Highland
Clearances
The
violent end to the Jacobite rising of 1745 also sounded the
death knell of Highland society. What began in less than an
hour of fighting on Culloden moor took nearly a century to complete.
The first actions of the government were to destroy the basis
of Highland life. The Clan system was primarily martial. Once
the need for large numbers of fighting men was obviated and
indeed made illegal, it was possible, for the first time, for
the money economy to enter Highland society. The Anglicisation
of the ruling Highland class meant that as the numbers of Gaelic
speaking lairds dropped, and the numbers of monoglot lairds
rose the chief became a feudal landlord for the first time in
any real sense. They now began to spend more and more time in
the south and needed to extract more money from their Highland
estates to fund their increasingly extravagant expenses. The
Tacksmen were the first strata of Highland society to feel the
brunt of this change. They had become obsolescent after the
'45 both as military leaders and as administrators of the system.
One factor would collect the rent and administer the land at
less cost to the chief than the Tacksmen could. Many were to
carry on their military traditions by becoming officers in the
new clan regiments which were being raised at this time, while
others took up administrative positions in the Empire or became
the first of the emigrants to Canada and America.
The growth in kelping and agricultural improvement, encouraged
the Tacksmen to make new lives for themselves in America. By
the end of the 18th century they had disappeared as a class-
often taking their dependents and whole townships with them.
The Clearances fall into three distinct stages. The first stage
began with the introduction of sheep farming to the Highlands
from 1760 onwards and ended with the establishment of the large
sheep runs in the interior of the country and the people on
the coast. This period was to see the worst excesses generally
associated with the Clearances. Soaring wool prices at the turn
of the century had led to an increase in clearings from the
interior to the coast. Few Highlanders had the capital or experience
to take advantage of this because of the large flocks needed.
Consequently the Clan chiefs, now landlords in their own right,
brought in southern sheep farmers with capital and experience.
The early clearances were almost always from the land to the
coast simply because at the time when wool prices were rising
the prices for kelp were rising too. Kelping was labour intensive
and could soak up the excess population now created. Fishing
was also put forward as a means by which the Highlanders could
raise money.
This removal from the interior to the sea shore created for
the first time a new individual, the crofter. The removed tenant
was given a small piece of land- the croft. If this land was
bad- it was often the land which even the sheep farmer wouldn't
touch- the crofter was forced into kelping. If the land was
relatively good the crofter had to pay a very high rent and
was therefore forced into kelping. The most notorious examples
of this type of clearance took place on the Sutherland estates
of the Stafford family. Nobody pursued the clearance policy
with more vigour and cruel thoroughness than Elizabeth, Countess
of Sutherland, and her name is still reviled in many homes with
Highland connections across the world to this day. The Stafford
family's ethos was that the people of the straths of Sutherland
would be moved to the coast where they could engage in more
profitable occupations. The land thus cleared would be turned
over to sheep. To fulfil this policy they engaged the services
of several sheep farmers from Moray and the Borders amongst
them Patrick Sellar.
The
clearing of Strathnaver in Sutherland is a perfect example.
In 14 days in May 1814, 430 people were evicted and forced to
move to Brora on the coast where they were to become fishermen.
Sellar himself personally directed the clearances. To force
the people to move, the roofs of their houses were often pulled
down and the roof trees set alight to stop rebuilding. He was
later tried and acquitted of the murder of some of the elderly
evicted tenants. For the people moved to the coast, life was
inevitably hard. They had to adjust to a new lifestyle and try
to eke out a living from fishing- something most had had no
experience of. In many cases they continued to farm on their
small plots of land.
The early clearances were the most harsh of all because no alternative
was offered. Emigration and migration were discouraged by the
landlords as being against the interests of the country and
most notably themselves. Kelping demanded a large workforce
and while it prospered the landlords and to some extent the
people prospered. However, once the kelp prices began to fall
during the 1820s this situation changed. Those who did choose
to migrate or emigrate were seldom the poorest people in society.
They had the means to support themselves in Scotland if they
had wished for the emigrating Highlander of this period chose
to go to America. The 1830s saw an intensification of migration
and emigration. The trickle of emigrants and migrants began
to become a stream as the economic situation deteriorated. After
the collapse of the kelp industry, the landlords were interested
only in clearing more land for sheep who were still profitable.
In some cases even the newly created crofts were cleared. Landlords
also financed schemes where their tenants were removed from
Scotland to the Americas, so relieving the population burden
on their lands, but often the tenants were given no option but
to emigrate .
