Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  Highland emigrants were not only driven away by economic, social and demographic dislocation. They were also lured across the Atlantic by the offer of abundant freehold land, readily available, affordable passages, and the assurances of earlier emigrants and agents that conditions and prospects in North America were the opposite of those that were creating hardship, disgruntlement and apprehension at home. Chain migration and the liberal land policies of Governor Gabriel Johnston made North Carolina a focus of interest for almost half a century before the American Revolution, particularly among emigrants from Argyllshire and Skye, including the renowned Flora Macdonald and her husband. Similar links were forged with Georgia and New York, and information and aid flowed back to Scotland in a swelling transatlantic stream of letters, press reports and travellers’ accounts. Most emigrant Highlanders were middle-ranking tenants who were able to finance their removal by realizing livestock and household goods, and they were well served by ships which often came to quite remote west-coast locations to pick them up. Much of the organization was in the hands of tacksmen. Formerly linchpins in the military structure of the clan whose nominal rent had borne no relation to the value of their land, they were increasingly perceived by their superiors as expendable middlemen once military service had become obsolete. Tacks were now rarely hereditary, but were given to the highest bidder, and since leases were granted to a much wider class, the tacksmen were no longer able to pass on their rent increases to sub-tenants. Their interest in emigration was sharpened not only by their loss of social and economic status but also by the particular opportunity that some of them had to acquire land in America. After 1746, when Highland militarism was harnessed to British imperial ends, many tacksmen had crossed the Atlantic as officers in Highland regiments, serving in the wars of 1756—63 and 1776—83. When the British government rewarded veterans with colonial land grants, the tacksmen became prominent colonizers, dispensing information about overseas opportunities and often recruiting fellow clansmen in order to establish prefabricated Highland communities on their American land grants. This was particularly evident after 1783, when proprietary soldier settlement was more explicitly encouraged in strategic parts of Britain’s remaining American territories. Dispossessed loyalist Highlanders also flocked north, many of them joining their countrymen who had been attracted to Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia since the early 1770s by the organizing abilities of Scottish land speculators as well as tacksmen.

  By the 1790s emigration had therefore clearly become a familiar part of life throughout Scotland. It was the subject of frequent comment in the Statistical Account of Scotland, and the ministers’ observations corroborate many of the trends already highlighted. In Lowland parishes it was associated mainly with ambitious artisans ‘in quest of better encouragement’, usually in North America, but also in the West and East Indies. 25 Emigrants from Orkney and Shetland invariably went into the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, usually with an eye to returning home eventually, while those from the Hebrides and mainland Highlands were driven overseas permanently by explicit opposition to the commercialization of agriculture, particularly the raising of rents and the consolidation of farms into sheepwalks. ‘Flattering accounts’ from those already settled in America were also crucial in persuading friends and relatives that they could live in ‘ease and opulence ’ on the other side of the Atlantic. 26

  Lowland opinion differed over whether emigration should be commended or condemned. The minister of Torthorwald in Dumfries-shire referred to a number of young emigrants who, by their success overseas, ‘have done honour to the place of their nativity’. Kirkcudbright too had dispatched large numbers of young people abroad, many of whom had, ‘by their industry and application’, not only retained their integrity but also acquired ‘ample fortunes’. Still in the south-west, very different sentiments were voiced by the minister of Cum-mertrees, who told the cautionary tale of fifty local emigrants, several of whom had returned home ‘miserably deceived and disappointed’, after being enticed to America by fraudulent speculators in the early 1770s. More vitriolic — if less specific — in his criticism was the minister of Whithorn, in his description of the fate of a handful of people who had emigrated from the parish in 1774: ‘They left their native country, their relatives, and abounding means of enjoyment, to settle in woods, among savages and wild beasts. Many of these deluded creatures were rich, and left very profitable leases, to bemoan their folly in uncultivated deserts.’ Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the minister of Cushnie in Aberdeenshire spoke of emigration in the same breath as murders, suicides and banishments from the parish. And in the Morayshire parish of Duffus, the return of some disillusioned emigrants from America, ‘bringing bad tidings of the country’, had resulted in a shift of focus from overseas to home migration. 27

