,
and got neighbours to help him to haul the three idiots
into it, and drove away with them to Dunrobin Castle.
When he came up to factor Gunn’s door, he capsized
them out upon the green, and wheeled about and went
away home. The three idiots finding themselves upon
the top of one another so sudden, they raised an inhuman-like
yell, fixed into one another to fight, and scratched,
yelled, and screeched so terrific that Mr. Gunn, his lady,
his daughters, and all the clerks and servants were soon
about them; but they hearkened to no reason, for they
had none themselves, but continued their fighting and
inharmonious music. Messenger after messenger was
sent after John, but of no use; at last the great Gunn
himself followed and overtook him, asked him how did
he come to leave his sisters in such a state? He replied,
“I kept them while I had a piece of land to support
them; you have taken that land from me, then take them
along with the land, and make of them what you can; I
must look out for myself, but I cannot carry them to the
labour market.” Gunn was in a fix, and had to give
John assurance that he would not be removed if he would
take his sisters, so John took them home, and has not been
molested as yet.
I have here beside me (in Canada) a respectable girl
of the name of Ann Murray, whose father was removed
during the time of the wholesale faggot removals, but got a
lot of a barren moor to cultivate. However barren-like it
was, he was raising a family of industrious young sons,
and by dint of hard labour and perseverance, they made
it a comfortable home; but the young sons one by one
left the country (and four of them are within two miles
of where I sit); the result was, that Ann was the only one
who remained with the parents. The mother, who had
an attack of palsy, was left entirely under Ann’s care
after the family left; and she took it so much to heart
that her daughter’s attention was required day and
night, until death put an end to her afflictions, after
twelve years’ suffering. Shortly after the mother’s
death, the father took ill, and was confined to bed for
nine months; and Ann’s labour re-commenced until his
decease. Though Ann Murray could be numbered among
the most dutiful of daughters, yet her incessant labour,
for a period of more than thirteen years, made visible
inroads upon her tender constitution; yet by the liberal
assistance of her brothers, who did not loose sight of her
and their parent (though upon a foreign strand), Ann
Murray kept the farm in the best of order, no doubt
expecting that she would be allowed to keep it after her
parent’s decease, but this was not in store for her; the
very day after her father’s funeral, the officer came to her
and told her that she was to be removed in a few weeks,
that the farm was let to another, and that Factor Gunn
wished to see her. She was at that time afflicted with
jaundice, and told the officer she could not undertake the
journey, which was only ten miles. Next day the officer
was at her again, more urgent than before, and made use
of extraordinary threats; so she had to go. When she
appeared before this Bashaw, he swore like a trooper, and
damned her soul, why she disobeyed his first summons;
she excused herself, trembling, that she was unwell;
another volley of oaths and threats met her response, and
told her to remove herself from the estate next week, for
her conduct; and with a threat, which well becomes a
Highland tyrant, not to take away, nor sell a single
article of furniture, implements of husbandry, cattle, or
crop; nothing was allowed but her own body clothes;
everything was to be handed over to her brother, who was
to have the farm. Seeing there was neither mercy nor
justice for her, she told him the crop, house, and every
other thing belonging to the farm, belonged to her and her
brothers in America, and that the brother to whom he
(the factor) intended to hand over the farm and effects
never helped her father or mother while in trouble; and
that she was determined that he should not enjoy what
she laboured for, and what her other brothers paid for.
She went and got the advice of a man of business, advertised
a sale, and sold off, in the face of threats of interdict,
and came to Canada, where she was warmly received by
brothers, sisters, and friends, now in Woodstock, and can
tell her tale better than I can. No one could think nor
believe that his Grace would ever countenance such doings
as these; but it was done in his name.