The flow of emigrants was constant and relentless. Much of this
was to blame on the increasing population pressures in the Highlands
and Islands. The growth of the kelp industry had encouraged
landowners to subdivide the crofts and insist on large families.
Consequently when the kelp industry collapsed and the price
of cattle fell there were now large numbers of surplus and destitute
people unable to pay either their rent or for their subsistence.
The failure of the potato crop, upon which the crofters were
solely dependent, in the late 1830s and again in the 1840s and
'50s was the last straw for many of these people.
The 'clearances' of the 1840s and early 1850s were intended
to clear the land of those people who were so destitute that
the landlords could not support them. It was thought that they
would have a far better chance of surviving outside Scotland
than by staying at home. This last wave of clearances was paid
for by the landowners who found it cheaper to pay for the transport
of their tenants across the Atlantic or even to the new favourite
for emigres, Australia. In many cases the tenants had no choice
but to emigrate, their homes having been torn down to make way
for sheep-walks. With nowhere left to go, the offer of passage
to the colonies where they would be able to acquire land denied
to them in Scotland was the only choice.
The
majority of Highlanders did not emigrate however, many being
too poor in the first place. Once the break had been made with
their land, many Gaels moved south to find work in the factories
of Lowland Scotland. By 1851 85,400 native born Highlanders
were living in the rest of Scotland However, all of this demographic
movement from the Highlands was not sufficiently fast enough
to relieve the pressure on the resources of the Highlands until
well into the 1850s.
By the 1850s the Clearances were effectively at an end, for
several reasons, firstly there were no more people to evict,
secondly the population had finally begun to decrease, thirdly
the economy was now beginning to pick up and finally the fishing
industry was finally entering an upturn. Moreover the crofters
were finally beginning to stir themselves on their own behalf.
The final end to clearances came in 1886 with the passing of
the Crofters Act after four years of struggle. There are several
reasons to explain why it took a long time for the Highlanders
to defend themselves. Firstly, they were slow to organise effectively.
Secondly, protests against the clearances tended to be spontaneous
and unorganised. Then the loss of their traditional leaders,
the Tacksmen, meant that they took time to recover from the
shock of the clearances, the destruction of the Clan society
and also to produce new leaders from amongst themselves. Finally
the church had an important influence on the course of events.
The Church had tended to portray the clearances as God's retribution
for their sins on earth and they consequently advised against
protesting. This is a graphic example of the effect the reintroduction
of patronage had in Scotland.
The question of patterns to the clearances is difficult to explain.
While the individual acts of clearances showed differing characteristics
there were several aspects which remained the same in each case.
The first of these is that of the economy. The landowners were
faced with a situation where they were trying to increase the
yields from their lands while at the same time having to finance
the population of their land. It is unsurprising that they followed
the actions which they did, for this was the era when the uncompromising,
improving, ideas of Robert Malthus and John MacCulloch were
followed closely by landlord and sheep farmer alike. These doctrines
advocated the clearing of the land and the eviction of the native
population for:
The
blessing of classical political economy was the reward of the
improving landlord who had been prepared to break the grip of
custom. Secondly, all Highland landlords strove to make the
most money out of the boom period Britain was going through
at the turn of the century. With wool and kelp prices rising,
the chance was there for the taking. The Highlanders themselves
could not take this opportunity because of their individual
lack of capital and expertise and so they were at the mercy
of the landlords. Finally the famines of the 1830s and '40s
caused the landlords to look hard at the principle of emigration-
something that they had been intrinsically opposed to for most
of the preceding decades. Indeed during the Clearances one of
the most valuable weapons available to the people had been the
threat of emigration in order to gain tenurial concessions.
The large cost involved to keep the people on the land, forced
many landlords to see that by paying the cost of passage to
the colonies they could rid themselves of the worst affected
families and so ease the financial burden. In some cases the
policy of previous years was revoked. In particular, the bans
on marriage were lifted on many estates, to enable the people
to comply with the emigration laws, so allowing them to leave
the land. For the Highlanders themselves, the experience of
the Clearances left an indelible hatred in their memory for
the factors and the sheep farmers, not for the landlords. Even
the individual incidences of Clearance showed that there were
different patterns involved. The manner in which the evictions
were carried out depended on the factor and the circumstances
in the area at the time. The result however was always depressingly
the same. Even resistance to the Clearances showed different
patterns depending on the area and the influences of church
and leadership.
It is clear therefore, that there was no one pattern to the
Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries. The sad fact is that
the financial circumstances of the landlord dictated the fortunes
of the people on the land. In trying to keep themselves in the
manner of London society the landlords destroyed what was in
reality important to the Highlands, its people.
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