  Highland commentators were more consistently critical of the transatlantic haemorrhage that had hit their region especially hard since the end of the American War of Independence. Emigration was unequivocally an evil to be opposed, and particular opprobrium was heaped on proprietors whose acquisitive attitudes had effectively banished their tenants by depriving them of land and a living. But the minister of Callander in Perthshire was the only contributor explicitly to expose the nub of the problem. Emigrants, he asserted, were people of ‘spirit and wealth’ who paid their passages and ‘carried away their riches’, while dispossessed tenants ‘of less spirit, the dregs of the people, have remained at home, and have found an asylum in villages … [which] are filled with those naked and starving crowds of people, who are pouring down every term, for shelter and for bread’. 28

  The ethics of emigration: antagonists and advocates

  The concerns of the Callander minister may not have been typical of comments in the Statistical Account, but they certainly reflected the major preoccupation of opponents of emigration in the eighteenth century. Until at least 1800 there was almost universal public and political antagonism to the outflow, particularly from the Scottish Highlands, where the loss of muscle, money and cannon fodder was perceived to be most serious for the nation’s health and security. Government, landlords, employers, travellers and the establishment in general all lined up to deplore emigration as detrimental to the economic health and stability of the region, and some investigations — notably those of John Knox in the 1760s and Thomas Telford around 1800 — deliberately tried to stem the flow through investment in fisheries or infrastructure. Touring the Highlands in 1773, the lexicographer and scourge of Scottish Romanticism Samuel Johnson admitted that individuals might well benefit themselves by going to America, but deplored the effect on the nation of the Highlanders’ ‘epidemick disease of wandering’. Taking the same tack as the Callander minister twenty years later, he asserted that the country was losing the flower of its population: ‘Once none went away but the useless and poor; in some parts there is now reason to fear, that none will stay but those who are too poor to remove themselves, and too useless to be removed at the cost of others.’ 29 His concerns were fuelled by evidence that substantial amounts of specie were being taken away by Highland emigrants, and some tenants clearly used the threat of emigration as a bargaining counter to improve their tenancy agreements at home. Johnson’s remarks also came at a time when relations with the American colonies were deteriorating and transatlantic emigration was posing a threat to national security, even more than to economic prosperity. In August 1775 the Lord Justice Clerk in Scotland, Thomas Miller, voiced publicly his fear that the emigrants, whatever their loyalties when they left home, might take up arms against the king once they arrived in America, and in September the Lord Advocate imposed a legislative ban on emigration to America for the duration of hostilities.

  After its defeat in the war the British government — recognizing the vulnerability of the redefined American frontier — began to see some virtue in populating its remaining territories with loyal settlers, particularly ex-soldiers. The Highland landlords, however, with undimmed
confidence in the viability of their estate development plans, remained implacably and solidly opposed to emigration until the end of the century, particularly those on kelping estates. Only with the backing of a large tenantry, they argued, could their estates be turned into profitable commercial entities, and it was with this in mind that the landlord lobby, in the guise of the Highland Society, in 1803 steered on to the statute book the ill-conceived Passenger Vessels Act. Masquerading as a piece of humanitarian legislation while its real aim was to make emigration prohibitively expensive, it was provoked by the activities of emigration agents in the Highlands and inflated, panic-stricken calculations of the numbers likely to leave at their behest. The resumption of hostilities with France meant that the act was passed without debate, but although it certainly curtailed emigration, it did not eradicate it entirely.