I have here within ten miles of me, Mr. William Ross,
once taxman of Achtomleeny, Sutherlandshire, who occupied
the most convenient farm to the principal deer-stalking
hills in the county. Often have the English
and Irish lords, connected in marriage with the Sutherlands,
dined and took their lunch at William Ross’s table,
and at his expense; and more than once passed the night
under his roof. Mr. Ross being so well acquainted
among the mountains and haunts of the deer, was often
engaged as a guide and instructor to these noblemen on
their deer-stalking and fishing excursions, and became a
real favourite with the Sutherland family, which enabled
him to erect superior buildings to the common rule, and
improve his farm in a superior style; so that his mountain-side
farm was nothing short of a Highland paradise.
But unfortunately for William, his nearest neighbour, one
Major Gilchrist, a sheep farmer, coveted Mr. Ross’s
vineyard, and tried many underhand schemes to secure
the place for himself, but in vain. Ross would hearken
to none of his proposals. But Ahab was a chief friend of
Factor Gunn; and William Ross got notice of removal.
Ross prepared a memorial to the first and late Duchess of
Sutherland, and placed it in her own hand. Her Grace
read it, instantly went into the factor’s office, and told
him that William Ross was not to be removed from Achtomleeny
while he lived; and wrote the same on the
petition, and handed it back to Ross, with a graceful
smile, saying, “You are now out of the reach of factors;
now, William, go home in peace.” William bowed, and
departed cheerfully; but the factor and ground-officer
followed close behind him, and while Ross was reading her
Grace’s deliverance, the officer, David Ross, came and
snapped the paper out of his hand, and ran to Factor
Gunn with it. Ross followed, but Gunn put it in his
pocket, saying, “William, you would need to give it to
me afterwards, at any rate, and I will keep it till I read
it, and then return it to you,” and with a tiger-like smile
on his face, said, “I believe you came good speed to-day,
and I am glad of it;” but William never got it in his hand
again. However, he was not molested during her Grace’s
life. Next year she paid a visit to Dunrobin Castle, when
Factor William Gunn advised Ross to apply to her for a
reduction of rent, under the mask of favouring him. He
did so, and it was granted cheerfully. Her Grace left
Dunrobin that year never to return; in the beginning of
the next spring she was carried back to Dunrobin a
corpse, and a few days after was interred in Dornoch.
William Ross was served with a summons of removal
from Achtomleeny, and he had nothing to show. He
petitioned the present Duke, and his commissioner, Mr.
Loch, and related the whole circumstances to them, but
to no avail, only he was told that Factor Gunn was
ordered to give him some other lot of land, which he did:
and having no other resource, William accepted of it to
his loss; for between loss of cattle, building and repairing
houses, he was minus one hundred and fifty pounds sterling,
of his means, and substance, from the time he was
removed from Achtomleeny till he removed himself to
Canada. Besides, he had a written agreement or promise
for melioration or valuation for all the farm improvements
and house building at Achtomleeny, which was
valued by the family surveyor at £250. William was
always promised to get it, until they came to learn that
he was leaving for America, then they would not give him
a cent. William Ross left them with it to join his family
in Canada; but he can in his old age sit at as comfortable
a table, and sleep on as comfortable a bed, with greater
ease of mind and a clearer conscience, among his own
dutiful and affectionate children, than the tyrant factor
ever did, or ever will among his. I know as well as any
one can tell me, that this is but one or two cases out of
the thousand I could enumerate, where the liberality
and benevolence of his Grace, and of his parents, were
abused, and that to their patron’s loss. You see in the
above case that William was advised to plead for a
reduction of rent, so that the factor’s favourite, Ahab
Gilchrist, would have the benefit of Naboth Ross’s improvement,
and the reduction he got on his rent, which
would not be obtained otherwise.