  By 1815, when peace finally broke out, widespread public and political aversion to emigration had been transformed into swelling enthusiasm for a device which many now regarded as a safety valve rather than a threat. Pressure of population, aggravated by a tide of demobilized soldiers, brought the spectre of massive unemployment, pauperism and social conflict. In the Lowlands, distress was probably most evident among handloom weavers, who continued to flock to an oversupplied and increasingly archaic trade, while in the Highlands severe economic dislocation came about as the boom prices paid for commodities like kelp and cattle during the wars gave way to slump and collapsed markets. The government responded to the crisis by giving limited and short-term assistance to impoverished Scots and Irish to settle in Canada and the Cape between 1815 and 1823, but its priority was to avoid positive intervention, so the repeated pleas of 22,000 destitute weavers from the west-central Lowlands for state-aided emigration generally fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, in the Highlands, landlords responded to the increasing congestion, poverty and land hunger on their estates by encouraging and even subsidizing emigration, in a complete reversal of their earlier stance. The safety-valve argument, which persisted in the Highlands throughout the famine years of the mid-nineteenth century, then reemerged in a national context during the depression of the 1870s, in strident assertions that the twin problems of overpopulation in Britain and a colonial labour deficit could be solved by state-funded emigration. Yet despite the recommendations of a succession of official investigations throughout the century, state-aided emigration remained firmly off the agenda until the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 demonstrated the government’s rearguard attempt to cement the crumbling fabric of the British Empire in an uncertain post-war world.

  Although particular migration policies were dominant at different times, they were never unanimously endorsed. The ethics of emigration remained a subject of hot, and recurring, debate, revolving around whether the exodus represented a threat or an opportunity to both donor and destination countries, as well as different perceptions about the calibre of the emigrants. In the eighteenth century, mercantilist opposition to emigration, particularly among Highland landlords, was fuelled by the activities of emigration agents like the Earl of Selkirk and Hugh Dunoon, who sought to recruit Highland colonists for their Canadian land grants, as well as by the British government’s reluctance to condemn imperial colonization wholeheartedly after 1783. But the Malthusian safety-valve policies that emerged in times of domestic recession were also criticized in the press and Parliament either as expensive and ineffective or as unethical. While overseas commentators alleged that their countries were being used as dustbins for Britain’s surplus or disaffected population, in Scotland there developed an enduring and powerful mythology of enforced but ineffective expatriation, particularly in a Highland context. At the same time — and despite overseas complaints of disparities between demand and supply — many nineteenth- century commentators echoed the earlier concern of Dr Johnson and the minister of Callander at the high quality of Scottish emigrants. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who orchestrated schemes of systematic colonization and positive Empire settlement in the middle years of the nineteenth century, was criticized for promoting an exclusive policy which took away the best and left the most needy, while attention was also repeatedly drawn to the vast numbers of provident unassisted emigrants, who invested their savings in land or employment abroad. Policy-makers always walked a difficult tightrope. Not only did they struggle to promote imperial colonization while discouraging foreign emigration, particularly to the United States; they were also bombarded with contradictory accusations from opposing vested interests that they were stripping Britain of the bone and sinew of its population yet simultaneously populating the Empire with paupers, social misfits and political agitators.

  The ethics of emigration per se, along with the pros and cons of different destinations, were hotly debated not only by policy-makers and political pundits. Authors of guidebooks and editors of newspapers tried to influence their readers and steer them in particular directions, although most claimed that they simply offered ‘facts rather than … opinions’ to those who had already made up their minds to leave. 30 Emigrants themselves often sat on the fence in terms of giving advice, for fear they might be blamed for subsequent disappointments. ‘There is much to induce you to emigrate, and much on the other hand to plead for your remaining in your own native land’ was the rather unhelpful observation of one Scottish settler in Illinois, a sentiment that was echoed from the other side of the world by a correspondent who, after three months in Australia, was equally noncommittal. ‘To come, or not to come, that is the question; but this I cannot resolve for you.’ 31