The unhallowed crew of factors and officials, from the
highest to the lowest grade, employed by the family of
Sutherland, got the corrupt portion of the public press on
their side, to applaud their wicked doings and schemes, as
the only mode of improvement and civilisation in the
Highlands of Scotland. They have got what is still more
to be lamented, all the Established ministers, with few
exceptions, on their side; and in them they found faithful
auxiliaries in crushing the people. Any of them could
hold a whole congregation by the hair of their heads
over hell-fire, if they offered to resist the powers that be,
until they submitted. If a single individual resisted, he
was denounced from the pulpit, and considered afterwards
a dangerous man in the community; and he might
depart as quick as he could. Any man, or men, may
violate the laws of God, and violate the laws of heaven,
as often as he chooses; he is never heeded, and has nothing
to fear; but if he offends the Duke’s factor, the lowest
of his minions, or violates the least of their laws and regulations,
it is an unpardonable sin. The present Duke’s
mother was no doubt a liberal lady of many good parts,
and seemed to be much attached to the natives, but unfortunately
for them, she employed for her factors a vile,
unprincipled crew, who were their avowed enemies;
she would hearken to the complaints of the people, and
would write to the ministers of the Gospel to ascertain the
correctness of complaints, and the factor was justified,
however gross the outrage was that he committed—the
minister dined with the factor, and could not refuse to
favour him. The present Duke[9] is a simple, narrow-minded
gentleman, who concerns himself very little
even about his own pecuniary affairs; he entrusts his
whole affairs to his factors, and the people are enslaved
so much, that it is now considered the most foolish thing
a man can do to petition his Grace, whatever is done to
him, for it will go hard with the factor, or he will punish
and make an example of him to deter others.
To detail what I knew myself personally, and what I
have learned from others of their conduct, would, as I
said before, fill a volume. For instance:—When a
marriage in the family of Sutherland takes place, or the
birth of an heir, a feast is ordered for the Sutherland
people, consisting of whisky, porter, ale, and plenty of
eatables. The day of feasting and rejoicing is appointed,
and heralded throughout the country, and the people are
enjoined in marshal terms to assemble—barrels of raw
and adulterated whisky are forwarded to each parish,
some raw adulterated sugar, and that is all. Bonfires are
to be prepared on the tops of the highest mountains. The
poorest of the poor are warned by family officers to carry
the materials, consisting of peats and tar barrels, upon
their backs; the scene is lamentable to see groups of these
wretched, half-clad and ill-shod, climbing up these
mountains with their loads; however, the work must be
done, there is no denial, the evening of rejoicing is arrived,
and the people are assembled at their different clachans.
The barrels of whisky are taken out to the open field,
poured into large tubs, a good amount of abominable-looking
sugar is mixed with it, and a sturdy favourite
is employed to stir it about with a flail handle, or some
long cudgel—all sorts of drinking implements are produced,
tumblers, bowls, ladles, and tin jugs. Bagpipers
are set up with great glee. In the absence of the factor,
the animal called the ground officer, and in some instances
the parish minister, will open the jollification, and show
an example to the people how to deal with this coarse
beverage. After the first round, the respectable portion
of the people will depart, or retire to an inn, where they
can enjoy themselves; but the drouthies, and ignorant
youthful, will keep the field of revelling until tearing of
clothes and faces comes to be the rule; fists and cudgels
supplant jugs and ladles, and this will continue until king
Bacchus enters the field and hushes the most heroic
brawlers and the most ferocious combatants to sound
snoring on the field of rejoicing, where many of them
enter into contracts with death, from which they could
never extricate themselves. With the co-operation and
assistance of factors, ministers, and editors, a most
flourishing account is sent to the world, and to the
absentee family in London, who knows nothing about how
the affair was conducted. The world will say how happy
must the people be who live under such good and noble,
liberal-minded patrons; and the patrons themselves are
so highly-pleased with the report that, however extraordinary
the bill that comes to them on the rent day, in
place of money, for roast beef and mutton, bread and
cheese, London porter and Edinburgh ale, which was
never bought, nor tasted by the people, they will consider
their commissioners used great economy; no cognizance
is taken, the bill is accepted, and discharged, the people
are deceived, and the proprietors injured.