  As a rule, however, correspondents and commentators did offer some kind of qualitative assessment, even if it was of a fairly general nature. There was unanimous agreement about the need for hard work, self-denial and perseverance on the part of the emigrant and widespread discouragement of overspecialized craftsmen, those of sedentary occupations and anyone who expected to make a quick fortune. ‘There is nothing in the soil or climate of America which can impart wisdom to the fool, energy to the imbecile, activity to the slothful, or determination to the irresolute,’ wrote Patrick Shirreff in 1835, a sentiment that was reiterated in respect of many other destinations. 32 Emigrants were warned against believing everything they read, and some editors, notably William and Robert Chambers, made a particular point of stressing their impartiality. The Chambers brothers, who admitted in 1834 that emigration was ‘a favourite subject with us’, included articles on a variety of destinations in their cheap, popular periodical Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, and in the 1840s and 1850s devoted specific attention to the United States in, respectively, Information for the People and the twenty-part series, Things as they are in America.33 But despite their alleged impartiality, the brothers’ sympathies lay in North America and in 1848 they were taken to task by the St Andrew’s Society of Adelaide for a hostility to Australia that had ‘sealed the fate of emigration to this land among the labouring masses’ who read their ‘extensively-circulated Journal’. Sixteen years earlier they had condemned the moral and physical climate of New South Wales in no uncertain terms, claiming that no country had been ‘so shamefully over-praised’ in books that had been ‘written to decoy settlers’, and that the emigrant who settled there ‘generally bids adieu to comfort and peace of mind’. 34

  The Chambers brothers were not the only commentators to condemn Australia, although their attitude — at least towards New South Wales — underwent a distinct change in the late 1830s, as assisted passages were extended to Scots and the colony became more popular with emigrants, at the same time as a political crisis in the Canadas stemmed the flow across the Atlantic. In 1838 too the immensely popular Counsel for Emigrants, published in Aberdeen by the bookseller John Mathison, included Australia — which had previously been ignored — in its third and final edition. A few letters also began to appear in the press promoting Australia over Canada and attempting to dispel fears about the long voyage and the prospect of settling in a distant, dangerous country. But emigrants continued to receive
very mixed messages concerning Australia throughout the century, and the British press as a whole frequently tried to dampen what it felt was the misguided enthusiasm of many that they could easily make a quick fortune there. The stigma of transportation was also difficult to erase and in 1845 a correspondent of the Aberdeen Herald, writing from Van Diemen’s Land, warned readers that ‘robbery, violence, and indolence ’ continued to ‘stalk through the land’. 35 South Australia, which had been established as a British colony in 1834, was untainted by convict settlement but its promoters were heavily criticized for painting a fraudulent picture of a temperate land where emigrants could earn high wages and readily establish themselves as farmers. According to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine and a number of newspaper correspondents, these promises bore little resemblance to the realities of unbearable heat, a high incidence of disease, rampant land speculation and the concentration of disappointed settlers in the ‘miserable village of Adelaide’. The discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales in the 1850s invoked further warnings from critics about the violent conduct of many gold diggers and the lawless, uncivilized nature of their settlements. 36

  The negative side effects of New Zealand’s gold rush in the 1860s provoked less criticism and on the whole New Zealand was more highly regarded than Australia by emigrants and commentators. This was thanks largely to the successful colonization of Otago and Canterbury according to Wakefield’s principles of systematic colonization. Earlier, however, the New Zealand Company had been criticized for making misleadingly optimistic allegations in its efforts to attract settlers, and three decades later, in the 1870s, when New Zealand’s economy was in difficulties, emigrants were repeatedly warned about an overstocked labour market, low wages, high living costs and poor farming prospects. Some correspondents at that time claimed that the Vogel government had deliberately and deceptively offered ‘enticing representations’ to emigrants in the hope of easing the colony’s financial problems, one dissatisfied settler publicly expressed his regret that he had believed the ‘lying handbooks of New Zealand’ and editorials in the Shetland Times repeatedly warned readers to treat with a pinch of salt the promises of agents who were making particularly assiduous efforts to recruit settlers from the Northern Isles. 37